David Harvey Quotes

But they are also better, our competitors are better because Wal-Mart exists.

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

I'm on the Business Roundtable, the CEOs of the largest 100-odd companies in the country. Most of these people wanted very much to be the CEO of a large public company but realize that it's not exactly what they had anticipated, for lots of reasons. One is competition has gotten a lot worse, and more global.

Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'

Mergers generate substantial synergies.

In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.

Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.

Vertical intergration is an organizational response to the contracting difficulties that attend intermediate product markets where trades that are supported by transaction-specific assets are exposed to hazard.

China is littered with the wrecks of failed joint ventures. Investors are moving toward wholly-owned subsidiaries.

As corporations get larger worldwide, we have to be organizing those companies worldwide.

It is commonly our Scots way to do little business but squeeze up high prices, whereas it would much more real advantage to enlarge the business, have the profit, though small upon it, yet many smalls to make a great.

Our established businesses of hydrocarbons, energy, and petrochemicals pretty much run on their own, with their own proven leaders. This has helped me focus almost exclusively on two things: Firstly, new businesses. And secondly, institutionalising what I call the Reliance Management System.

You can get wrapped up in that megamerger mentality.

Creative tension is constructive. Its purpose is to bring out the very best in management so that senior executives can generate the greatest value for shareholders, stakeholders, and society at large.

It would be troubling if everything is determined by whether profits will be made within five to six years.

As we've often said, to the world at large, Marvel looks like a giant octopus that's out to swallow the galaxy - which, by the way, we are. But we are, in fact, a rather small and intimate company.

I've been a business person for 30 years. I started my own companies; I've invested in others.

That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.

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.

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.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

My basic strategy is to stick to my core business, and to my area of expertise. My businesses are all related - retail, shopping centers, banking, real estate and tourism development. Together they create synergy.

Capitalism is an art form.

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.