Quotes About Economics

You can't have an economic structure worldwide whereby capital can move but labour can't, and if you're going to follow this, then labour must be able to come to wherever it's more profitable. These are the people that are being kept out by the Asylum Bill, on the grounds that they are economic migrants and all of that, but of course all the money that's invested abroad is economic migrant money.

Education is the best economic policy there is.

Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear.

Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph—at least in the short run—over more ethically sensitive competitors.

socialism has only two fundamental problems: lunch and dinner.

the declining economic gains from marriage highlight the nonmaterial reasons for marriage, including mutual love and respect. But for the relationships in which these break down, divorce more easily results.

The increased global linkages promote economic growth in the world through two key mechanisms: the division of labor and the international spillovers of knowledge.

People don't say "Work is money." They say "Time is money." We all instinctively understand this, but we also know deep down that there is something wrong with it.

Murray Rothbard.

Tell me, sir, do you know of any banker that really understands his business? Some modern Fugger?' 'Oh, Stephen, if you please,' cried Jack.

Happiness equals consumption divided by desire.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even neg- ative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs). This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.

So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

A large part of what big companies pay extra for is the cost of selling expensive things to them.

The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else. How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means.

What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.

Brand is the residue left as the substantive differences between rich and poor evaporate.

the way to get rich was not to create wealth, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it. This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class.

Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist.

At a more material level, one might better accuse communists of fashioning a golden calf than channeling an unclean spirit. What communists effectively bowed down to was just that: a material idol forged and focused on money, property, gold. It was not about the soul. The key to the communist-Marxist utopia would be economics. Solve the economic problem, the communists believed, and you would solve the human problem.