Quotes About Economics

whenever there are some people calling for the elimination of the class that lives by collecting interest, there will be others to object that this will destroy the livelihood of widows and pensioners.

The effect, though, is that American imperial power is based on a debt that will never—can never—be repaid.

money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The

Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.

Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least

What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y.

Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melts away into the background.

in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute?

Whatever its earliest origins, for the last four thousand years money has been effectively a creature of the state.

Human nature does not drive us to "truck and barter." Rather, it ensures that we are always creating symbols—such as money itself.

I always wonder how banks manage to go bankrupt at all considering they can just make up the money, and especially, what is stopping them from lending money to themselves.

the economists' insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.

So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one's picture on it, causing it to circulate among one's subjects—and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again?

True, earlier figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were suspicious of credit systems, but already by the mid–nineteenth century, economists who concerned themselves with such matters were largely in the business of trying to demonstrate that, despite appearances, the banking system really was profoundly democratic.

The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.

As for the credit partnership, it is also called the "partnership of the penniless" (sharika al-mafalis).

Etant donné que la valeur du travail réside désormais moins dans ce qu'il produit ou dans les bienfaits qu'il apporte aux autres que dans sa dimension sacrificielle, tout élément susceptible de le rendre moins pénible ou plus plaisant, y compris la satisfaction de se sentir utile à ses semblables, diminue sa valeur - justifiant donc un salaire inférieur. C'est un système d'une incroyable perversité.

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

Capital, then, is not simply money. It is not even just wealth that can be turned into money. But neither is it just the use of political power to help one use one's money to make more money.

John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it's really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn't be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

Smith's argument is worth laying out in detail because it is, as I say, the great founding myth of the discipline of economics.

When an economist attempts to prove that it is "irrational" to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say "irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, of the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.