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Economic Quotes

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Economic Quotes

“I don't think you can pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere indefinitely and not have a reaction. But there are great scientists such as Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the last hundred years, who has studied the question, who believes quite the opposite. The reason transnational action is so difficult is because the major problem with climate change is, A, that there is no consensus, and, B, that the economic cost is simply staggering. Reversing it completely might mean undoing the modern industrial economy.”

“What does a man need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by.”

“The start of the New Year is a perfect time to start a stop doing list and to make this the cornerstone of your New Year resolutions, be it for your company, your family or yourself. It also is a perfect time to clarify your three circles, mirroring at a personal level the three questions... 1) What are you deeply passionate about? 2) What are you are genetically encoded for - what activities do you feel just "made to do"? 3) What makes economic sense - what can you make a living at?”

“Good economic policy requires not so much the bravado to implement drastic change as the strength and wisdom to make reasonable trade-offs over the many years it takes to transform a country's standard of living.”

“The economic system that the United States has is an evil empire. It's an economic system that's not fair, not just, and it's not democratic. And it will fall just like communism fell. The richest 1 percent now own 50 percent of the wealth. It didn't use to be that way. The average CEO 20 years ago made 20 times as much as the average employee. Now they make 212 times as much.”

“Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.”

“For more than 3,000 years, China and India accounted for half of the world's economic output. But then the Industrial Revolution gave North America and Europe 150 golden years. If you take the long-term perspective, our economic dominance has been more of an exception than the rule.”

“The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all?”

“In Mexico, a poor country, higher education is of quite good quality -- and is free. Ten years ago the government tried to impose small fees. There was a national student strike and the government backed down. High tuition is not an economic necessity, as is easy to show, but a debt trap is a good technique of indoctrination and control. And resisting this makes good sense.”

“In times of economic distress, it's only natural for people - and Americans have done this for many years - to look for a scapegoat. Depending on where you live in this country, the scapegoats are either, frankly, Mexicans or Muslims. So, you know, God save you if you happened to be a Mexican Muslim in America right now.”

“Music was not always my fan. Sometimes there were lean years, years where I was uncertain if I was doing the right or wrong thing. And years where there wasn't the acceptance, years of economic hardships, and failures. That's when you get to know either who you are, what you're made of, or what's inside of you. If you don't probe deeper, you'll never know, and you can't go on.”

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

“The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement.”

“Economics, over the years, has become more and more abstract and divorced from events in the real world. Economists, by and large, do not study the workings of the actual economic system. They theorize about it. As Ely Devons, an English economist, once said in a meeting: 'If economists wanted to study the horse, they wouldn't go around and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, `What would I do if I were a horse?' '”

“Unemployment in the sense of distress is widely disappearing. . . . We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but given a change to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with he help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation. There is no guarantee against poverty equal to a job for every man. That is the primary purpose of the economic policies we advocate”

“The larger the government, the more our livings standards are reduced. We are fortunate as a civilization that the progress of free enterprise generally outpaces the regress of government growth, for, if that were not the case, we would be poorer each year - not just in relative terms, but absolutely poorer too. The market is smart and the government is dumb, and to these attributes do we owe the whole of our economic well-being.”

“Those who advocate more and more government regulation have been experimenting for 40 years, trying to create an economic system in which everyone can somehow be made more prosperous by the toil of someone else.”

“The left's inability to understand the most basic economic fact - that people need an incentive to produce - has caused the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of people - mostly poor - in the last 75 years. But thanks to a politically corrupted media and educational system, their pigheaded pursuit of socialist fantasies goes on.”

“It makes no difference to a widow with her savings in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income tax on her interest income during a period of zero inflation or pays no income tax during years of 5 percent inflation. Either way, she is 'taxed' in a manner that leaves her no real income whatsoever. Any money she spends comes right out of capital. She would find outrageous a 100 percent income tax but doesn't seem to notice that 5 percent inflation is the economic equivalent.”

“Obama has paid and will continue to pay dearly for betting on his stimulus package. Because of it, the Bush recession is becoming the Obama recession much faster than it would have had he adopted a more gradual approach to solving economic problems. By jumping in immediately, as he did, in order to increase government spending and pass eight years of Democratic dreams in one day, he made the public expect a solution.”

“A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, 'Delay, Denial and Dilution,' written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.”

“Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.”

“Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.”

“No one can predict whether the earth will be cooler or hotter next year, let alone do anything to change it. If you're afraid of global warming, turn off the lights when you leave the room - but don't participate in the corruption of science, don't scare our kids with unproven cataclysmic theories, and don't try to ban economic energy sources that people living on this planet depend upon today. And don't try to stop progress; it's the only hope the earth has of seeing clean industry, short of exterminating mankind.”

“The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.”

“During the debate over NAFTA President Clinton said, 'I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact.' WRONG. According to the Economic Policy Institute, NAFTA has led to the loss of more than 680,000 U.S. jobs. I voted against NAFTA and other bad trade agreements and am fighting to stop the TPP.”

“If a legislator is safe from competition, or if he represents groups with the same economic and political beliefs, he does not have to change his ideas or respond to the needs of the broader population. He can rest content with a mediocre, absentee performance knowing he will be returned to office. And as he is returned year after year the seniority system gives him immense control over people from other parts of the country whose views he need not heed at all.”

“I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of postgraduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but I was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.”

“Don't ever let anyone tell you that history doesn't repeat. For 70 years, liberals have been spinning the yarn that FDR's New Deal, despite all the evidence that it exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression, quickened our economic recovery. Indeed, I remember scratching my head when one of my college history professors in the 1970s tried to convince us of that theory and its corollary - an even better howler - that FDR was actually a conservative, because if he hadn't implemented his socialist programs, the republic would have died right there.”

“The more subtle thing is more speculative. The world is well past its long-term carrying capacity for human beings living a European, much less an American, lifestyle predicated on planned obsolescence. International economic growth is largely a matter of accelerated movement of materials from mines and forests to the dump. Instead of saving and buying decent furniture we can pass on to our children, we charge our credit cards for shaped heaps of sawdust and glue that fall apart in less than three or four years.”

“We're obviously at the edge of something quite new in humanity's experience. That is this globalization process which isn't just economic or social, but involves the interpenetration of cultures, people moving to different places several times in their lifetime, traveling for business or pleasure, and marrying people of very different cultural backgrounds, all of which was almost impossible a hundred years ago.”

“Social mobility decreased under Labour and under the current government it is reversing. The differences between the poorest and richest are returning to Victorian levels. We don't have open sewers and infant mortality rates at fifty percent but in economic terms we're getting to a level of disparity we haven't seen for a couple of hundred years. And we're getting there very quickly.”

“If you think about the last 50 years, Africa's proximity and historical context has absolutely been with Europe and the United States, but their approach in dealing with the economic challenges that Africa faces in particular has been one of handing out aid, not developing economies, not building a long term relationship around agriculture and so on.”