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.
Edmund PhelpsRead
There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy's entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of responsible economic policy over populism.
Edmund Phelps argues that while it is reasonable to consider raising revenues to support businesses that pay low-wage workers, it is not acceptable to lower standard economic practices just to gain favor with voters from the lower economic strata. He suggests that ethical governance should prioritize effective economic policies that benefit society as a whole rather than resorting to tactics aimed solely at appealing to those in the lowest economic positions for political gain.
In practice
During a public policy debate, this quote can highlight the need for sustainable economic strategies.
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.
If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.
The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.'
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.
When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses?
A global economy is characterized not only by the free movement of goods and services but, more important, by the free movement of ideas and of capital.
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that_x000D_ capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially_x000D_ available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the_x000D_ Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth_x000D_ process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers_x000D_ capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided_x000D_ that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.
All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.
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