Charles Handy Quotes

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

Markets are the best way to allocate resources.

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.

But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.

Market design is about understanding the details of markets in sufficient detail so that we can help fix them when they are broken.

My politics are: I'm a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I'm pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It's good for everybody; it's not red or blue.

An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention.

Whoever claims that economic competition represents "survival of the fittest" in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics…. The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

I want the market to work if it can, and most of the time it will, but not without some pain.

Markets are, in many settings, self-organizing and 'efficient' in terms of maximizing the welfare of both buyers and sellers.

The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.

Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process.

Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

The self-regulating mechanism of the market place cannot always be depended upon to produce adequate results in scientific research.

The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.

The much-maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve. [...] Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them.

The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer.

People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.

There exists no third principle for the organisation of the economics process which can be rationally chosen to achieve any desirable ends, in addition to either a functioning market in which nobody can conclusively determine how well-off particular groups or individuals will be, or a central direction where a group organised for power determines it.

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.

The market is the best garden.

Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.

Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.

One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.

The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.