William Petty Quotes

It is not possible to spend on one thing and then not have consequences on something else.

Throwing money after security turns out to be a classic example of the law of diminishing marginal utility.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

You have to spend a lot of money to build strong sides.

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

Time is money, but also money is money.

I'm not interested in wasting money on a project.

Time is a resource, much like money or autonomy, which can be invaluable or can be squandered.

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.

The thing that we at MIT must understand is the amount of real damage that is being done to us in the fine structure of how research funds are expended.

What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.

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.

True economy means the wisest expenditure of what we have, everything considered, looking at it from the broadest standpoint. It is not a good thing to save a nickel at the expenditure of twenty-five cents' worth of time.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Cost effectiveness and effectiveness are not always the same thing in government.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'

I think if you have a big enough wallet you can solve anything but the key is to solve it with the least amount of expenditure.

It's one thing to get the money apportioned in the budget; the other is to utilise it completely.

When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers.

If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources.

The free lunch has still to be invented.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.