#economics

Whoever claims that economic competition represents 'survival of the fittest' in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics. ↗

— George Reisman

#clearest #competition #economic #economics #evidence

Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor. ↗

— Christopher Caudwell

#art #beauty #economics #poetry #truth

Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on. ↗

— Harrison Salisbury

#background #because #economics #get #journalism

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago. ↗

— Paul Samuelson

#been #economics #even #few #less

In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable. ↗

— Charles Wheelan

#economics #science

When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky. ↗

— Steven D. Levitt

#incentives #imagination

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people. ↗

— Bob Torres

#economics #marxism #poverty #sociology #sociology

The use of market values and technology as a social barometer has devalued the worth of individuals, rendered irrelevant the quality of their lives, and stunted their creativity. ↗

— Sulak Sivaraksa

#capitalism #economics #sociology #sociology

The social phenomenon of economic growth is, thanks to the principle of the conservation of matter, nothing other than the physical phenomenon of increasing resource depletion. ↗

— Craig Dilworth

#economics #sociology #sociology

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born. ↗

— Yanis Varoufakis

#cycles #economics #industrial-revolution #technology #death