Quotes About Economics

the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual's era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).

There are a lot of people missing in Iraq. Just the other day I heard of somebody asking $250,000 ransom for an Egyptian. Can you imagine? An Egyptian. That's inflation. This war," he said, leaning closer to her, "is all about money.

The idea of perfect equality, i.e. an equal share of all goods for everybody, is not only unfeasible economically but is contradictory in itself: for perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality at least in such basic advantages as participation in power and access to information.

And I know this happens because I took economics, and I'd explain it to ya, but I flunked that course. Not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing you can learn out of one bloodshot eye.

Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow. Elsewhere

Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

Economics is all about consumption. People either spend money now or they use financial instruments - like bonds, stocks and savings accounts - so they can spend more later.

Most of the expressions we use in economics are relative terms. All of us are votaries of free trade.

Why should we use the Dollar even when we trade among ourselves?

A billion dollars isn't what it used to be.

The dollar used to be a gold standard currency. And the dollar is really good in the last century, I mean in the 19th century.

If a commodity were in no way useful, - in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification, - it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it.

Good analysis is very useful when you want to convert a political decision into an investment. It can also go the other way and drive policy.

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.

I tell my micro students everything I teach them is important, but the truth is that some things are more useful than others, and opportunity cost is near the top.

Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded. So, half as much grain is half as much useful, but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer, and we've been trying to make computers that work that way.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

It's one thing to recognize that the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing like a cancer; it's another thing to come up with useful solutions.

About the only useful thing my economics degree taught me was that, in all decisions in life, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.

Economic theory dictates that the value of a company is basically the present value of its future profits. To estimate Facebook's value through its future profits, we need to have a view on its user growth and how this will evolve in the next 10 to 50 years.