Quotes About Economics

How sad to see a father with money and no joy. The man studied economics, but never studied happiness.

You see, our hard-earned saving are always going to be taken away from us by someone - whether we have any or not.

In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of production.

there is remarkably little support in economics for regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through the tools of intellectual property law.

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.

A nickle ain't worth a dime anymore!

Microeconomists are wrong about specific things and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general!

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

I'm not too big on religion ... and not very fond of politics or economics either ... And why should I be? They are the man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about. What mental turmoil and anxiety does any human face that is not related to one of those three?

Yet Smith's claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.

Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.

data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data.

A Christian may be a capitalist as easily as a socialist, and even though a few things Jesus said smack of downright communism, during the Cold War good American capitalists went on reading the Sermon on the Mount without taking much notice.

The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. When the peasant brother made his way to the Beijing market with his torn clothes, rough manners and incomprehensible dialect, he would quickly have discovered that in the business world, manners and connections often speak far louder than genes.

Similar probabilistic models have become central to economics, sociology, psychology, political science and the other social and natural sciences.

Just as Christians and Muslims all believe in heaven, and disagree only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method.

The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything at all about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence.

Capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating changes.

Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market. They thereby give politicians the perfect excuse for inaction and ignorance, which are reinterpreted as profound wisdom. Politicians find it convenient to believe that the reason they don't understand the world is that they need not understand it.

Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, and listens to music written in European modes with words in European languages. Even today's burgeoning Chinese economy, which may soon regain its global primacy, is built on a European model of production and finance.

By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed "the End of History," confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets, and government welfare services remained the only game in town.

In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.