Basic Economics 101. It's the most complicated simple subject there is.
If you say "the economy," you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production.
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.
In the absence of any short term in common use to represent all desirable things, or things that satisfy human wants, we may use the term Goods for that purpose.
A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies.
Most economists use 'fixed' and 'pegged' as interchangeable or nearly interchangeable terms for exchange rates.
Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and, above all, boring. The same is true of 'management science.'
Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.
Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students.
I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods.
[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems.
Most of the expressions we use in economics are relative terms. All of us are votaries of free trade.
I'm not currently into economic textbooks, but my grandchildren tell me that the book by Gregory Mankiw, former head of the white house council of economic advisers is a model of intelligence and clarity. Why not try that one.
95 percent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 percent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.
… competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.
Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.
And I know this happens because I took economics, and I'd explain it to ya, but I flunked that course. Not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing you can learn out of one bloodshot eye.
I tell my micro students everything I teach them is important, but the truth is that some things are more useful than others, and opportunity cost is near the top.
I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.
I don't even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don't know what a credit bubble means. I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning.
'Fun money' is another thing that makes no sense to traditional economists. Because there's just money; there's no 'fun money.' It's all supposed to be the same.
