Quotes About Economics

From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.

The original purpose of the welfare state was to lift people into self-sufficiency, not to create a permanent underclass dependent on taxpayers.

Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.

Almost everybody thinks that the fight is about ideology. Everybody will tell you, 'Well, the fighting is all about the Middle East.' 'Well, it's about Muslims starting jihad.' 'It's about terrorism.' 'It's about this or that.' And no, it's not. It's about money.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

The ultimate purpose of economics, of course, is to understand and promote the enhancement of well-being.

The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence they're contributing as much to the nation's well-being as they did decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in taxes.

I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs.

Growth does not bring any 'automatic' improvement in the health component of wellbeing.

Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation - all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith's vision of an opulent society.

The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing.

I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.

In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of 'freedom', like a bastard brother of reform.

Once the Third World has become a mass market for the goods, products, and processes which are designed by the rich for themselves, the discrepancy between demand for these Western artifacts and the supply will increase indefinitely.

Levi's can produce many more Western jeans than we can and make them at a better price.

It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.

Many of the Western democracies - including the U.S. - have a problem that voters want benefits they don't want to pay for.

Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics.

Margaret Thatcher's government redistributed money from rich to poor. And that's the nature of a modern western democracy.

We know that Brexit would make our poorest communities poorer still. That it would make the powerless even less able to effect change.

We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics: more practical than spiritual.

Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes predicted the 'euthanasia of the rentier' before the end of the 20th century. It did not happen.