Quotes About Economics

The level of economic literacy in the U.S. had been underdeveloped for a long time ... As a teacher, the best situation is when your students want to learn. But if you have an underdeveloped literacy, then your economic analysis is going to be all over the place, particularly in times like now in the middle of a crisis.

the market has been anthropomorphized. It is not created by us but creates us. That's what the market distates. If Jesus can talk to you, the market can talk to you.

Our leaders keep saying phrases like, "Let the market decide." or "The market will get to the efficient outcome." Really? The market is a very flawed institution that does not deserve the nearly religious kind of endorsement of it that our leaders are eager to provide over and over again.

Richard D. Wolff

Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.

2,000 of the richest have more together than the bottom three and a half billion. That's a level of inequality that any system should be deeply ashamed of.

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality.

Keynes once wrote: 'The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.

I am even going to go as far as to say that the argument that harming the environment is a necessary or effective way to help the unemployed isn't even an economic argument, it's just complete bullshit.

That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services.

Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit.

whosyourcity.com

On traditional economic theory: We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.

Loss aversion helps produce inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings.

Giving up the opportunity to sell something does not hurt as much as taking the money out of your wallet to pay for it. Opportunity costs are vague and abstract when compared to handing over actual cash.

We don't have to stop inventing abstract models that describe the behavior of imaginary Econs. We do, however, have to stop assuming that those models are accurate descriptions of behavior, and stop basing policy decisions on such flawed analyses.

In economics (and in ordinary life), a basic principle is that you can never be made worse off by having more options, because you can always turn them down. Before Thaler removed the nuts the group had the choice of whether to eat the nuts or not—now they didn't. In the land of Econs, it is against the law to be happy about this!

our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.

One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. Many people adopt what we will call the "yeah, whatever" heuristic.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens.

people are more likely to keep what they start with than to trade it, even when the initial allocations were done at random.

quasi-hyperbolic discounting.

Econs do not suffer from self-control problems, and so temptation is not a word that exists in the economists' lexicon. As a result, most of the world's regulators have not thought much about the problem. But when the dessert cart comes by, we humans often cave. The next thing we know we are fat.