Misallocated Resources Quotes

I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.

To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.

The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.

Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes - that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it's... all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There's billions spent on rockets up there, and there's millions starving down here. It don't make sense to me.

The social rights of children must be recognized so that a world suited to their needs may be constructed for them. The greatest crime that society commits is that of wasting the money which it should use for children on things that will destroy them and society itself as well.

Making products for $17 an hour that we could have purchased for 75 cents an hour wastes resources that we could have used elsewhere.

Modern capitalism is masterful at producing services people don't need and in large part probably don't want. It is brilliant at convincing people that they do need and want them. But it has difficulty turning itself to the production of those services which people really do need. Not only that, it often spends an enormous amount of time and effort convincing people that those services are either unrealistic, marginal or counterproductive.

Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for ... artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountians of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

Brazil is strewn with ruins of projects - refineries, power plants - begun but never finished. Most of this investment never landed in places or industries that really meshed with the trajectory of the global economy. This wasn't state-of-the art industrial policy. The projects seemed curiously nostalgic.

You can spend all the money in the world. If you've got a bad product, it doesn't matter.

We've seen the government give out subsidies to companies, those companies turn around and use it for executive bonuses.

In America, we are just moving the chairs around and spending huge amounts of money rather than having them go in making people's lives better.

The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management's reluctance to reward the shareholders.