#economics

As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization -- our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity -- to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists. ↗

— John Ralston Saul

#intelligence

The financial markets are not to be trusted. They expect to be given free reign to make huge profits while the sun is shining, but hasten to the shelter of the state when the skies darken. ↗

— Peter Stalker

#money #money

Decided to put aside ethnic differences in the cause of making more money. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#humor #money

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#greed #greed

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#capitalism #communism #economics #north-korea #obedience

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption. ↗

— Evan Davis

#assume #assumption #behaviour #behavioural #deviate

1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight. ↗

— Mark Bittman

#food #health #hunger #wealth #food

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#obesity #food

If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#economics #pro-life #social-structures #life

Selling is a painful necessity, buying is what makes it all worthwhile. ↗

— Steven E. Landsburg

#humor #life