Quotes About Economics

You get a lot more calories for the price of hamburgers and french fries than you do for carrots, not least because the government subsidizes the production of corn and soybeans, the basis of cheap corn sweeteners and vegetable oil.

How arrogant to believe we are in control of what happens to the people we love, good or bad, when there's this giant, teeming universe of forces at work out there: biology, society, economics, physics, grief, greed, the Spanish Inquisition, meanness, illness, drugs, love, weather, accidents, randomness. Do you see what I mean?

A bottle of perfume brought in more foreign revenue than a barrel of petroleum. A Paris frock was worth more than ten tons of coal. These very equations were evidence, in the eyes of some people, of the indefensible extravagance of haute couture.

continued with considerable bitterness into the 1700s. Moreover, the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618–48), which was fought over a confused welter of religious, political, and economic matters, had enervated central European life in general, including the churches.

The market was mostly Protestant. The industry was mostly Jewish-run. Yet a Midwest Catholic minority gained control.

the 25 percent of Spaniards who are presently without work simply don't (by Milton's presumption) want to work at the prevailing wage and are on vacation.

R. F. Kahn asked, "If I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?" "Yes," said Hayek, "but … it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why.

raising the average income tax for the top income percentile to 43.5 percent from 22.4 percent, the level of 2007, would raise revenue by 3 percent of GDP, which is enough to close the US structural deficit while still leaving very high earners with more after-tax income than they would have had under Nixon.

Is everybody supposed to run current account surpluses? If so, with whom—Martians? And if everybody does indeed try to run a savings surplus, what else can be the outcome but a permanent global depression?

The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world.46 In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives.

We're so shit at seeing the Macro, and ultimately it's those macro uncoupling dynamics that matter more than anything else.

Banking bubbles and busts cause sovereign debt crises.

These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.

To me, all war is failure for humanity, though it often is a bounty for commerce.

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

By the middle of the 1990s, the United States had the smallest and fastest-shrinking middle class among seventeen industrialized nations,[45] and it is hardly new for reports to state today as they do that the U.S. middle class still fails to compete well with those other nations (even though the U.S. wealthy are nearly without parallel).

Parenti reported in 1999 that yearly expenses of the correction industry were between $20 and $35 billion annually with "more than 523,000 full-time employees working . . . more than in any Fortune 500 company except General Motors.

An economic order rooted in a system of production that tolerates and depends upon hierarches of class and race will have to devise systems of control and punishment to deal with social dynamite. This need to control yields the kind of policing, imprisoning, and executing we see today in the political theatrics of state terror, both to move aside those seen as "social junk," and to remove and "neutralize" those seen as "social dynamite.

But it is also, and more basically, because if this century has shown one thing, it is that politics cannot be reduced to economics: differences in values and ideologies must be taken seriously and not simply regarded as foils for class interest. Fascism, in other words, was more than just another form of capitalism.

Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself.

Of course, many have benefited from Social Security over the decades, especially the elderly. But the overall structure, which as Roosevelt insisted at the outset, put politics before economics, was and is, in the end, economically and fiscally irrational and irresponsible.

The laws of economics, like the laws of science, are real, unlike the utopian images and empty assurances of expedient and self-aggrandizing politicians and bureaucrats.

In plain English, Anyon promoted her dumbed-down brand of Marxist ideology in the classroom in lieu of a traditional approach to attaining knowledge. For example, she wrote: "Capitalism's private ownership of production is… distinct from a socialist/communist system as imagined by Marx, in which everyone contributes to the production of economic goods according to their ability, and is provided profits and goods according to what each person needs."44

In her 2011 book, Marx and Education, she claimed, "An important insight of Marx was that capitalism is an economic system that cannot function without fundamental inequality—meaning that inequity is built into the way the system works. Business owners must make a profit to survive, and those who do not own businesses must find jobs and work in these enterprises, if they are to provide for themselves and their families.