Economics Quotes
The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble.
By the fall of 1918, it was clear that a nation's prosperity, even its very survival, depended on securing a safe, abundant supply of cheap oil.
The social phenomenon of economic growth is, thanks to the principle of the conservation of matter, nothing other than the physical phenomenon of increasing resource depletion.
Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can't deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.
You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long)
Broadly speaking, there are only two ways human beings can make an income: ...by contributing to society or they can extract an income from society
Due to its inherently limited supply for each location, land obtains its value from the natural, social, and cultural wealth that exists in its surrounding environment.
An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
That’s because they don’t know, ’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.
More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.
They did not understand that by liberalizing imports, the government was also promoting exports.
world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss.
sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty
Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong
In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.
The theory of Economics must begin with a correct theory of consumption.
The reader who thinks that rationality does not require a definition should ponder the following: I'll give you a million dollars to do something irrational.
A good way to do econometrics is to look for good natural experiments and use statistical methods that can tidy up the confounding factors that Nature has not controlled for us.
it is easier to induce national governments to discriminate against foreign producers than to defend the interests of domestic consumers
Inflation consists of subsidizing expenditures that give no returns with money that does not exist.
But this is your home''Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!
The Socialist system requires that each individual act out of selfless, altruistic motives. It sounds nice, but the only way that could happen is if Man were innately centered on others.
A fool believes that the society of the future will transcend the laws of economics. A person of reason hopes that it will finally learn to respect them.
Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap labor.
Microeconomists are wrong about specific things and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general!
Theory of public goods. Theory that if I take you euro (as an elected state government) and give fifty cents back... you will be happier and I will be satisfied.
Now, in the modern money economy everything in the nature of a social-economic occurrence consists in human actions and behaviour.
...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics.
Our knowledge of dynamic processes is necessarily inferior to our ability to describe stationary conditions.
He wants to focus on what he calls 'cultural issues.' That makes sense, because when you're going to rob people blind you don't want to have them focus their attention on economic issues.
Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.
He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.
The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.
At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.
I think the very best attitude for anyone investing in the stock market is to make up his mind to lose money.”— The Duchess Gloriana XII
Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone’s interest
Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility
...an' there never yet was speculation but in the long run, it meant smash. Ye run so hard that ye fall ower yoursel
when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravestthreat to it.