Thomas Malthus Quotes

Supply can create its own demand.

Supply creates its own demand

It has been shown that, in contrast to everything which classical national economy has hitherto taught, not the producer but the consumer is the ruling factor in economic life.

The first, or theoretic branch, that which explains the nature, production, and distribution of wealth, will be found to rest on a very few general propositions, which are the result of observation, or consciousness.

Want and effective demand are not the same thing. If they were, the poorest nations would be the ones to display the most vigorous demand.

Falling prices through increased production is a wonderful long-run tendency of untrammeled capitalism.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

Economists largely confine themselves to three key factors - capital, labor and productivity - when explaining how and why a country grows.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

People confuse economists and economic policy.

If then the prosperity of the commercial classes, will most certainly lead to accumulation of capital, and the encouragement of productive industry; these can by no means be so surely obtained as by a fall in the price of corn.

I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.

The idea that free trade encourages global economic growth by enhancing productivity is taken as an article of faith by the three major schools of international political economy: liberalism, Marxism, and mercantilism

We have learned that the various schools of [economic] thought all have important elements of truth in them. But none of them is by itself a sufficient explanation of what goes on in the economy.

What we may call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

If people don't want it, they won't have it.

Capital is a result of labor.

I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college.

Supply and demand don’t work on a legislative schedule.

Neither capital can do without labor, nor labor without capital.

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order.

95% of economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.

The opinions that the price of commodities depends solely on the proportion of supply and demand, or demand to supply, has become almost an axiom in political economy, and has been the source of much error.