Economics quotes

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Richard_Clarke_Cabot

Write Barbarously

"Scientists, economists, and historians often write barbarously."

Dwight_D_Eisenhower

Long Lane of History

“During the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”
  • Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell address (17 January 1961).

Herbert_Simon

Satisficer

“The real economic actor is in fact a satisficer, a person who accepts 'good enough' alternatives, not because less is preferred to more but because there is no choice.”

Markets and Coordination

“Markets aim to coordinate the decisions and behavior of multitudes of economic actors to guarantee that the quantity of brussels sprouts shipped to market bears some reasonable relation to the quantity that consumers will buy and eat, and that the price at which brussels sprouts can be sold bears a reasonable relation to the cost of producing them. Any society that is not a subsistence economy, but has substantial specialization and division of labor, needs mechanisms to perform this coordinative function. Markets are only one, however, among the spectrum of mechanisms of coordination on which any society relies. [central planning, bargaining and negotiation, business, government, education, balloting procedures]”

Organization and Market Economy

“The economic units in capitalist societies are mostly business firms, which are themselves hierarchic organizations, some of enormous size, that make almost negligible use of markets in their internal functioning. Roughly eighty percent of the human economic activity in the American economy, usually regarded as almost the epitome of a "market" economy, takes place in the internal environments of business and other organizations and not in the external, between-organization environments of markets. To avoid misunderstanding, it would be appropriate to call such a society an organization-&-market economy; for in order to give an account of it we have to pay as much attention to organizations as to markets.”

Invisible Hand

“In examining the processes of social coordination, economics has given top billing sometimes almost exclusive billing to the market mechanism. It is indeed a remarkable mechanism... The optimality theorems stretch credibility, so far as real-world markets are concerned, because they require substantive rationality of the kinds we found implausible in our examination of the theory of the firm. Markets populated by consumers and producers who satisfice instead of optimizing do not meet the conditions on which the theorems rest.”

H_G_Wells

Competent Receiver

“This complex problem of the competent receiver is the underlying problem of most of our constructive politics. It is imperative that every voter should have some conception of the experiments in economic control that are in progress in Great Britain, the United States of America, Italy, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere. Such experiments are going to affect the whole of his or her life profoundly. So, too, are the experiments in monetary and financial organization. Many of the issues involved go further than general principles. They are quantitative issues.”
  • Source: Wells, H. G. (1938). World Brain chap. II (The Brain Organization of the Modern World). London, UK: Methuen and Co. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/

T_H_White

Learning Cure for Sadness

“‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.’”
  • Source: White, T. H. (2011). The Once and Future King | 1939. New York, NY: Penguin. ISBN 9781101657546.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Automation and Labor

“Perhaps the most compelling reality that drives managers to a narrowly conceived emphasis on automation is the web of economic logic in which they must operate. Frequently, new expenditures for technology can be justified only as a capital substitution for labor. It is often assumed that whatever was provided by the human contributor can be transferred to the automatic functioning of the machine system.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 248. ISBN:0465032125.

Technology Change

“To fully grasp the way in which a major new technology can change the world... it is necessary to consider both the manner in which it creates intrinsically new qualities of experience and the way in which new possibilities are engaged by the often-conflicting demands of social, political, and economic interests in order to produce a 'choice.' To concentrate only on intrinsic change and the texture of an emergent mentality is to ignore the real weight of history and the diversity of interests that pervade collective behavior. However, to narrow all discussion of technological change to the play of these interests overlooks the essential power of technology to reorder the rules of the game and thus our experience as players. Moreover, these two dimensions of technological change, the intrinsic and the contingent, need to be understood, not separately, but in relation to one another. The same innovation that abstracts work and increases its intellectual content, thus enhancing the learning of lower level employees... can also, within the context of the choices by which it is adapted, be experienced as a new source of divisiveness and control.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 389. ISBN:0465032125.