Quotes About Economics

Making products for $17 an hour that we could have purchased for 75 cents an hour wastes resources that we could have used elsewhere.

Many people still believe that 'green' solutions are too expensive, but they are actually much cheaper when all of the costs to public health, social services, and waste handling are factored into the same equation.

It's certainly sobering to think that British consumers waste roughly a quarter of the food we buy. Or to put it another way, we funnel £12 billion a year from the supermarket through to our rubbish tips, costing each household an average of £480.

Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.

The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of economic resources, which its advocates often claim will also be a less wasteful one. Socialism is about who gets the goods and how. Socialism objects to markets because markets allocate resources in ways socialists believe to be unfair on both counts: both the who and the how.

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.

Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.

I watched Reagan turn around the country by lowering taxes and controlling spending, and I'm applying the same principles.

Shipping by water is cheaper than by rail, which is cheaper than by truck.

Gold, on the contrary, though of little use compared with air or water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods.

Pricing water delivery closer to its real costs is a necessary step to improving use efficiency.

There is a new wave of environmental consumers I like to call Pocketbook Environmentalists. They're going green primarily because it makes good financial sense, but the fact that it benefits their families' health and the environment also makes them feel good.

If I could wave a magic wand, we would eliminate income tax; we would eliminate corporate tax. We would abolish the IRS, and we could replace all of it with one federal consumption tax.

I observed a man sourcing candle wax from South America and selling it to Japan. I thought: 'That's unbelievable. Talking on the phone in his office, that man made money moving candle wax from one country to another.' It really interested me.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

Profit or perish... There are only two ways to make money: increase sales and decrease costs.

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

For centuries, economic thinkers, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, have tried to identify the elusive formula that makes some countries more prosperous and successful than others. My curiosity about this topic spurred me, as a young professor of economics in the late 1970s, to research new ways of measuring national competitiveness.

I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.