economic perspective Quotes

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

I don't even look at gold as gold anymore. Gold is just another piece of paper.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics - the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.

Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.

Oprah is rich; Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out of a window and slit his throat on the way down saying, 'I can't even put gas in my plane!'

Let me put it bluntly: anyone who says that money isn't important doesn't have any! Rich people understand the importance of money and the place it has in our society. On the other hand, poor people validate their financial ineptitude by using irrelevant comparisons. They'll argue, "Well, money isn't important as love." Now, is that comparison dumb or what? What's more important, your arm or your leg? Maybe they're both important.

I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction.

There are 100 Billion starts in the galaxy. That used to be an astronomical number. It's less than the national deficit. Now we should calm them economical numbers.

Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.

What outsourcing causes - what it's caused by, rather. I understand, for instance, how to read a balance sheet. I happen to believe that having been in the private sector for twenty-five years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created - that someone who's never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn't understand.

Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

Measuring the oil industry in dollars gives you a very warped view. Pick a sound currency such as Swiss francs or gold grams and look at the oil business through that lens.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

I think in part the reason is that seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are.

In my state [ Maryland] we've lost jobs to NAFTA, we did not gain jobs from NAFTA. But I think it's very difficult when your state is right up against the northern border, you do see things differently.

I'm a socialist. I'm amazed at how the spirit of socialism is alive and well in New York. I had always thought I wouldn't want to be here without a lot of money, but I was wrong about that.

Money is neither a material to work upon nor a tool to work with.

The last thing that people want to hear is the plain simple fact that the rich think differently [about money] than the poor ... They have what I call a wealthy mindset.

If the only tool we use to analyse what's valuable is a price tag, then those things that don't have price tags begin to look like they have no value.

I don't do much recording anymore, but before I really stopped, I was glad to get five, five cent a record. That's why when I see people today and they complain about what they get, and I picked cotton for $2.50 a day.