Florence Scovel Shinn Quotes

Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.

The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize.

Since scarcity is the basic economic problem, if it does not exist then there is no reason for my economics course. Devoting time to the study of how people use limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants and needs should help us to discover how to best utilize the resources we have at our disposal.

The fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited

Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.

As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.

For 99 issues out of 100 we could say that at some price they are cheap enough to buy and at some price they would be so dear that they would be sold.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

It's a market economy. Apparently the demand for great coaches exceeds the supply, so of course the price of good coaches is going to be high.

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'

Microeconomics is the study of how specific choices made by businesses, consumers and governments affect the markets for different goods and services. For example, a microeconomist might examine how price changes affect sales of apples relative to oranges.

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

Every thing receives a value from its use, and the Value is raised [or lowered], according to its Quality, Quantity and Demand.

Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round

The difficulty lies, not in finding a producer, but in finding a consumer.

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.

You want supply to always be full, and you use price to basically either bring more supply on or get more supply off, or get more demand in the system or get some demand out.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

There's a harsh reality to situations where demand outstrips supply.

Understand clearly that when a great need appears a great use appears also; when there is small need there is small use; it is obvious, then, that full use is made of all things at all times according to the necessity thereof.

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful

Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing - self-rationing. Why is rationing necessary? Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is. . .Resources are limited but desires are not. That is the basic and defining problem of economics.

The dictates of economics, that "dismal science," limit the benefits of medical science

Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor. Never in this happy country or elsewhere except in the Land of Miracle, where "they did all eat and were filled"-has there been enough of anything for the people. Never since time began have all the sons and daughters of men been all warm, and all filled, and all shod and roofed.