Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it's developed and passed on.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.

I think I'm actually quite a materialistic person, I value what it takes to make a car or build a nice house. Money does change things, but how it changes people depends on how they react to it.

It is really want, rather than need, that drives the process of technological evolution.

There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore.

If in 1989 I said, 'I have an idea: Bottle water and sell it. And charge more than a beer,' they would have chased me around with a giant butterfly net. The same with paying to watch a television station.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

Because of the demand for luxury articles, they become customary, and thus come to be necessities

Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

One thing I would say about the Indian consumer is that as much change and as much technology, innovation that you offer to the Indian consumer, the Indian consumer is very receptive and actually keep expecting more, and we have had that great experience.

I love reading fashion magazines, buying handbags, the usual things - but when you're in the moment and focusing on setting up the car, how you look is so irrelevant.

Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."

What I'm doing is obeying the law of diffusion of innovations.

A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.

Wherever desirable superfluities are imported, industry is excited, and thereby plenty is produced. Were only necessaries permitted to be purchased, men would work no more than was necessary for that purpose.

Luxury, so far as it reaches the people, will do good to the race of people; it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury; for, as I said before; it can reach but a very few.

Thirty or forty proprietors, with incomes answering to between one thousand and five thousand a year, would create a much more effectual demand for the necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries of life, than a single proprietor possessing a hundred thousand a year.

All technological breakthroughs start with a small "elite". Think about cellphones, for example. Now just about everyone has one. The same will happen to innovations such as Twitter.

In spite of the poor economy, almost 70 percent of Americans occasionally splurge on luxury items -- like a blanket on a plane, or a peanut.

Fashion is capitalism's favourite child.

Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

We grew up in a very material-lacking socialist society, but today China is a capitalist society. It's very materialistic. It's full of desire and luxury goods.

We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we're shopper-borrowers.