Economy Quotes

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* If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century -- and the economy -- around. -- Bella Abzug

Economic development, more than any single issue, is the battle line between two competing world views. Tribal people's fundamental value was sustainability, and they conducted their livelihoods in ways that sustained resources and limited inequalities in their society. What made traditional economies so radically different and so very fundamentally dangerous to Western economies were the traditional principles of prosperity of Creation versus scarcity of resources, of sharing and distribution versus accumulation and greed, of kinship usage rights versus individual exclusive ownership rights, and of sustainability versus growth. -- Rebecca Adamson

In the field of economic development, economists like to think Western economics is value-neutral, but in truth, it is not. Success is defined according to production units or monetary worth. The contrast with successful indigenous development is stark. For example, since they understand the environment to be a living being, the Northern Cheyenne have opposed coal strip mining on their reservation because it kills the water beings. There are no cost measurements of pollution, production, or other elements that can capture this kind of impact. There is an emerging recognition of the need for a spiritual base, not only in our individual lives, but also in our work and in our communities.
-- Rebecca Adamson

The global economy is a runaway train that is causing more and more suffering in the world. The current 'profit before people' system is causing the gap between the very rich and the very poor to grow larger each year. In order to transform the global economy into a true global community, we need to create a Better World Economy - an economic system that gives value to other commodities besides money. Then we can create more sustainable local, national and global communities. -- Robert Alan

For the economy I want workers and consumers to have control over their own economic lives. I want everyone to have fair conditions that fully utilize their talents and potentials. I want incomes that accord with the efforts people expend in their labors. I want what is produced, by whom, under what conditions, and with who consuming the result--all determined in accord with enhancing human well-being and development and all decided by the people involved and affected. I want an end to hierarchies of power and wealth and to class division with most actors subordinated to an elite few. To accomplish all these ends I favor the institutions of participatory economics -- worker and consumer councils, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. If someone should demonstrate that those institutions somehow fail to accomplish necessary economic functions or have social or personal by-products that outweigh their benefits -- I would simply return to the drawing board. Exploitation, alienation, poverty, disempowerment, fragmenting and debilitating labor, production for the profit of a few -- much less harsh homelessness, starvation, and degradation -- are not like gravity. They arise from institutional relations established by human beings. New institutions, also established by human beings, can generate other vastly superior outcomes. Defining and working to attain those new institutions ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert

The purpose of economic theory is to make those who are comfortable FEEL comfortable.
-- Lord Balogh

I think it must be conceded that it is possible to create a society in which the response to market failure is not a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation of individual efforts to stay ahead by making and spending yet more money. Does the public health service have long waiting lists and inadequate facilities? Buy private insurance. Has public transport broken down? Buy a car for each member of the family above driving age. Has the countryside been built over or the footpaths eradicated? Buy some elaborate exercise machinery and work out at home. Is air pollution intolerable? Buy an air-filtering unit and stay indoors. Is what comes out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full of carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on. We know it can all happen because it has: I have been doing little more than describing Southern California. Now it is worth noticing two things about the private substitutes that I have described. The first is that in the aggregate they are probably much more expensive than would be the implementation of the appropriate public policy. The second is that they are extremely poor replacements for the missing outcomes of good public policy. Nevertheless, it is plain that the members of a society can become so alienated from one another, so mistrustful of any form of collective action, that they prefer to go it alone.
-- Brian Barry

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization -- Edward Bellamy

"People would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions and aspirations derive from the type of economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion it creates, and question the sense and purpose of a society where control of a large portion of life is abdicated under contract in the labour market, and where immense creativity and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive tasks in order to earn a wage."
-- Tony Benn

"The nature of the economic system should be a matter for public choice, and free market capitalism should not be accepted without any discussion of the rich variety of alternatives ... Unlike civil laws, economic laws are imposed on people with all the authority of immutable laws of nature. But the economy is created by people, supported by government intervention, regulation, statute and subsidy, and implemented in such a way that it gives substantial wealth and power to a privileged few, while the majority face a life of relentless work, stress and periodic financial insecurity."
-- Tony Benn

It is no longer a single historical world--as it has been from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture of commodities, are living our crisis; the rest of the world are living theirs. Our crisis is that we no longer believe in a future. Their crisis is us. The most we want is to hang on to what we've got. They want the means to live. That is why our principal preoccupations have become private and our public discourse is compounded of spite. The historical and cultural space for public speech, for public hopes and action, has been dismantled. We live and have our being today in private coverts.
-- John Berger

Why are we so zealous, then, about the private sector? We persist in designating a large part of the economy as private so that we can disavow public responsibility for its evils and claim individual merit for its blessings. As a civic body, we are reluctant to countenance and cure the deprivations of the poor, the damage to the environment, and the trivialization of culture that are the depressing concomitants of our advanced industrial economy. At the same time applauding the rich and powerful who claim their privileges as the fruits of their rugged and individual efforts, we sanction our positions and our aspirations
-- Albert Borgmann

Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment. -- Kenneth Boulding * With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology's Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy's Unecologic. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

When everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing.
-- David Byrne

"If the corporations have their way, the Earth will be killed, and that's in your lifetime. It's revolting to me that students are being trained to work in corporations. It's obscene to me that the corporations are running the world. We've got to get cross. Anger is an appropriate emotion." -- Helen Caldicott

We have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace, where human attributes come with a price tag.
-- Linda Chavez

Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives? -- Noam Chomsky

The real world of American society is one which it is very misleading to call simply a democracy. Of course, it is in a sense a democracy, but it is one in which there are enormous inequities in the distribution of power and force. For example, the entire commercial and industrial system is in principle excluded from the democratic process, including everything that goes on within it
-- Noam Chomsky

Representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly of power centralized in the State, and secondly -and critically - because representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one?s productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.
-- Noam Chomsky

All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell.
-- Noam Chomsky

In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.
-- Confucius

The superior person understands rightness; the inferior person understands profit
-- Confucius

Economy Quotes

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ECONOMY
HERO PIX

Bella Abzug | John Dewey | Michael Lerner

See Also Quotes on
Globalization | Labor | End Poverty | Fair Trade

Workers Day - May 1
Fair Trade Day - 2nd Sat in May
End Poverty Day - October 17
Buy Nothing Day - 4th Fri in November