Quotes About Economics

Capital, it must be remembered, maintains a war more than forced contributions. Farmers

war is a matter not so much of arms as of money

In the end economics is about people ... And economic growth is about a better life for individuals - more choice, less fear, less toil and hardship. ... Yang Li tried factory work and decided that it wasn't for her. Now she says that 'I can close the salon whenever I want.' Economics is about Yang Li's choice.

Kahneman, Nobel laureate and one of the fathers of behavioral economics, calls overconfidence "the most significant of the cognitive biases.

But many of us love the fact that Ricardo was able, nearly two hundred years ago, to produce insights that illuminate our understanding today. It's easy to see the difference between nineteenth-century farming and twenty-first-century frothing, but not so easy to see the similarity before it is pointed out to us. Economics is partly about modelling, about articulating basic principles and patterns that operate behind seemingly complex subjects like the rent on farms or coffee bars.

To the economist, there is a story to tell about the contrast between the chaos of the traffic and the smooth running of the bookshop. We can learn something from the bookstore that will help us avoid traffic jams.

isn't the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk:

los márgenes comerciales del café rondan el 150 por ciento; cuesta 40 centavos preparar una taza de café de máquina de un dólar, y menos de un dólar preparar un café cortado que se vende a 2,55 dólares. De

Los reguladores descubrieron que librarse del dióxido de azufre era tan barato que poca gente estaba dispuesta a pagar demasiado por el derecho a seguir produciéndolo. Al

Esther Duflo, a leading randomista. 'Sometimes

La economía trata de quién consigue qué y por qué. En

La economía tiene que ver con la decisión de Yang Li.

From 1776 to 1976 just five books reigned over economics in nearly unbroken succession: Smith's Wealth of Nations, Ricardo's Principles, Mill's Principles, Marshall's Principles, and Samuelson's Economics. What they lack in imaginative titles, they make up in endurance.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

In short, economic docetism is the use of economics to abbreviate our living of our full humanity, in all its complexity, richness, and ambiguity. This often occurs today through the denial that the body is essential to human flourishing, and such a presumption that the sufferings and pleasures of some bodies (such as Bangladeshi women) are less important than others (such as American middle-class consumers).

How could you be so naive as to tell a human being the truth? Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. If you wish to gain the favor of the two-legged ilk, you must learn to fabricate as wholeheartedly as they do.

War is capitalism with the gloves off

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best—indeed the only—way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.

Behind every cynical (or merely incompetent) banking executive and trader sits an economist, assuring them (and us) from a position of unchallenged intellectual authority that their actions are publicly useful and should in any case not be subject to collective oversight.

in the arena of economic policy, the citizens of today's democracies have learned altogether too much modesty. We have been advised that these are matters for experts: that economics and its policy implications are far beyond the understanding of the common man or woman—a point of view enforced by the increasingly arcane and mathematical language of the discipline.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.

the 20th century morality tale of 'socialism vs. freedom' or 'communism vs. capitalism' is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States).