Quotes on 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.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

Rising inequality is not a law of nature - it's not even a law of economics. It is a consequence of political and economic arrangements, and those arrangements can be changed.

There is no single theory that is used in economics that considers the finite nature of resources. It's shocking.

Governments constantly choose between telling lies and fighting wars, with the end result always being the same. One will always lead to the other.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.

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.

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

The Pope appeals for disinterested solidarity and for a return to person-centred ethics in the world of finance and economics.

The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.

We can't afford more top-down economics. What we need are policies that will grow and strengthen the middle class.

I believe that you have to understand the economics of a business before you have a strategy, and you have to understand your strategy before you have a structure. If you get these in the wrong order, you will probably fail.

Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.

Economics is a very difficult subject. I've compared it to trying to learn how to repair a car when the engine is running.