Quotes About Economics

Of course, a business with terrific economics can be a bad investment if the purchase price is excessive.

Year-to-year variances, however, cannot consistently be in our favor. Even if our partially-owned businesses continue to perform well in an economic sense, there will be years when they perform poorly in the market. At such times our net worth could shrink significantly. We will not be distressed by such a shrinkage; if the businesses continue to look attractive and we have cash available, we simply will add to our holdings at even more favorable prices.

If our noneconomic values were to be lost, much of Berkshire's economic value would collapse as well. "Tone at the top" will be key to maintaining Berkshire's special culture.

In business, I look for economic castles protected by unreachable moats.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

In these ways, your son's economic health can dictate his ability to be loved, which makes his economic health inseparable from his mental health, and therefore his physical health. And few things affect his economic health more than his education.

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.

There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? 'I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don't do what you are doing now.

From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.

having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income. Economists love to turn relationships into numbers.

six-story mixed-use building produced more than thirteen times the tax revenue and twelve times the jobs per acre of land than the Walmart on the edge of town.

First is a reckoning on energy. It will probably never again be inexpensive to fill a gas tank. There is too little easy oil left in the ground, and there are too many people competing for it.

Anyone with faith in economic man would think that people would put up with the pain of a long commute only if they enjoyed even greater benefits from cheaper housing or bigger, finer homes or higher-paying jobs. They would weigh the costs and benefits and make sensible decisions. A couple of University of Zurich economists discovered that this simply isn't the case.

low-rise, mixed-use buildings of two or three stories—the kind you see on an old-style, small-town main street—bring in ten times the revenue per acre as that of an average big-box development.

We have not had a free market in real estate for eighty years," Ellen Dunham-Jones, Georgia Tech professor of architecture and coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia, told me. "And because it is illegal to build in a different way, it takes an immense amount of time for anyone who wants to do it to get changes in zoning and variance. Time is money for developers, so it rarely happens.

Discarding the welfare state in favor of a universal basic income is no longer something that would be economically feasible in America's future. It is economically feasible right now.

Money is a public good; as such, it lends itself to private exploitation.

it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic.

Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.

Making money takes time, so when we shop, we're really spending time. The real cost of living isn't measured in dollars and cents but in the hours and minutes we must work to live."1

Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it maximized his utility.

I once interviewed Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics and a noted baseball enthusiast. I asked if it bothered him that he received less money for winning the Nobel Prize than Roger Clemens, who was pitching for the Red Sox at the time, earned in a single season. "No," Solow said. "There are a lot of good economists, but there is only one Roger Clemens." That is how economists think.

You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.