418 quotes found
“Although the view that, once discovered, ideas can be imitated for free by anybody is pervasive, it is far from the truth. While it may occasionally be the case that an idea is acquired at no costi...”
“While there are certainly informational spillovers as ideas move from person to person, it is hard to see why in most instances they are not priced. Although it is possible to imagine examples such...”
“History, practical experience, common sense and economic theory all agree: economic competition is probably one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with. When people compete to achieve the sa...”
“We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers...”
“Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.”
“Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can't deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.”
“The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply...”
“That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They requ...”
“You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long)”
“When I was an undergraduate studying economics under Professor Arthur Smithies of Harvard, he asked me in class one day what policy I favored on a particular issue of the times. Since I had strong ...”
“In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete...Just as the legendary i...”
“It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase...”
“The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.”
“What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. this is so much the case that I do not know whether ...”
“Employing yourself costs less than employing someone else but more than working. The marginal cost/revenue of education.”
“they'll reregulate within ten years. There'll be a string of crashes, and they'll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does th...”
“Because we bump into reinforcing loops so often, it is handy to know this shortcut: The time it takes for an exponentially growing stock to double in size, the doubling time, equals approximately 7...”
“*THE COMMONS, which are creative - so unleash their potential*The commons are shareable resources of society or nature that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relyi...”
“Broadly speaking, there are only two ways human beings can make an income: ...by contributing to society or they can extract an income from society”
“Due to its inherently limited supply for each location, land obtains its value from the natural, social, and cultural wealth that exists in its surrounding environment.”
