Richard Epstein Quotes

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.

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.

In business, real jobs profitably produce goods and services that people value more highly than their alternatives. Subsidizing inefficient jobs is costly, wastes resources, and weakens our economy.

Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

Price creates incentive, and energy will be developed if there's demand for it at the price you can develop it.

Supply always comes on the heels of demand.

The general principles of political economy teach us to buy all our commodities where we can have them the cheapest; and perhaps there is no general rule in the whole compass of the science to which fewer justifiable exceptions can be found in practice

The dictates of economics, that "dismal science," limit the benefits of medical science

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

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

We might as well reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by demand or supply.

Markets are the best way to allocate resources.

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.

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.

Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.

Whether manufactured by black, white, brown or yellow hands, a widget remains a widget – and it will be bought anywhere if the price and quality are right. The market is a more powerful and more reliable liberating force than government can ever be.

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

The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists.

Free markets are amazing.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it's possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

Markets are really people.