Economist Daily Quotes

The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them—smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn’t easy.

As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government...Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let's return as much of daily life as possible to a two-party system--buyer and seller. You'll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music systems prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it would have turned out with a government-regulated system of electronic insurance plans.

Today more than ever, we are in need not only of godly pastors and Bible teachers, but also godly lawyers, politicians, diplomats, judges, doctors, economists, educators, artists, carpenters, mechanics, and used car salesmen who see their jobs as a way to honorably represent God's ways in daily living.

second related pressure stems from organizational biases—whereby employees become captured by the institutional culture that they experience daily and adopt the personal preferences of their bosses and workplaces more generally. Over a century ago, the brilliant economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen illustrated how our minds become shaped and narrowed by our daily occupations:

All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you. An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

One bitcoin block is expected to be produced around every ten minutes. Every 210,000 blocks, or roughly four years, the protocol halves the number of coins produced with each block. This means that the daily bitcoin production on any given day is half of what it was four years earlier. Four more years of successful operation will likely increase people’s awareness of bitcoin and increase the chances they place on its continued survival, thus increasing their subjective valuation and demand for it. So as long as bitcoin continues to operate, and its supply drops by half every four years, it is highly likely that marginal demand for it will be higher, and the marginal supply lower, than four years previously. This monetary time bomb keeps clicking with each new block, and it is time for economists to begin to seriously contemplate what its continued clicking means for the world’s monetary and financial system.

I was amazed at how expensive economists thought doctors were. They instituted many economic maneuvers—de-skilling medicine onto nurses and physician assistants; computerizing medical decision-making; substituting algorithms for thinking—because they assumed that doctors were such expensive commodities. And yet doctors were not expensive, at least, not the doctors I knew. We cost no more than the nurses, the middle managers, and the information technicians, alas. Adding up all the time I spent with Mrs. Muller, the cost of her accurate diagnosis was about the same as one MRI scan, wholesale. Economists did the same thing with the other remedies of premodern medicine—good food, quiet surroundings, and the little things—treating them as expensive luxuries and cutting them out of their calculations. At Laguna Honda, for instance, while most patients were on fifteen or even twenty daily medications, many of which they didn’t need, the budget for a patient’s daily meals had been pared down to seven dollars, which could supply only the basics. I began to wonder: Had economists ever applied their standard of evidence-based medicine to their own economic assumptions? Under what conditions, with which patients and which diseases was it cost-effective to trade good food, clean surroundings, and doctor time for medications, tests, and procedures? Especially ones that patients didn’t need? Although Mrs. Muller was an impressive example of Laguna Honda’s Slow Medicine, she wasn’t the only one. Almost every patient I admitted had incorrect or outmoded diagnoses and was taking medications for them, too. Medications that required regular blood tests; caused side effects that necessitated still more medications; and put the patient at risk for adverse reactions. Typically my patients came in taking fifteen to twenty-five medications, of which they ended up needing, usually, only six or seven. And medications, even the cheapest, were expensive. Adding in the cost of side effects, lab tests, adverse reactions, and the time pharmacists, doctors, and nurses needed to prepare, order, and administer them, each medication cost something like six or seven dollars a day. So Laguna Honda’s Slow Medicine, to the extent that it led to discontinuing ten or twelve unnecessary medications, was more efficient than efficient health care by at least seventy dollars per day. I

As a parent, I appreciate the value of surplus—of having enough food to feed my family, even if a lean spell comes. As a species, the production and accumulation of more than you need is a masterful strategy for survival and advancement. But it has a design flaw. There can never be too much, especially in an age when most of the surplus we accumulate is in the forms of symbols like money, distantly tied to tangible commodity value, if at all, and largely immune to spoilage. The equilibrium that economists would have us believe this system always wants to return to never arrives, because the things the system values omit the value of all other life on the planet, except to the extent it can be converted to our use. This way of living creates systems of power designed to enslave us and the entire world on which we live. The system is founded, at its essence, on control over the reproduction of others: plants, animals, and even people, as our daily debates about reproductive rights show. The only life it really values is that of the people in control.

First, price changes are not independent of each other. Research over the past few decades, by me and then by others, shows that many financial price series have a "memory," of sorts. Today does, in fact, influence tomorrow. If prices take a big leap up or down now, there is a measurably greater likelihood that they will move just as violently the next day. It is not a well-behaved, predictable pattern of the kind economists prefer-not, say, the periodic up-and-down procession from boom to bust with which textbooks trace the standard business cycle. Examples of such simple patterns, periodic correlations between prices past and present, have long been observed in markets-in, say, the seasonal fluctuations of wheat futures prices as the harvest matures, or the daily and weekly trends of foreign exchange volume as the trading day moves across the globe.

We are not against trade, we are not against free trade, but our fear is that the global market intends to annihilate our markets. We will be pushed to the cities, to eat food grown on factory farms in distant countries, food wose price depends on the daily numbers game of the first market. "This is more efficient," the economists say. "Your market, your way of life, is not efficient," they say. But we ask, "What is left when you reduce trade to numbers, wen you erase all that is human!

Yet, as another economist, Wilhelm Röpke, reminds us, many areas of life will always remain beyond the spheres of supply and demand, largely unaffected by them.18 Friendship, grace, chivalry and beauty, for example, are not governed by the principles of the free market and never will be. These areas of life are no less important both in our daily lives and in our approach to government.

JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION While history has proven Malthusianism empirically false, however, it provides the ideal foundation for justifying human oppression and tyranny. The theory holds that there isn’t enough to go around, and can never be. Therefore human aspirations and liberties must be constrained, and authorities must be empowered to enforce the constraining. During Malthus’s own time, his theory was used to justify regressive legislation directed against England’s lower classes, most notably the Poor Law Act of 1834, which forced hundreds of thousands of poor Britons into virtual slavery. 11 However, a far more horrifying example of the impact of Malthusianism was to occur a few years later, when the doctrine motivated the British government’s refusal to provide relief during the great Irish famine of 1846. In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” 12 For the last century and a half, the Irish famine has been cited by Malthusians as proof of their theory of overpopulation, so a few words are in order here to set the record straight. 13 Ireland was certainly not overpopulated in 1846. In fact, based on census data from 1841 and 1851, the Emerald Isle boasted a mere 7.5 million people in 1846, less than half of England’s 15.8 million, living on a land mass about two-thirds that of England and of similar quality. So compared to England, Ireland before the famine was if anything somewhat underpopulated. 14 Nor, as is sometimes said, was the famine caused by a foolish decision of the Irish to confine their diet to potatoes, thereby exposing themselves to starvation when a blight destroyed their only crop. In fact, in 1846 alone, at the height of the famine, Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain. 15 The Irish diet was confined to potatoes because—having had their land expropriated, having been forced to endure merciless rack-rents and taxes, and having been denied any opportunity to acquire income through manufactures or other means—tubers were the only food the Irish could afford. So when the potato crop failed, there was nothing for the Irish themselves to eat, despite the fact that throughout the famine, their homeland continued to export massive amounts of grain, butter, cheese, and meat for foreign consumption. As English reformer William Cobbett noted in his Political Register: Hundreds of thousands of living hogs, thousands upon thousands of sheep and oxen alive; thousands upon thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and butter; thousands upon thousands of sides of bacon; and thousands and thousands of hams; shiploads and boats coming daily and hourly from Ireland to feed the west of Scotland; to feed a million and a half people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire; to feed London and its vicinity; and to fill the country shops in the southern counties of England; we beheld all this, while famine raged in Ireland amongst the raisers of this very food. 16 “The population should be swept from the soil.” Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure. (Contemporary drawings from Illustrated London News.)

Indeed, if one was a cold-hearted economist, whose sole aim was to maximise GDP, or even better GDP per head, then one’s advice on the best way to respond to the coronavirus pandemic would have been to do absolutely nothing, to ignore it entirely and let it take its course. It primarily affects the elderly; the average age of death so far in the UK has been about 80; and even then the younger deaths are mainly amongst those with other severe medical problems, co-morbidity in the jargon. This is a group largely dependent on others to help with daily living, and thus stopping their carers from producing goods and other services to swell GDP per head.

Kuznets himself, however, would not have chosen this as the picture of economic progress because he was well aware of the limits of his ingenious calculations from the outset. Emphasising that national income captured only the market value of goods and services produced in an economy, he pointed out that it therefore excluded the enormous value of goods and services produced by and for households, and by society in the course of daily life. In addition, he recognised that it gave no indication of how income and consumption were actually distributed between households. And since national income is a flow measure (recording only the amount of income generated each year), Kuznets saw that it needed to be complemented by a stock measure, accounting for the wealth from which it was generated, and its distribution. Indeed, as GNP reached the height of its popularity in the early 1960s, Kuznets became one of its most outspoken critics, having warned from the start that ‘the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income’.

The key-note of ancient culture is not conflict, neither is it mastery, but conciliation and friendship. Man strives to make peace with the animals, the trees and the powers that be, or deeper still, he wants to draw them into himself and make them kin of his kin, till he is unable to draw a fast line between his own life and that of the surrounding nature. Culture is too complex — and we may add too unprofitable — a thing to be explained by man's toil for the exigencies and sweets of life, and the play of his intellect and imagination has never —until recent times perhaps — been dominated by the quest of food or clothing. The struggle for daily bread and for the maintenance of life until the morrow is generally a very keen one in early society, and it seems that the exertion calls for the exercise of all faculties and powers. But as a creature struggling for food, man is a poor economist; at any rate he is a bad hand at limiting his expenditure of energy to the needs of the day. There is more than exertion in his work; there is an overshooting force, evidence that the energy which drives him is something more complex than the mere instinct of existence. He is urged on by an irresistible impulse to take up the whole of nature in himself, to make it, by his active sympathy, something human, to make it heore.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call “negative utility.

For example, Stewart downplayed the “common” aspect of the commonsense philosophy, and implied it should really be read as “good sense”—in other words, that our commonsense judgments reflect “that prudence and discretion which are the foundation of successful conduct.” While the foundations of truth were still equally available to all human beings, it was also clear that, in that respect, some are more equal than others. A trained political economist such as Adam Smith, Stewart would argue, will have more insight into the laws of human behavior, and be better able to predict how a certain fiscal policy will compel people to act, than the people themselves. Likewise, an experimental scientist such as Joseph Black will be able to offer a more comprehensive and more precise account of our daily reality than our own untrained and unscientific understanding.

An American born in the early twentieth century witnessed transformational changes not only in transportation and schooling, but also in cooking, house cleaning, and many other areas of daily life. The changes of recent decades have been considerably smaller, even with the creation of the internet and the potential of artificial intelligence. As Gordon, the economist, explained in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, recent advances have been concentrated in a few areas of human endeavor, mostly involving communication, entertainment, and information. 'For the rest of what humans care about -- food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health and working conditions both inside and outside the home -- progress slowed down after 1970,' Gordon wrote. That has been especially true in the United States.