Quotes About Economics

the notion of incentives as limited to financial gain cannot otherwise explain the very existence of an economics academia that promotes the idea of self-interest.

Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market.

An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.

Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

because they cost more to run than the benefits they bring.

perishable) food costs in America are largely, up to about 80 or 90 percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level.

There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike

If low self-esteem correlates with resistance to change and clinging to the known and familiar, then never in the history of the world has low self-esteem been as economically disadvantageous as it is today.

doing what Americans had always done: profit as best they could from whatever commercial circumstances presented themselves.

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.

Not until the 1440s did they learn that the island's warm climate was better suited to another, more profitable crop: sugarcane.

Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world's annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys.

Before the potato and maize, before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent with those today in Cameroon and Bangladesh; they were below Bolivia or Zimbabwe. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon.

Africans themselves controlled the supply of African slaves, selling them to Europeans in the numbers they chose at prices they negotiated as equals. To be sure, Europeans tried to play off slavers against each other to get lower prices. But Africans played off European buyers against each other, too, captain against captain, nation against nation.

Broadly speaking, says to Thornton, the Boston University historian, "slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.

What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard to parse, they think that humanity's fate is worth more than an apartment.

Spanish merchants doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled the price and still sold their goods in the Americas for a third the cost of Spanish textiles. Incredibly, they sold silk from China—silk that had crossed two oceans!—in Spain for less than silk produced in Spain.

The potato's cold tolerance spurred its embrace by European peasants. Not only did potatoes grow in places where other crops could not, the plant was an ally in smallholders' ceaseless struggle against the economic and political elite. A farmer's barnful of wheat, rye, or barley was a fat target for greedy landlords and marauding armies; buried in the soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.)

Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. . . . Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt.

As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor had a problem.

We are, after all, homo economicus .

Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.

Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.