Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Robert H. Frank

Quote by Robert H. Frank

“When the economic pie grows larger, it's always possible for everyone to have a larger slice than before. So it's really in all of our interest to make the economic pie larger by eliminating waste whenever and wherever possible.”

Quote by Robert H. Frank

Author

Robert H. Frank
Robert H. Frank

Robert H. Frank is a renowned economist born on January 2, 1945. He has conducted extensive research in various fields of economics, particularly in the areas of consumer choice, market behavior, and income distribution. Professor Frank is known for his profound insights into economics and his focus on social issues. more

You May Also Like

“No one could argue with a straight face that the couples getting married today are much happier just because their wedding celebrations cost three times as much as those in 1980. Bigger mansions and costlier parties are wasteful in the same sense that larger antlers on all bull elk are wasteful. The good news is that simple changes in the tax system can eliminate much of this waste without having to deny people the right to decide for themselves how best to spend their money.”

“I reluctantly signed up for a journalism major, thinking I needed a fall-back way to make money should my career as a novelist fail to take off. As I started to try on journalism, including doing internships and working at the campus paper, I found I actually liked it. So I started to want to be a journalist.”

“Every purchasing decision involves a trade-off between what I call fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something - how great the experience is. Convenience is how easy it is to get something. A live concert is a high fidelity way to experience music; an MP3 file is a high convenience way to experience music. Depending on the situation, one or the other is probably pretty appealing. What's not appealing is something that offers neither.”

“High fidelity is a rich experience, and you'll put up with terrible convenience to get it - maybe it's high cost, waiting in line, jumping through hoops. High convenience is the opposite - it's a commodity, but it's cheap and easy and ubiquitous. A great exclusive boutique shop is high fidelity; Wal-Mart is high convenience. Both are hard to establish in their own way. The thing to remember about sustaining either is that you can't sit still. Some other entity will always find a way to challenge your fidelity position or your convenience position.”

“Talented people can predict with great accuracy what's about to happen just a tiny bit ahead of their competitors. It might be two seconds ahead, or two hundredths of a second, or two days. Napoleon on an eighteenth century battlefield had something more like a two-day advantage. Wayne Gretzky in a hockey game was probably a second ahead of everyone else on the ice.”

“Wayne Gretzky's talent doesn't come from studying everything he's experienced in hockey and making long-term game plans. It comes from constantly taking in all the data that's happening in the moment on the ice, and instantly generating constant predictions based on super-efficient mental models he's built in his head. Technology has to work more like Gretzky.”

“Now companies tend to mine gigantic databases for insights into what might happen six months from now. That might always be valuable, but there's a different kind of value - and a competitive edge - in processing ongoing streams of data through a software model that can quickly and constantly make predictions about, say, whether a certain customer is going to defect, or an aircraft is going to run into trouble.”