Quotes About Economic theory

Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.

Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity.

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it's a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate.

I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.

I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

The doctrine of population has been conspicuously absent, not because I doubt in the least its truth and vast importance, but because it forms no part of the direct problem of economics.

It's called fractional reserve banking. Before

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.

Os economistas baseiam toda uma teoria de comportamento social nesta premissa individualista. A teoria económica da ação coletiva defende que os indivíduos se agregam em grupos sobretudo como um meio de maximizar os seus próprios interesses individuais e não por qualquer motivo de sociabilidade natural.

Inflation itself is a form of taxation.

Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price.

Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.

Libertarianism is based in economic theory, as economic science teaches how workable order can arise from the seeming chaos of free actions uncoordinated by a single outside intelligence, and how government intervention is apt to upset that balance.

I took the book and glanced at the page Guy was reading. I quoted, 'The rich man's substance is the wellspring of the poor man's living.' Ah yes, that theory, that as the rich grow richer their wealth trickles down to the poor like sand. Well, I have been practising law twenty-five years and all I have seen is it trickle ever upwards.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

they have never presented a coherent and compelling explanation of why this market should be treated differently from other markets.

Though claiming to be value-free, conventional economic theory cannot escape the fact that value is embedded at its heart: it is wrapped up with the idea of utility, which is defined as a person's satisfaction or happiness gained from consuming a particular bundle of goods.

Economic externalities are framed—thanks to their very name—as a peripheral concern in mainstream theory.

Homo economicus may be the smallest unit of analysis in economic theory—equivalent to the atom in Newton's physics—but, just like an atom, his composition has profound consequences.

Jevons drew up 'calculating man', whose fixation on maximising his utility had him constantly weighing up the consumption satisfaction that he might derive from every possible combination of his options.7 With this move, Jevons placed utility at the heart of economic theory —a spot it occupies to this day—and from it he derived the law of diminishing returns: the more of a thing that you consume (be it bananas or shampoo), the less you will desire still more of it.

Irrationality in politics is not a puzzle. It is precisely what an economic theory of irrationality predicts.

Socialism is not a way of life. It is an unworkable formula which would apply to robots but not to men and women.