Quotes About Economics

Socialism is a dead horse.

Contrary to the received wisdom, global markets are not unregulated. They are regulated to produce inequality.

When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposite position. I assume that markets are always wrong.

Labor is the source of subsistence, capital is the source of affluence. My idea is to make everyone a capitalist, and therefore, financially secure.

Ownership is a sine qua non of sustainable development.

Just as stinginess is blameworthy, so is facility in paying more for things than they are worth...

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

The point is to make the pie grow faster and distribute the new growth more equitably.

The way the system now works, credit is extended to those who don't need it and denied to those who are in desperate need of it.

The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.

The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.

"Religious Socialism," "Christian Socialism," are expressions implying a contradiction in terms.

How many sepoys were brought by the Musalmans? How many Englishmen are there? Where, except in India, can be had millions of men who will cut the throats of their own fathers and brothers for six rupees? Sixty millions of Musalmans in seven hundred years of Mohammedan rule, and two millions of Christians in one hundred years of Christian rule - what makes it so?

RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an 'optimization problem'.

The worst of it is, that as a revolutionary she is out of fashion. Before, she was an inspiration. But inspiration is not wanted now, it seems. One must be practical, one must be administrative, one must understand economics and systems. She pines. She said to me, that very evening, 'Our Moses was luckier than he knew, to die before he went into the promised land.

Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor we would know much of the economics that really matters.

If he had been able to sell all his assets at full market value at the moment of his death, in January of that year, he would have taken one out of every twenty dollars in circulation, including cash and demand deposits.2

When Americans fill a prescription, the price is routinely twice as much—sometimes ten times as much—as a Briton or a German would pay for precisely the same pills made in the same factory.

Every brick laid in the foundation of a life, however meaningfully or haphazardly placed, shaped the whole. He could now see that fact borne out in every branch of study, from mathematics to science, from economics to chemistry. Each part of the equation influenced the whole.

Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn't happen because people woke up any poorer than they'd been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.

Dublin housing prices are a lot like New York ones, except that in New York, you get New York for your money.

Capitalism is based on the concept that in order for someone to succeed, someone else has to suffer.