Quotes About Economics

These acts recall the 1971–72 "Chicken War" between America and Europe, and the grain embargo that quadrupled wheat prices outside of the United States. It was this embargo that inspired OPEC to enact matching increases in oil prices to maintain terms-of-trade parity between oil and foodstuffs. The "oil shock" was simply a reverberation of the U.S. grain shock.

Junk Economics is the cover story for all this. Claiming to be scientific, it is sponsored by financial interests to redistribute income and wealth upward, reversing the policies urged by the 19th-century classical economists and Progressive Era reformers. Instead of progressive taxation, this ideology advocates shifting taxes off the One Percent onto the 99 Percent.

Economics ultimately is political economy. To claim that it is "disinterested" and scientific is to cover up its political motives. The entire history of political economy has centered on the conflict between reformers seeking to free society from rentiers – landlords, creditors and monopolists – and the reaction by these wealthy vested interests to maintain their grip on the status quo that favors them.

So we are brought back to the fact that compound interest does not merely increase the flow of income to the rentier One Percent, but also transfers property into its hands.

Today's self-multiplying debt overhead absorbs profits, rents, personal income and tax revenue in a process whose mathematics is much like that of environmental pollution. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson demonstrates how impossible it is for growth to proceed at exponential rates without encountering a limit. He cites "the arithmetical riddle of the lily pond. A lily pod is placed in a pond. Each day thereafter the pod and then all its descendants double

The foundation myth of pro-rentier economics is that everyone receives income in proportion to the contribution they make to production. This denies that economic rent is unearned. Hence, there is no exploitation or unearned income, and no need for the reforms advocated by classical political economy.

Money, endless money, is the sinews of war," wrote Cicero in his Philippics (43 BC). Not only money, but credit, too.

Indeed, warfare became financialized long before industry or real estate.

John Locke's guiding axiom was that all men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor. A corollary to this logic was that landlords have a right only to what they themselves produce, not to exploit and appropriate the labor of their tenants:

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth.

He recognizes that the inherent tendency of history is for the wealthy to win out and make society increasingly unequal. This argument also has been made by Thomas Piketty and based largely on the inheritance of great fortunes

The basic principle that should guide economic policy is recognition that debts which can't be paid, won't be. The great political question is, how won't they be paid?

There are no good or bad horses, just correctly or incorrectly priced ones. This principle holds across all probabilistic domains: again, the goal is to get more than you pay for.

If you look closely at the price-gouging debate, you'll notice that the arguments for and against price-gouging laws revolve around three ideas: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

Markets express and promote certain attitudes to the goods being exchanged.

How does the economist help? By promoting policies that rely, whenever possible, on self-interest rather than altruism or moral considerations, the economist saves society from squandering its scarce supply of virtue. "If we economists do [our] business well," Robertson concludes, "we can, I believe, contribute mightily to the economizing Ã¢â'¬Â¦ of that scarce resource Love," the "most precious thing in the world."49

La concepción tecnocrática de la política está ligada a una fe en los mercados; no necesariamente en un capitalismo sin límites, de laissez faire, pero sí en la idea más general de que los mecanismos de mercado son los instrumentos primordiales para conseguir el bien público.

We've come to equate citizenship as an extension of market relations.

Es fragt sich, warum die moderne bildende Kunst immer noch in den Feuilletons der Zeitungen behandelt wird und nicht gleich im Wirtschaftsteil.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Whereas the presence of a powerful state suppresses the capability of fighting, the benefits of trade suppress the intention to fight. Countries that trade with one another avoid war not because they fear losing but because they do not find winning an attractive prospect: they gain more economically by not fighting than by prevailing.

Harvard historian Crane Brinton (The Anatomy of Revolution) pointed out that revolutionary sentiments generally develop in periods of long-term economic progress, not abject deprivation. When business produces a sharp increase in living standards, the 'revolution of rising expectations' leaves workers and farmers impatient for more rapid advancement.