Quotes About Economics

In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected "scientific" establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart  was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics.

This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.

Simply consider that close to 80 or 85 percent of the cost of a tomato can be attributed to transportation, storage, and waste

There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion. We

Simply consider that close to 80 or 85 percent of the cost of a tomato can be attributed to transportation, storage, and waste (unsold inventories), rather than the cost at the farmer level.

2. No socialization of losses and privatization of gains.

wealth is seen as zero-sum.

Someone getting rich is doing so at other people's expense

you are excited about how cheap it

seem to ignore the bad economic aspect of the transaction.

Just as one day some primitive tribesman scratched his nose, saw rain falling, and developed an elaborate method of scratching his nose to bring on the much-needed rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserve Board, or the success of a company with the appointment of the new president "at the helm.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call "negative utility.

What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they "think" about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that.

Political and economic "tail events" are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.

The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.

You can tell people who come from countries with rent seeking; they think that business is zero-sum: wealth is money taken from others.