William Vickrey Quotes

Most economic fallacies derive … from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.

We have a government that boasts about free education. Those of us who have scratched below the surface know it is costing us by denying opportunities for others to attend college or university.

As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.

When you think of all the conflicts we have - whether those conflicts are local, whether they are regional or global - these conflicts are often over the management, the distribution of resources. If these resources are very valuable, if these resources are scarce, if these resources are degraded, there is going to be competition.

Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.

In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'

Many in local government will ask why should only a few areas have the freedoms and benefits of Enterprise Zone status while the majority lose out?

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

The lens of contract focuses predominantly on gains from trade whereas orthodoxy is focused on resource allocation.

I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.

You wouldn't think there was a need for a Coase Theorem, really.

Economics is built on the assumption of scarcity. Therefore, it deals with values and calculations. It cannot seek the good that fits a specific person within a given human condition. Where scarcity rules, ethics is reduced to numbers and utility. Further, the person engaged in the manipulation of mathematical formulas loses his or her ear for ethical nuance; one becomes morally deaf.

Very few governments have the money to meet the needs of their people….The private sector has most of the resources.

With shrinking resources, interest groups are pitted against each other.

The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas reserves where there are democratic governments.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

My family is just like most other families - we rise and fall on good and bad government policy. Politics affects us all.

The danger facing us comes not from lack of resources, but from people who insist that we have run out of resources. If you embrace their idea of a world where there is only so much to go around, then you are endorsing a program of genocide and a war of all against all.

To start with, anybody who would like the world to be a better place should be able to think like an economist.

What we are beginning to witness is a whole new set of rules for economics, based on rationing resources.

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

I spend about fifteen minutes a year on economic analysis.