Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle ...
Scholars and enlightened always want to define the differences between communism, socialism, fascism and other economic or political systems. It really doesn't matter to those who are subjected to those societies how someone has articulated their mis...
This is the best possible way to retain important details that you wish to remember in any unified field of knowledge, whether it be the field of economics, science, history, or any other--link them up with related items which you already know or wou...
The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As...
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all ...
Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wea...
My cat’s favorite sport is economics, and his favorite player is Ben Bernanke. But it’s just too violent for me to enjoy.
Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.
Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.
The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws—if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit, the dollar will eventually plummet—but in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, ...
Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our l...
The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of huma...
The fact that the United States has political, economic, and legal structures that do indeed create incentives to control hazards (in the workplace) is one the reasons the corporations have moved to Latin America and Asia.
The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun: a certain amount of difficulty plus a certain amount of your friends plus a certain amount of interesting strangers plus a certain amount of reward pl...
Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but...
Foreign policy is about trying to deliver for them the best possible economic benefits, the chance to travel, to study, to work, the opportunity through trade to be able to sell their goods and services and as much peace and security so they can live...
I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food...
Similar questions were posed to Allende as to me. Allende was told that he blamed everything on a conspiracy, on the economic crisis, that he blamed the high inflation that sabotaged him on the United States, and that he was frequently accusing the l...
It [economics] is the study of how people, companies, and societies allocate scarce resources. Which happens to be the same puzzle you and your spouse are perpetually trying to solve: how to spend your limited time, energy, money and libido in ways t...
If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Eit...
There are still deep-seated structural problems that threaten the economic balance in the world: Between the United States and China, for example, but also within Europe. We have taken a few steps toward taming the financial markets, but we haven't c...
