Quotes on Economics

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

All around us, aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.

I would never make a good economist. You know, an economist is a man that can tell you anything about — well, he will tell you what can happen under any given condition — and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's, too.

People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

You reach a point where you don't work for money.

That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

I look in a right of property - on the right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyments, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves, as essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society.

What I have been trying to remind people of for the past 40 years is that you can’t operate an entire conventional system, whether it’s economics, business or the way we live and surround ourselves, what we eat, without recognizing that there are severe negative externalities that are not being accounted for.

The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.

Modern economics is a set of formal models and equations purporting to fully determine human behaviour, at least in the economic realm. And there is no way that uncertainty can be compressed into determinate mathematical models.

The concept of a general equilibrium has no relevance to the real world (in other words, classical economics is an exercise in futility).

International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others- in this case, the domination of liberal free market principles of economics, democratic principles of politics, and a peaceful international system over other visions that other nations and peoples may have. It will last only as long as those who favor it retain the capacity to defend it.

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks - drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

What would it mean if there were a theory that explained everything? And just what does "everything" actually mean, anyway? Would this new theory in physics explain, say the meaning of human poetry? Or how economics work? Or the stages of psychosexual development? Can this new physics explain the currents of ecosystems, or the dynamics of history, or why human wars are so terribly common?

The budget should be balanced not by more taxes, but by reduction of follies.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.