Invisible Hand Quotes

“These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another- yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil. How did it happen? Adam Smith gave us the answer two hundred years ago.”
― Milton Friedman

“Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

“Innocence has invisible hands to touch the hearts directly!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“However appealing it may be in theory, the benevolent design of Nature rarely works out in practice, requiring intellectual acrobatics on the part of those who invoke it. [Adam] Smith recognizes that a healthy economic circulatory system depends on some government interference. Complete freedom leads to monopolies, giving manufacturers outsize power over prices and politicians, which works to the detriment of the body politic. How to account for monopolies while maintaining an ideal of naturalness? Just call them unnatural. Monopolists, writes Smith, are guilty of selling their commodities "much above the natural price." To regulate them is to force them into accordance with nature—even though monopolies themselves naturally emerge in unregulated economies.”
― Alan Levinovitz, Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science

“In economy, invisible hand is a set of wealthy men.
It's the puppeteer who's in charge behind the curtain.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Sometimes an invisible hand touches your life; you plan to travel to the east but you go to the west; you plan to meet someone but you meet someone else; you plan to fly in the sky but you crawl on the ground! And this invisible hand is what makes this life mystical!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“In the earlier era, the subject of economics was geared to human needs. Now, the prime emphasis is on market behaviour and market outcomes based on choices under uncertainty and scarcity. The emphasis on choice behaviour subtly and inadvertently makes economics and most of its contents largely irrelevant for poor people.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Mankiw’s famous quote was ‘People react to incentives, all else is just explanation’. However, poor people are helpless. They do not have or face a willingness to pay choice in helpless scenarios. A literal application of definition of demand would imply that the poor people do not have demand for the essential goods. Their wants are not backed up by purchasing power. Economics does not differentiate between essential and non-essential wants. If a rich person demands golf course in a locality near a big population of homeless people, then, the golf course will be built first if he can afford it. Are poor willing to give fewer dollar votes by choice to buy the essential needs? Is it their conscious and sovereign decision?”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“The Bayesian Invisible Hand
… free-market capitalism and Bayes’ theorem come out of something of the same intellectual tradition. Adam Smith and Thomas Bayes were contemporaries, and both were educated in Scotland and were heavily influenced by the philosopher David Hume. Smith’s 'Invisible hand' might be thought of as a Bayesian process, in which prices are gradually updated in response to changes in supply and demand, eventually reaching some equilibrium. Or, Bayesian reasoning might be thought of as an 'invisible hand' wherein we gradually update and improve our beliefs as we debate our ideas, sometimes placing bets on them when we can’t agree. Both are consensus-seeking processes that take advantage of the wisdom of crowds.
It might follow, then, that markets are an especially good way to make predictions. That’s really what the stock market is: a series of predictions about the future earnings and dividends of a company. My view is that this notion is 'mostly' right 'most' of the time. I advocate the use of betting markets for forecasting economic variables like GDP, for instance. One might expect these markets to improve predictions for the simple reason that they force us to put our money where our mouth is, and create an incentive for our forecasts to be accurate.
Another viewpoint, the efficient-market hypothesis, makes this point much more forcefully: it holds that it is 'impossible' under certain conditions to outpredict markets. This view, which was the orthodoxy in economics departments for several decades, has become unpopular given the recent bubbles and busts in the market, some of which seemed predictable after the fact. But, the theory is more robust than you might think.
And yet, a central premise of this book is that we must accept the fallibility of our judgment if we want to come to more accurate predictions. To the extent that markets are reflections of our collective judgment, they are fallible too. In fact, a market that makes perfect predictions is a logical impossibility.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“The brilliance of this system (creating entire ecosystems of products) is that it often feels entirely organic, like a subliminal hum that vibrates just below the threshold of conscious awareness. Gradually and imperceptibly, our understanding of identity has been subtly rewritten by the invisible hand of the marketplace.
Every scroll and click is another lesson in this new language of identity, where being has
been replaced by buying. The most innocuous consequence would be simply purchasing a
pile of rubbish you don’t actually need. But the effects of these new market-driven social
norms can reach beyond your wallet, burrowing deep into your sense of self.”
― Rachel Barr, How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend: A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life