Quotes About Economics

As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people! Since the world's population is about 7.2 billion, it means that these sixty-two billionaires together hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.37 The

A pirate who loots a Spanish treasure fleet and buries a chest full of glittering coins on the beach of some Caribbean island is not a capitalist.

Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.

Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. For

Even Nobel laureates in economics make only a tiny fraction of their decisions using pen, paper and calculator; 99 per cent of our decisions – including the most important life choices concerning spouses, careers and habitats – are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires.

Qué lástima!, los primeros textos de la historia no contienen ideas filosóficas, ni poesía, leyendas, leyes, ni siquiera triunfos reales. Son documentos económicos aburridos que registran el pago de impuestos, la acumulación de deudas y la posesión de propiedades

El capitalismo no derrotó al comunismo porque fuera más ético, porque las libertades individuales fueran sagradas o porque Dios estuviera enfadado con los paganos comunistas. Por el contrario, el capitalismo ganó la Guerra Fría porque el procesamiento de datos distribuido funciona mejor que el procesamiento de datos centralizado, al menos en períodos de cambios tecnológicos acelerados.

Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.

First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.

Russia has a population of 150 million people and a GDP of $4 trillion. In both population and production it is dwarfed by the United States (325 million people and a $19 trillion GDP) and the European Union (500 million people and a $21 trillion GDP).6 Together, the United States and the European Union have five times more people than Russia, and ten times more dollars.

Yet can the economic pie grow indefinitely? Every pie requires raw material and energy. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo Sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

It is liberal politics that believes the voter knows best. Liberal art holds that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Liberal economics maintains that the customer is always right. Liberal ethics advises us that if it feels good, we should go ahead and do it. Liberal education teaches us to think for ourselves, because we will find all the answers within.

In the eighth chapter of its first volume, Smith made the following novel argument: when a landlord, a weaver, or a shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants, in order to further increase his profits.

You couldn't have established a communist regime in sixteenth-century Russia, because communism necessitates the concentration of information and resources in one hub.

What Rwanda earned from an entire year of looting Congolese coltan, the Chinese earn in a single day of peaceful commerce.

Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.

You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements.

al perder las masas su importancia económica y su poder político, el Estado podría a su vez perder al menos algunos de los incentivos para invertir en su salud, su educación y su bienestar

Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit.

It was not food shortages that caused most of history's wars and revolutions

Writing and money made it possible to start collecting taxes from hundreds of thousands of people, to organise complex bureaucracies and to establish vast kingdoms.

It is liberal politics that believes the voter knows best. Liberal art holds that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Liberal economics maintains that the customer is always right.

In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don't really need.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes.