Joan Robinson Quotes

A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures.

The key thing about wealth in a capitalist economy is that it reproduces itself and usually earns a positive net return.

Probably nobody in America has come close to setting up as many jobs for people with his business as Donald Trump has.

Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

It's not hard to generate a paper fortune in a huge inflation. All you have to do is own the most important economic assets: energy, communication, and transportation.

It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

I'm not calling for redistributing wealth; I'm calling for reinvigorating our stuck energy sector, so some new entrepreneurs can create some new wealth.

As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.

Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.

As the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital.

Take care to be an economist in prosperity. There is no fear of your being one in adversity.

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.

Nothing contributes so much to the prosperity and happiness of a country as high profits.

Americans want action for their money. They are fascinated by its self- reproducing qualities if it's put to work. Gold- hoarding goes against the American grain; it fits in better with European pessimism than with America's traditional optimism.

If you believe that the developing world deserves the same standards of living that we do in the developed world, then to achieve that, they need resources. They need the metals and the minerals to build the industries and the buildings and so forth, and the energy.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.