Economic Theory Quotes

“Still, in 1877, Engels wanted to protect us from false socialism. Still then, in Anti-Dühring, he wrote that not any nationalization is socialist, because in the contrary case both Bismarck and Napoleon would have to be arranged among the founders of socialism.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“This book was under arrest, along with its author. This event occurred on March 27, 1986. During that time, the totalitarian system in East Europe was called socialism and even by the scientific nonsense and absurd names of Communism and Communist system. In this system, the official ideology was allegedly Marxism, but really it could not endure any Marxist criticism. Since this “socialist” system was afraid of the weapon of criticism, it applied criticism of the weapon against its own citizens, as Marx would have said.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“And there is nothing wastes so rapidly as liberality, for even whilst you exercise it you lose the power to do so, and so become either poor or despised, or else - in avoiding poverty - rapacious and hated. And a leader should guard himself, above all things, against being despised and hated; and liberality leads you to both. Therefore it is wiser to have a reputation for austerity which brings reproach without hatred, than to be compelled through seeking a reputation for liberality to incur a name for rapacity which begets reproach with hatred.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation—the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society.”
― Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

“...whatever their intentions, the topic addressed by Arrow and Debreu was the coherence of economic theory, not the coordination of economic activities.”
― Brian J. Loasby

“Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“Many people have played with the 4P’s and even with the 4C’s, tried to put their own particular stamp on it, but at the risk of sounding arrogant, no variation I’ve ever seen has expressed the outside-in concept as simply and elegantly as the original 4C’s formulation.”
― Robert F. Lauterborn

“In game theory, as in applications of other technologies that use RPT [Revealed Preference Theory], the purpose of the machinery is to tell us what happens when patterns of behavior instantiate some particular strategic vector, payoff matrix, and distribution of information—for example, a PD [Prisoner's Dilemma]—that we’re empirically motivated to regard as a correct model of a target situation. The motivational history that produced this vector in a given case is irrelevant to which game is instantiated, or to the location of its equilibrium or equilibria. As Binmore (1994, pp. 95–256) emphasizes at length, if, in the case of any putative PD, there is any available story that would rationalize cooperation by either player, then it follows as a matter of logic that the modeler has assigned at least one of them the wrong utility function (or has mistakenly assumed perfect information, or has failed to detect a commitment action) and so made a mistake in taking their game as an instance of the (one-shot) PD. Perhaps she has not observed enough of their behavior to have inferred an accurate model of the agents they instantiate. The game theorist’s solution algorithms, in themselves, are not empirical hypotheses about anything. Applications of them will be only as good, for purposes of either normative strategic advice or empirical explanation, as the empirical model of the players constructed from the intentional stance is accurate. It is a much-cited fact from the experimental economics literature that when people are brought into laboratories and set into situations contrived to induce PDs, substantial numbers cooperate. What follows from this, by proper use of RPT, not in discredit of it, is that the experimental setup has failed to induce a PD after all. The players’ behavior indicates that their preferences have been misrepresented in the specification of their game as a PD. A game is a mathematical representation of a situation, and the operation of solving a game is an exercise in deductive reasoning. Like any deductive argument, it adds no new empirical information not already contained in the premises. However, it can be of explanatory value in revealing structural relations among facts that we otherwise might not have noticed.”
― Don Ross

“Anyone who seeks to penetrate beneath the surface of complex economic events requires a frame of reference within which the flux of economic life can be reduced to manageable proportions. Only with the aid of such an organizing framework can the world we observe be made intelligible.”
― William J. Barber, A History of Economic Thought

“[No] single system of economic ideas can be fully satisfying for all purposes.”
― William J. Barber, A History of Economic Thought

“The imperfect markets of the real economy display so much variation that there will probably remain a need for a relatively large arsenal of theoretical models to capture it.”
― Agnar Sandmo, Economics Evolving: A History of Economic Thought

“Indeed, on a high plane of generality there is nothing very much for
economic theory to say to the planner, except: Do not listen to those
who say you want this rather than that — agriculture, not industry;
exports, not home production; light industry, not heavy. You always want
both. [p. 113]”
― Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy

“what, for instance, were you telling me about charity? And yet the gratification derived from giving charity is an arrogant and immoral tell nothing gratification, the gratification a rich man takes in his riches, his power, and the comparison he makes between his importance and the importance of a poor man. Charity corrupts both the one who gives it and the one who receives it, and furthermore, it doesn't achieve its goal, because it only intensifies poverty. Lazy people who don't want to work throng around people who give, like gamblers around the gambling table, hoping to win. And meanwhile, the pitiful coins that are tossed their way Such trivial are insufficient for even a hundredth of what they need. Have you given away much in your lifetime? Perhaps eighty kopecks, no more, if you stop and think about it. Just try to remember the last time you gave something; it would be a good two years go, and perhaps four. You're just making a lot of noise and impeding the cause. In today's society charity should definitely be prohibited by law. In the new social order there will be no such thing as poor people.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons