Quotes About Economics

Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.

It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

The iron law of wages.

The wealth of a nation consists not in its mass of material things, but in its system. The natural resources of South America are not inferior to those of the United States, but the wealth of the two regions is vastly different. The land of India is far richer than that of Japan, but the comparative wealth of the two nations is reversed.

The ideal social state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but in which each gets in proportion to his contribution to the general stock.

All wealth is the product of labor

If you laid every economist in the country end to end you would still not reach a conclusion.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

In the three years after Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, the costs did not go down $2,500 per family as promised. They went up $2,581 a family. Yes, inflation would have pushed the costs of insurance coverage up regardless of Obamacare, but not that much, nor that quickly.

When I see a picture like the 1861 cotton market, I ask myself, "What caused that? Why did that happen?" Then I try to figure it out. From that, you learn an enormous amount. In

history is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade...

Then the business game is to make profits out of others, and to prevent others from making profits out of you.

Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.

Then arises the third and inexorable question: If Civilisation has increased the producing power of the average man, why has it not bettered the lot of the average man? There can be one answer only—MISMANAGEMENT.

Nationalism makes us poor because its Siamese twin, protectionism, will destroy the internal market and disrupt international trade.

There are folks out there, especially during the political season, that'll try to twist and turn economic statistics for their own personal benefit, to pick and choose talking points in order to tear Montana's progress down.

There are two main drivers of asset class returns - inflation and growth.

Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries.

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry's career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.

I think that 'Lost' is a bit of a dinosaur in terms of the type of show it is. The economics just don't support making a show this big and complicated profitable enough for a network.

The problem with interest rates are that you are not modeling a single number, you are modeling a whole term structure, so it is a sort of different type of problem.

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

There are many types of economic data, but the type considered by Rob Engle and myself is know as time series.