Economics Quotations

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.

When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance.

Learn computer science. It's extraordinarily helpful. I like recommending learning economics as well so they think in terms of business, they have rational frameworks for looking at the world, but yeah, computer science is an amazing way to get into, even if you want to be CEO, having a tech background is helpful.

Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

Rogue economics is a sort of umbrella under which we find the criminal economy, the illegal economy, but also those gray areas, gray areas where there is not a proper regulation, where there is not legislation for the economy.

By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.

Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.

Commercial institutions, proud of their achievements, do not see that healthy living systems - clean air and water, healthy soil, stable climates - are integral to a functioning economy. As our living systems deteriorate, traditional forecasting and business economics become the equivalent of house rules on a sinking cruise ship.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded. So, half as much grain is half as much useful, but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer, and we've been trying to make computers that work that way.

I think it is true to say that I am not the first Nobel Prize winner in economics to have little formal training in economics.

Economists agree about economics - and that's a science - and they disagree about economic policy because that's a value judgment... I've had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree.

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far.

Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations.

The economics favour one-man comedy shows: all you need is one person, a microphone and a PA system. But I'm pleased so many people are making a living out of comedy - it's a wonderful business to be in.

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.

Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.

At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.

There is no sense in making statements that will not continue to be true after they are made.

Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State.

The major driver of economics is the equilibrium approach, which has taken various forms over the years. General equilibrium is the statement that all the different parts of the economy influence each other, even if it's remote, like mortgage-backed securities and their demands on automobiles.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these terrible things to each other. And he did a little bit of economics on the side.

Even though I didn't get a business degree, I enjoyed learning about economics.

Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

A lot of my colleagues have been people with broad interests in economics, not just narrowly focused interests.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

Everywhere I go, I see incredible examples of communities that have a vision for transportation and how it will impact the quality of life, mobility, economics and opportunity.

We believe in liberty, we believe in limited government, we believe in free enterprise, we believe in family values and the sanctity of human life, and we all believe Washington needs a good dose of Economics 101.

To join or not to join films was the biggest choice I had to make. I'd done two years of biogenetic engineering, was an economics graduate and a gold medalist. I had also been a Bharatanatyam dancer from age five, always won the best actress award in school. Finally, I decided to do things for my soul, chose to act.

You can't just read the Koran to understand Muslim life. You have to look at history, at personalities, at economics, and so on.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

I wasn't actually very naturally good at economics. My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics.

Seventy percent of the fish we eat is black market, fished in violation of international laws. Our ignorance makes us unwilling partners in crime. Rogue economics is turning the global market into our worst nightmare.

That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.

I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

In human life, economics precedes politics or culture.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

The simple model of a bridge is great, and you could not build a bridge without understanding it well. But if you're actually building the bridge, you need to know the site. A lot of economics is like that: When prices go up, demand is gonna go down. You can't forget that and run your economy. But it's not the only thing you need to know.

Cutting budget deficits can never be just an exercise in economics.

The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.

Start with the idea that you can't repeal the laws of economics. Even if they are inconvenient.

I think the association of economics with forecasting is unfortunate and is down to the fact that one great way to get an investment bank's name on business television is to hire a guy called a Chief Economist who will go and prognosticate.

Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.

You know and I know and economists know that trickle-down economics doesn't work.

I just knew that economics had never been my big motivation.

I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write.

Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people's taxes that stimulates the economy and lowers the unemployment rate, is a very widely accepted idea. It's in every economics textbook, that's what we teach our undergraduates, and I certainly try to teach them the truth.

I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

A number of bloggers in economics and the financial sector have risen to prominence through the sheer strength of their work. Note it was not their family connections nor ties to Ivy League schools or elite banks, but rather the strength of their research, analysis and writing.

There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.

Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.

Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity.

It was never my intention to marry anybody. Economics are basically the only reason to get married, but I'm very glad I did it.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

I don't think Obama understands basic economics. Not economics that work. He may understand some theory that someone in Princeton sat and dreamed up, but it's not working.

Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.

Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

I got politics and economics moving and then others took over.

It's well proved economics that if a country which is rich and a country that is poor come together in global trade, sooner or later the standard of living of the poor country will go up towards that of the rich country.

I'm not a communist, of course. But I do think that everything is down to economics. Capitalism doesn't change.

The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I've always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women's story - that stuff often happens at the time it happens because of the economy.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.

The point is the industry itself shouldn't be straddled with constraints that many of our direct competitors don't have. We feel the number 30 percent isn't really justified. It's very, very arbitrary. We consider a number around 40 percent to be more appropriate given the economics in the industry.

We believe that the completion techniques that further improved our drilling economics in Johnson County can be applied to our acreage in the western counties where we have seen improved drilling results over the past three months. This provides the assurance to actively pursue development in these areas.

Whether one believes or not, religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics, and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive, it remains vital, inspiring great good and, sometimes, great evil.

We're in uncharted times here, both for the economy and for the stock market. Some of the old rules just don't apply to global economics and to the global mechanism of how things are working.

Ulster (Northern Ireland) and the Balkans have already shown how difficult it is to split cities, and with Iraq's centralized and failing infrastructure, and impoverished economy, violence and economics cannot be separated.

Our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.

There is no business on a dead planet

"Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool."

We have saturated Europe with oil. And as any economics handbook will tell you, excessive supply makes prices fall. But we do not have the means to decrease supply: all our (oil) exports are directed at Europe.

We wanted to try something new this year. We had the students create a business to see just how economics evolves in our society.

Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?

Economics, politics, and personalities are often inseparable.

Whatever you tax you get less of.

"Murphys law of economic policy": Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

Neither a state nor a bank ever have had unrestricted power of issuing paper money without abusing that power.

It is not the responsibility of the Federal Bank - nor would it be appropriate - to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their decisions

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

Good environmentalism is good economics

My observation is China is thinking more as a global player than regionally, in both politics and economics.

The problem with vaccines is not a new problem, ... For the last decade, we have had reduction in the number of vaccine manufacturers. ...The issue comes down primarily to economics ... Profit margins are small.

Climate change: Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics

Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics. That's a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you're not undermining just that, you're undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society.