Quotes About Economy

So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.

wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves—a

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term "human economy," what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people's days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this.

The difference, though, was that this time, the bankers were doing it on an inconceivable scale: the total amount of debt they had run up was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world—and it threw the world into a tailspin and almost destroyed the system itself.

If we really want to understand the origins of the modern world economy, the place to start is not in Europe at all. The real story is of how China abandoned the use of paper money.

since Roman times, Europe had been exporting gold and silver to the East: the problem was that Europe had never produced much of anything that Asians wanted to buy, so it was forced to pay in specie for silks, spices, steel, and other imports.

As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.

What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies extracted, through the very mechanisms of the human economy, premised on the principle that human lives are the ultimate value, to which nothing could possibly compare.

Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity.

these same parties self-consciously rejected any remaining elements of their old working-class constituencies, and instead became, as Tom Frank has so effectively demonstrated, the parties of the professional-managerial class: that is, not just doctors and lawyers, but the administrators and managers actually responsible for the bullshitization of the caring sectors of the economy.15

To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.

This is why I developed the concept of human economies: ones in which what is considered really important about human beings is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others—therefore, that no one could ever be considered exactly equivalent to anything or anyone else.

For most of the Middle Ages, the economic nerve center of the world economy and the source of its most dramatic financial innovations was neither China nor India, but the West, which, from the perspective of the rest of the world, meant the world of Islam.

The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man's 'living in the way of money'.38

Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."16

Only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good.

The weaknesses of the system, the inherent dangers of being a part of a domestic monopoly in an industry open to other countries, had not yet revealed themselves. So, while other areas of the American economy remained competitive, no one challenged the auto industry until the full-scale assault of the Japanese in the seventies. When it finally came, the extent of American vulnerability surprised even those who had been critical.

As Marx amusingly put it elsewhere, in boom economies everybody acts like a Protestant—they act on pure faith. When the crash comes, though, everyone dives for cover in the "Catholicism" of the monetary base, real gold.

These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx's terms, it is a fetish construct.

With the whole world in economic recession, a new approach was called for.