Quotes About Economics

The postmodern left gets its particular brand of egalitarianism from the New Left of the 1960s. It was then that neo-Marxism and other radical movements transformed the radical politics of America into something entirely new. The focus shifted from economics to culture. Old Marxist categories of class conflict were picked up and transformed into struggles over racial and gender identity and sexual politics.

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

A woman will buy anything she thinks the store is losing money on.

In terms of per capita income, the bottom half in America is better off. However, in terms of social progress, the average income of the bottom half of the Chinese people is rising much faster, albeit from a lower starting point.

In his book Oligarchy, American political scientist Jeffrey Winters provides a stunning illustration of just how dire US inequality has become: the average wealth of the richest one hundred American households relative to that of the bottom 90 percent approximates the wealth disparity between a Roman senator and a slave at the height of the Roman Empire.

In reality, the rulers of Southeast Asia were keen to send tributes to China because they found it to be immensely profitable.

Most Americans are unaware that the average income of the bottom 50 percent of their population has declined over a thirty-year period.

any American effort to decouple itself from China could well result in America decoupling itself from the world.

It may be too soon to tell, but extrapolating from current trends indicates that mobility will play an ever more important role in society and economics in the future than today:

The most progressive tax years in US history were 1944 and 1945, with a 94% rate applied to any income above $200,000 (the equivalent in 2009 of $2.4 million). Such top rates, often denounced as confiscatory by those who had to pay them, would not drop below 80% for another 20 years. At the end of World War II, many other countries adopted similar and often extreme tax measures. In the UK during the war, the top income tax rate rose to an extraordinarily stunning 99.25%!

Since the first Industrial Revolution, the average real income per person in OECD economies has increased around 2,900%.

Now that you are dead, you are splendid. Photographs of people who have just died are worth twenty percent more, and for suicides there is an additional five percent. Now that you are dead you are much in demand.

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.

I'm stretching my point only a bit when I say that in American life, every vision must begin and end in an economic argument in order to be heard, on urgent matters of human life: labor, education, immigration, refugees, prisons, poverty, health care. Rename

By claiming to be something more than the economic, the political is obliged to base itself on categories other than production and consumption. To repeat: it is curious that the capitalist entrepreneur and the socialist proletarian are of one accord in considering the political's assumption a presumption and, from the standpoint of their economic thinking, regarding the dominance of politicians as immaterial.

The understanding of every type of representation disappears with the spread of economic thinking.

It was both a religious and an economic war, for in those early days of global vandalism the sword and the cross went together.

Profit is the most global aspect of a business, and it is cross-functional.

If you look at history, you see that human flourishing exploded beginning about the time two things first appeared: the new American republic and free market capitalism. If you plot the history of human prosperity going back over a thousand years, what you see is a flat line hovering just above zero until the late eighteenth century; then the line turns upward, and it hasn't turned back.

The bottom line was that black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination.

Low prices are what consumers consider fair, even if their affordable goods create injustice elsewhere.

Money is just dirty paper with dead presidents' pictures on it.

The key to Carroll Quigley's success as a teacher and as a scholar lies in his creative intellect, the depth of his perceptions, and the wide interdisciplinary range of this interests, which encompasses the fields of history, economics, philosophy, and science. An iconoclast and a person of insatiable curiosity, as well as keenness of mind, Dr. Quigley stands apart from the specialized scholar who plows diligently in the rutted grooves of narrow disciplines.

That's the point. If these Labour MP's were really working men, they'd have some sense. But most of 'em, or at least the ones I've met, seem to be half-baked intellectuals who've specialized in economics or some such dreary muck.