Marvin Harris Quotes

This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.

The general proposition is that the resources that will be utilized are the ones that contribute most to the overall efficiency of the production system. The third parameter has to do with our commercial world, our search for profits.

The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize.

The facility of obtaining food is beneficial in two ways to the owners of capital, it at the same time raises profits and increases the amount of consumable commodities.

One likes at the point of production to realize the maximum value, and diamond producers are no different.

Since scarcity is the basic economic problem, if it does not exist then there is no reason for my economics course. Devoting time to the study of how people use limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants and needs should help us to discover how to best utilize the resources we have at our disposal.

The law of diminishing returns is something I really believe in.

Farmers the world over, in dealing with costs, returns and risks, are calculating economic agents. Within their small, individual, allocative domain, they are fine-tuning entrepreneurs, tuning so subtly that many experts fail to recognize how efficient they are.

In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.

The law of property determines who owns something, but the market determines how it will be used.

It results from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

India needs to come out of its socialist pattern of doing things on a rationing basis.

Canada is rich in hydrocarbons and other natural resources... India's requirements and Canada's surplus are a perfect match.

If the system should not need parts now, the worker should not produce because you are just absorbing instead of producing.

Understand clearly that when a great need appears a great use appears also; when there is small need there is small use; it is obvious, then, that full use is made of all things at all times according to the necessity thereof.

It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs.

We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money - through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.

My goal is for a cooperative world at peace, using its resources to build, not to destroy.

It takes just as much to save a dead man as a living man.

Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing - self-rationing. Why is rationing necessary? Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is. . .Resources are limited but desires are not. That is the basic and defining problem of economics.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

A firm, therefore, consists of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur... As a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organising additional transactions within the firm may rise.

Japan, Europe, [and] America probably [are] better than last year [2015], not China.

I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.