Can Iban > Can's Quotes

“Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Economic growth and technological change are accompanied by what the great economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. They replace the old with the new. New sectors attract resources away from old ones. New firms take business away from established ones. New technologies make existing skills and machines obsolete.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“A businessman who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated, or entirely taxed away will have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Whenever things were frightening, it was a good idea to measure them.”
― Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World

“Similarly, though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price of Civilization

“Sustainability, or fairness to the future, therefore involves the concept of stewardship, the idea that the living generation must be stewards of the earth’s resources for the generations that will come later. That’s a tough role to play. There is nothing natural or innate about it. We need to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met and never will. Yet those are our descendants and our fellow humanity. Alas, it’s a role that we’ve mostly ignored till now, to the increasing peril of all who will follow. The”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“I knew, as every peasant does, that land can never be truly owned. We are the keepers of the soil, the curators of trees.”
― Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, The Palace

“A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

“Turkey's true master is the peasant.”
― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“Property is theft!”
― Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Quest-ce que la propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement

“People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring – not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century