Quotes by Economists - Page 5

Money never remains just coins and pieces of paper. Money can be translated into the beauty of living a support in misfortune an education or future security.

Sylvia Porter

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

Karl Marx

For the etatist, money is a creature of the State, and the esteem in which money is held is the economic expression of the respect or prestige enjoyed by the State. The more powerful and the richer the State, the better its money. Thus, during the War, it was asserted that 'the monetary standard of the victors' would ultimately be the best money. Yet victory and defeat on the battlefield can exercise only an indirect influence on the value of money.

Ludwig von Mises

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich A. Hayek

The antagonists of finance’s future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all.

Usman W. Chohan

Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.

Paul Collier

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 expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.

Daniel Kahneman

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

In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

John Maynard Keynes

I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The cause of freedom is the cause of God.

Samuel Bowles

Desperation is the best innovator

Tony Cleaver

Launching a turnaround takes courage. I cannot measure that and so it is not going to be included in my analysis, but behind the moments of change there are always a few people within these societies who have decided to try to make a difference.

Paul Collier

for in the absence of a magistrate (dandadharabhave), the strong will swallow the weak; but under his protection, the weak resist the strong.

Kautilya

Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy. When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing it. This applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer, or daycare. There is something in the way that is preventing the market from working as it should. If you look carefully enough, you will find the hand of the state making the mess in question.

Jeffrey Tucker

The doctrine of the importance of hoards for stabilizing the objective exchange-value of money has gradually lost its adherents with the passing of time. Nowadays its supporters are few.

Ludwig von Mises

Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.

Thomas Sowell

It is the beginning of the 'demonetization' of the notes. The process is hastened by its panic-like character. It may be possible once, twice, perhaps even three or four times, to allay the fears of the public; but eventually the affair must run its course and then there is no longer any going back. Once the depreciation is proceeding so rapidly that sellers have to reckon with considerable losses even if they buy again as quickly as is possible, then the position of the currency is hopeless.

Ludwig von Mises

People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.

Jeffrey Tucker

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

Ludwig von Mises

The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Walter Bagehot

Any factor that breeds polarization will worsen policy, and thus cause lower growth.

William Easterly

You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long)

Richard McKenzie

Freedom of mind is the real freedom. A person whose mind is not free though he may not be in chains, is a slave, not a free man. One whose mind is not free, though he may not be in prison, is a prisoner and not a free man. One whose mind is not free though alive, is no better than dead. Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.

B.R. Ambedkar

I don't accept defeat as final. Only death is final - and even then I hope for a reprieve.

Phil Gramm

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Paul Romer

This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.

Karl Marx

By the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago—who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. (Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.

Steven D. Levitt

The main cause of the ineffectiveness of British propaganda is that those directing it seem to have lost their own belief in the peculiar values of English civilization or to be completely ignorant of the main points on which it differs from that of other people. The Left intelligentsia indeed, have so long worshiped foreign gods that they seem to have become almost incapable of seeing any good in the characteristic English institutions and traditions. That the moral values on which most of them pride themselves are largely the product of the institutions they are out to destroy, these socialists cannot, of course, admit.

Friedrich A. Hayek

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

John Kenneth Galbraith

Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.

Ha-Joon Chang

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.tThese findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

Daniel Kahneman

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

Daniel Kahneman

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.

William Hurrell Mallock

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

William Beveridge

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing soundeconomic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit ofthis task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatanswhose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able toadvance plausible objections to an economist’s argument, the more furiously do theyinsult them.

Ludwig von Mises

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Walter Bagehot

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat

I've learned ruthless concentration. I can write under any circumstances ... street noises loud talk music you name it.

Sylvia Porter

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

Daniel Kahneman

Judgment is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all? To prohibit what they think pernicious is not claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions, because those opinions ‘lay be wrong, we should leave all our interests uncared for, and all our duties unperformed. An objection which applies to all conduct can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular.

John Stuart Mill

Inflation made it possible to divert the fury of the people to 'speculators' and 'profiteers'. Thus it proved itself an excellent psychological resource of the destructive and annihilist war policy.

Ludwig von Mises

It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.

Ludwig von Mises

Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.

Daron Acemoglu

Society is a voluntary scheme of mutual benefit. The state is a compulsory scheme of mutual exploitation.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

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

We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it 'social capital, or maybe 'trust'. Others call it 'the rule of law', or 'institutions'. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.

Tim Harford

Slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct.

B.R. Ambedkar

Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown.

Thomas F. Woodlock

The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Jesus never asked me to give to an organization the kind of exclusive devotion he demands from his disciples. Over and over, Jesus calls people to himself - out of the church, the culture, the economy, and the family.

Michael Spencer

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.

Karl Marx

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

Thomas Sowell

I’d volunteer to go to prison, as long as there are books. Because with books I am free.

Mohammad Hatta

If all the exchange-ratios of the past were erased from human memory, the process of market-price-determination might certainly become more difficult, because everybody would have to construct a new scale of valuations for himself; but it would not become impossible. In fact, people the whole world over are engaged daily and hourly in the operation from which all prices result: the decision as to the relative significance enjoyed by specific quantities of goods as conditions for the satisfaction of wants.

Ludwig von Mises

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Daniel Kahneman

In each case, the relative cost of postponing the purchase for buyer and seller determines the intensity of competition between the [past and future] selves of the seller. If the buyer has a lower cost of postponing the purchase (delay, making do with an interior model) than the seller (inventory, staff salaries) the buyer has the bargaining power.

Rakesh V. Vohra

An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state for the acquisition of wealth.No. 75

Alexander Hamilton

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