#economic

If the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught. The world works as it does only because people are not the totally self seeking agents that free-market economics believes them to be. We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them. ↗

— Ha-Joon Chang

#economics #free-market #change

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#philosophy #men

Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate ↗

— Frank Herbert

#resource-economics #nature

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped. ↗

— Kalle Lasn

#environment #nature

Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists ↗

— John Ruskin

#communism #economics #respect

The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved. ↗

— Jeffrey D. Sachs

#future #science #sustainability #science

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round. ↗

— Paul Krugman

#conservatism #conservatism-in-the-us #democratic-party-united-states #economics #flat-earth

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#earnings #economics #income #socialism #wealth

It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it? ↗

— Paul Mason

#capitalism #economics #age

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook. ↗

— Francis Parker Yockey

#economic #economic system #part #rather #system