Quotes About Economics

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was

After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Länder of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU.

It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amenable to prediction or precision.

If we compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether measured by overall assets or annual income, we find that in every continental European country as well as in Great Britain and the US, the gap shrank dramatically in the generation following 1945.

What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.

The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

However, for Keynes it had become self-evident that the best defense against political extremism and economic collapse was an increased role for the state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention.

An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists:

we have smuggled in a misleadingly 'ethical' vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments

The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data.

So what have Keynes's 'madmen in authority' done with the ideas they inherited from defunct economists? They have set about dismantling the properly economic powers and initiatives of the state.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier.

We should by now have learned that politics remains national, even if economics does not: the history of the 20th century offers copious evidence that even in healthy democracies, bad political choices usually trump 'rational' economic calculations.

For three decades following the war, economists, politicians, commentators and citizens all agreed that high public expenditure, administered by local or national authorities with considerable latitude to regulate economic life at many levels, was good policy.

where the 'Chicago boys' got their ideas, we shall find that the greatest influence was exercised by a handful of foreigners, all of them immigrants from central Europe: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker.

Democracies in which there are no significant political choices to be made, where economic policy is all that really matters—and where economic policy is now largely determined by nonpolitical actors (central banks, international agencies, or transnational corporations)—must either cease to be functioning democracies or accommodate once again the politics of frustration, of populist resentment.

Nonetheless, he was sensitive not just to the need for countercyclical economic policies to head off future depression, but also to the prudential virtues of 'the social security state'.

be financially viable in its current form.

Slaves today are cheaper than they have ever been. The cost of slaves has fallen to a historical low, as little as $10.

I understand that finance can be very complex.

The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.

Thus, throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Fifield and like-minded religious leaders advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics, and politics that one observer aptly anointed "Christian libertarianism.

It's too expensive, that's the thing nobody wants to talk about. It is too expensive to make movies. That's not true, it is too expensive to market movies. Making movies is not.