Quotes About Economics

Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.

The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet's wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world's wealth. For them it wasn't so bad.

it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly

we can't think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP. This

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is—peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It's crowdsourced, it's democratic, it's capitalism, it's the market.

Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

That was standard Keynesian practice, a kind of pump-priming used by governments ever since the third New Deal of 1938, as Diane told them now, with World War II itself an even bigger example.

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis.

most economists are still working within the empty-world model of economics.

The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent. And

Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.

Things are sold for less than it costs to make them. ... lots of business do go bankrupt. The ones that don't haven't actually sold their thing for more than it costs to make. They've just ignored some of their costs. ... they shove some of their production costs off their books.

that's a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

Kim Stanley Robinson

because economics was above all a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement.

That's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

It's the structure of feeling in our time; we can't think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP. This is said to be the only thing people can agree on. Although those who say this are often economists.

If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those "objective functions." Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things.

So if you combined this thing with carbon taxes, you would get taxed if you burn carbon, but paid if you sequester carbon.