Quotes About Economics

Unless a company has an economic moat protecting its business, competition will soon arrive on its doorstep and eat away at its profits. Wall Street is littered with the dead husks of companies that went from hero to zero in a heartbeat.

Network-based businesses tend to create natural monopolies and oligopolies.

One annual report is worth 10 speeches by a Federal Reserve chairman.

going, they needed to see a profit. And just running cattle

what did we expect when, even in so-called democratic countries, we have become so selfish and passive, letting factions of tiny, powerful and unaccountable elites dominate both politics and economics? That applies to most leading political parties, even in democracies, whose overriding concerns usually seem to be getting re-elected and protecting big business.

Did I realize at the time how high interest rates might go before we could claim success? No. From today's vantage point, was there a better path? Not to my knowledge—not then or now.

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, economic history is a deaf man answering questions no economist has put to him.

My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can't afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.

Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you're tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we've seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

Or consider why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science." It's a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the "gay science" of music and poetry: "Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

When you bring your car into the shop, you're charged for "parts and labor," and you've never questioned for a second that the more labor it takes, the more you have to pay. Indeed, the relationship between effort and financial cost is so tight that we often talk about our everyday efforts in economic terms

As an economist, I have learned that decentralized, market-based competition – the vital core of capitalism – is the only way to deliver prosperity, but what are the founts of the other aspects of well-being? Whereas economic man is presumed to be lazy, purposive action such as work is important for esteem.

Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette.

There is no analytic presumption that migration produces gains either for the societies that migrants join, or for those they leave; the only unambiguous gains are for the migrants themselves.

Trade does usually benefit each country sufficiently that whoever gets the gains could fully compensate those who lose out. But while economists were vociferous advocates of trade, they kept very quiet about compensation. Without it, there is no analytic basis for claims that society is better off.

Every philosophy of life will have an anthropology—a stance on what a human is. Do we interpret the human being through the grid of economics and class struggle (Marxism), biology and the struggle to survive (naturalistic Darwinism), or suffering produced by attachment to transitory things (Buddhism)? Are we bundles of experiences, streams of consciousness?

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

If a complete free market seemed efficacious in principle, in practice it had not delivered the basic services necessary for a country to call itself civilised.

A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes cheese, milk, and eggs). The model also calculates a reduction in global mortality of 6 to 10 percent.

Too many economists excuse their practical failure by saying "the politicians (or bureaucrats) didn't do exactly what I recommended." Just as medical practitioners must allow for the fact that their patients may not take all the pills they prescribe, or follow all the advice they are given, so economics practitioners need to foresee political and administrative pressures and make their plans robust to changes that politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists are likely to impose.

Supply-side economics… is like one of those African viruses that, however often it may be eradicated from the settled areas, is always out there in the bush, waiting for new victims.

On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn't be dismissed just because there's no Hitler in sight.

A track on iTunes costs next to zero to store on Apple's server, and next to zero to transmit to my computer. Whatever it cost the record company to produce (in terms of artist fees and marketing costs) it costs me 99p simply because it's unlawful to copy it for free. The

El propio Kondratiev se mostró siempre exquisitamente cauto en cuanto a las implicaciones de su teoría. Jamás afirmó que sirviera para predecir acontecimientos, aunque, desde luego, predijo la Gran Depresión de la década de 1930 diez años antes de que esta se produjera.