Quotes by Economists - Page 5

We really don’t get all the government we pay for, and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do.
Jeffrey Tucker
There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.
Henry Hazlitt
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
Joseph Schumpeter
Individualism turns a band into a society. Collectivism turns society into a mob.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
In all modern depressions recessions or growth-correction as variously they are called we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided.
J. K. Galbraith
The minute you start talking about what you’re going to do if you lose, you have lost.
George P. Shultz
Labour is not a commodity or a standard or a means to an ulterior end but an end in itself.
George Brockway
That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.
Karl Marx
Never stop learning, and always be ready to teach yourself things you don’t know. The only things you will remember are things you care about.
Jonathan Tepper
Economics without ethics is a caricature. Ethics without economics is a fairy tale.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
A third group of inflationists do not deny that inflation involves serious disadvantages. Nevertheless, they think that there are higher and more important aims of economic policy than a sound monetary system. They hold that although inflation may be a great evil, yet it is not the greatest evil, and that the State might under certain circumstances find itself in a position where it would do well to oppose greater evils with the lesser evil of inflation.
Ludwig von Mises
But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.
John Stuart Mill
Voters thereby prove themselves bad and indeed corrupt judges of such issues and often they even prove themselves bad judges of their own long-run interests, for it is only the short-run promise that tells politically and only short-run rationality that asserts itself effectively.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When the law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same.
Bastiat
No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow.
Ludwig von Mises
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism
Alexander Hamilton
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
Karl Marx
The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.
John Stuart Mill
The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.
Walter Bagehot
I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy. They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about. It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.
Thomas Sowell
Daddy, I don't like military parades. I never want to be like those people who march rank and file to music - they were given brains by mistake.
Corinne Maier
The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
John Stuart Mill
The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public
Adam Smith
By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Adam Smith
Constitutions should consist only of general provisions the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.
Alexander Hamilton
Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.
John Stuart Mill
No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
Thomas Sowell
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.
Daniel Kahneman
The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.
Adam Smith
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
Karl Marx
Savings, remember, is the prerequisite of investment.
Campbell R. McConnell
It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor the world over.
Henry George
We're fragile things, Harb. It doesn't look like it but we are. We're here one minute, and just like that, we're gone. The Peacemakers (The Nemesis Engines)
Olivier A. Blanchard
But things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that in this, as in everything else, political economy and morality, far from clashing, agree; and the wisdom of Aristus is not only more dignified, but still more profitable, than the folly of Mondor. And when I say profitable, I do not mean only profitable to Aristus, or even to society in general, but more profitable to the workmen themselves—to the trade of the time.
Frédéric Bastiat
The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government: the mass of mankind understand it and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
Walter Bagehot
Religion is the opiate of the people.
Karl Marx
People do not necessarily know what they are doing, because our ability to comprehend even matters that concern us directly is limited – or, in the jargon, we have ‘bounded rationality’. The world is very complex and our ability to deal with it is severely limited. Therefore, we need to, and usually do, deliberately restrict our freedom of choice in order to reduce the complexity of problems we have to face. Often, government regulation works, especially in complex areas like the modern financial market, not because the government has superior knowledge but because it restricts choices and thus the complexity of the problems at hand, thereby reducing the possibility that things may go wrong.
Chang Ha-Joon
[Abusers] blame the world - circumstances, other people - for their defeats, misfortune, misconduct, and failures. The abuser firmly believes that his life is swayed by currents and persons over which he has no influence whatsoever (he has an external locus of control).But there are even subtler variants of this psychological defense mechanism. Not infrequently an abuser will say: "I made a mistake because I am stupid", implying that his deficiencies and inadequacy are things he cannot help having and cannot change. This is also an alloplastic defense because it abrogates responsibility.Many abusers exclaim: "I misbehaved because I completely lost my temper." On the surface, this appears to be an autoplastic defense with the abuser assuming responsibility for his misconduct. But it could be interpreted as an alloplastic defense, depending on whether the abuser believes that he can control his temper.
Sam Vaknin
What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm capitalism is that kind of a system.
Milton Friedman
Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.
Thomas Sowell
The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We should not approve of an unequal and brutal society because surveys show that people are happy. But who has the right to tell those oppressed women or starving landless peasants that they shouldn’t be happy, if they think they are? Does anyone have the right to make those people feel miserable by telling them the ‘truth’? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they definitely tell us that we cannot rely on ‘subjective’ happiness surveys to decide how well people are doing.
Ha-Joon Chang
The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.
Stephen Leacock
Confidence is this: Wearing your triumphs with humility, and wearing your scars with pride. Many of us do precisely the opposite.
Umair Haque
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Of all the girls that are so smart There's none like pretty Sally She is the darling of my heart And lives in our alley.
Henry Carey
Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.
Ernst F. Schumacher
To a naive observer, money made out of precious metal was 'sound money' because the piece of precious metal was an 'intrinsically' valuable object, while paper money was 'bad money' because its value was only 'artificial'. But even the layman who holds this opinion accepts the money in the course of business transactions, not for the sake of its industrial use-value, but for the sake of its objective exchange-value, which depends largely upon its monetary employment. He values a gold coin not merely for the sake of its industrial use-value, say because of the possibility of using it as jewellery, but chiefly on account of its monetary utility. But, of course, to do something, and to render an account to oneself of what one does and why one does it, are quite different things.
Ludwig von Mises
...for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.
Frédéric Bastiat
Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.
Paul Collier
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
Daniel Kahneman
The trouble is, nobody knows exactly how the world really works. We are all fallible people with limited knowledge. It is only through Biblical revelation from the One who knows how the world really works because He made it and actively sustains it that anyone can come to a competent understanding of the world.
Gary North
To act without rapacity to use knowledge with wisdom to respect interdependence to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.
Barbara Ward
The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.
Karl Marx
The present presses automatically on you. The future does not. To attend to the future requires bandwidth, which scarcity taxes. When scarcity taxes our bandwidth, we become even more focused on the here and now. We need cognitive resources to gauge future needs, and we need executive control to resist present temptations. As it taxes our bandwidth, scarcity focuses on the present, and leads us to borrow.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.
Steven E. Landsburg
We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.
Daniel Kahneman