1,161 Quotes About Economics

The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new.

The reality is that extreme inequality recurs again and again; to deal with it, societies need institutions capable of periodically redefining and redistributing property rights. The refusal to do so in as transparent and peaceful a manner as possible only increases the likelihood of more violent but less effective remedies.

Billionaires think that anything goes, are enamored of geoengineering, and detest nothing so much as simple but unpleasant solutions (such as paying taxes and living quietly).

We find the same pattern in virtually every region of the world: the identity cleavage deepened and conflicts over boundaries intensified while the wealth cleavage weakened and criticism of wealth became muted.

Human behavior is not dependent on social or economic realities, social and economic realities are dependent on human behavior.

History is full of examples of revolutions and radical movements replacing one tranny with another, in a pattern that the German sociologist Robert Michels dubbed the iron law of oligarchy, a particularly pernicious form of the vicious circle.

I am starting to come to the opinion that the ongoing destruction of our planet and social systems by the markets may in fact be a less urgent problem than our continued distortion of truth and perception.

Debt is a precise measure of the inefficiency of capitalism. If a market exchange system actually worked, no-one would owe anything. Debt is an error – and we’ve got trillions of it!

Law is the blunt instrument we use to hide our failure to create a properly educated, nurturing society. Give people what they want and they won’t need to steal from you. Reinforce peoples’ natural empathy and they will understand why not to hurt you. That won’t stop every crime of course – but it should stamp out around 99% of it.