#economics

As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#peace #technology #nature

Nadie ha visto nunca a un perro hacer un intercambio justo y deliberado de un hueso por otro con otro perro. Nadie ha visto a un animal que, con gestos y sonidos naturales, indique a otro: esto es mío y esto es tuyo; estoy dispuesto a darte esto a cambio de eso ↗

— Adam Smith

#nature

You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long) ↗

— Richard McKenzie

#nature

I got politics and economics moving and then others took over. ↗

— Lech Walesa

#got #i #moving #others #over

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#economics #law #art

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature. ↗

— Ludwig von Mises

#age

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well. ↗

— Charles Eisenstein

#charles-eisenstein #ecology #economics #gaia #gift-giving

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. ↗

— Ivan Illich

#economics #modernity #age

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#economics #economists #expertise #intellect #mind

Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe. ↗

— Friedrich A. von Hayek

#equality