Economics Quotes

Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.

~ Richard Florida

I have a dream, there will be critical point in the future,where economics and technology will negate each other.

~ Toba Beta

Savers have to be punished so debtors can be saved.Why? Because if debtors are rescued, that makes it possible for more debts to be issued in the future.And why is that important? Because the banking system needs ever more loans in order to survive.

~ Chris Martenson

The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.

~ Ernst F. Schumacher

The emotional pattern seems to be something like, “[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore his tales about what happened in economic history must be true.” Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: “We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism.” It is not true, but it motivates.

~ Deirdre N. Mccloskey

Let's stop kidding ourselves that Greek debt is the Euro's key problem. With Greece gone, who's next ?

~ Alex Morritt

Nowadays… deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place.

~ Jonathan Sacks

Oil may run out, liquidity may dry up, but as long as ink flows freely, the next chapter of Life will continue to be written.

~ Alex Morritt

Man is smart - If money would have grown on trees, we would have used green leaves as money.

~ Amit Kalantri

Facing a deteriorating economy and a weakening hold over the populace, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein opted to revitalize tribal leaders and conservative practices as a means of stabilizing state power; those conservative practices were not an inherent feature of a predominantly Muslim country.

~ Nadje Al-Ali

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

~ Kenneth E. Boulding

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that we're number one.

~ Fareed Zakaria

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.

~ Cory Doctorow

either on a competitive or a cartel basis.

~ George W. Stocking

The term cartel was virtually unknown to the American language a generation ago. Like most borrowed words, when first taken over it meant different things to different persons. Time was required to crystallize its meaning. In this country it now commonly refers to international marketing arrangements. In a companion study we have defined such a cartel as an arrangement among, or on behalf of, producers engaged in the same line of business designed to limit or eliminate competition among them.

~ George W. Stocking

Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine in a free society, and have said that in such a society, there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

~ Milton Friedman

A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.

~ Rex Curry

Interest in such organizations is too often linked to the fringe and marginal or thought to be little more than conspiracy theories. While such a critique is not entirely incorrect, we will see that hidden organizations are far more common, more important, and more consequential than we have typically allowed ourselves to admit. As a result, they also need to be better integrated into thinking about organizations by scholars, policymakers, and everyday citizens.

~ Craig Scott

There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system...

~ Milton Friedman

The problem with capitalism is that we have a global theology without morality, without a Bible. And that's dangerous, he warns - we're not going to be able to exist in a global context if we are the bastards of our business.

~ Joel Bakan

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

~ Michael Lewis

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

~ Elbert Hubbard

1. Stop blaming China We taught them how to do what they are doing2. Take responsibility – purchase consciously, purchase less, don’t go for lowest possible price3. Follow good business ethics, it’s a two way street4. Create global partnerships in a global village, create a true Win-Win situation with your supplier, consider the supplier a partner (what a concept!)5. End the Price Pressure: Boycott Walmart & Club-buying stores, not China. Stop buying what you don’t need!

~ Tom Galey

100 trillion is 100 followed by 12 zeroes

~ Andrew Ashwin

The opportunity cost of an unlived dream is not only that dream, but also the dreams the dream was meant to inspire.

~ Ryan Lilly

1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.

~ Mark Bittman

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.

~ Ellen Cushing

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

~ Ivan Illich

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.

~ George Orwell

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

~ Alice Walker

For whom, I asked myself innocently, were the riches and dominions that the English conquered and held on to at any price in the most remote corners of the planet? The neighborhoods which succeeded one another interminably down the narrow cobbled streets were not inhabited by the beneficiaries of those enterprises.

~ Sylvia Iparraguirre

To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.

~ Adam Smith

You eat the wealthy, sir, and it will be your last meal.

~ J.s.b. Morse

The rich feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God. Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now shown for wealth and money-making has been the most fundamental change in Britain over four decades.

~ Anthony Sampson

You will miss a normal life while living a successful life, but not as much as the craving for a successful life while you were living a normal life.

~ Amit Kalantri

If you have money but not love you will somehow manage, but if you don't have both then you are in serious trouble.

~ Amit Kalantri