1,161 Quotes About Economics

The old rule of forecasting was to make as many forecasts as possible and publicise the ones you got right. The new rule is to forecast so far in the future, no one will know you got it wrong.

Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media...

John Law’s life and his Mississippi Scheme had followed an identical arc of trajectory. Law had been both the maker and breaker of the Mississippi Scheme just as the Mississippi Scheme had been both the maker and breaker of Law.

When trust is low, speed is slow.

Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted...

But when something is easy to imagine, it’s often because you’ve failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

The evolutionary economist Richard Nelson of Columbia University has pointed out that there are in fact two types of technology that play a major role in economic growth. The first is Physical Technology; this is what we are accustomed to thinking of as technology, things such as bronze-making techniques, steam engines, and microchips. Social Technologies, on the other hand, are ways for organizing people to do things.

The facts we have examined in this chapter indicate that it is not simply out of intellectual curiosity that we ask these questions. The answers hold the key to unlocking widespread rapid economic growth.

While many futurists and business leaders believe that robots and automation are taking jobs from humans, I believe that it's the humans who are takin the jobs away from robots.