Economics Quotes

Nobody notices a dollar a day disappearing from their payroll, but think of the impact of a thousand people doing that.

The issue you're worried about, the one you're likely spending most of your time discussing, isn't the only problem in the world. We tend to lose sight of this because we often perceive our immediate tasks as the most crucial. Given the multitude of issues we need to address, the goal shouldn't be to resolve a single problem in an exhaustive and expensive way. Instead, we should aim to find an effective, low-cost strategy that addresses most of the problem, ensuring we preserve resources for other tasks.

We are living in a world where the top 1% of the world's population own more of our planet's wealth than the bottom 95% combined. We live in a world where billions exist in abject poverty without access to the basic food, water, shelter which the rest of us take for granted.

We have to leave behind the myth that our economies are actually fit for the present that we understand, and the vision of the future we want to create. We need to redesign economics for our times.

There is an honest trade-off between labour market protection and learning. If you have an extremely static labour market—like the high protection laws in France or Spain—you get stability, but you sacrifice learning. You pay a 'learning cost' for that 'stability dividend.'

In rich countries, 'innovation' often means finding a better way of doing things. But in developing countries, it can mean finding a way to do things at all.

It's clear to me that small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years… particularly through the recession.

The Chinese government has realised that to fuel capitalism, an atheistic, communistic, civil-religion will never propel growth. They realise that their system, frankly, will not support the growth or creativity to create the new technologies and companies that are necessary.

Countries that criminalise LGBT+ people are losing tourist revenue because LGBT+ tourists and their straight friends and families won't go to such countries. There is also a very significant brain-drain from countries that victimise LGBT+ people.

Part of the reason I'm arguing the time is right is because unlike back in the 60s when these ideas about complexity economics were first floated by people like Herbert Simon, we now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better, we know a lot more about how to program models like this.

We are, in the early days of the 21st century, talking about the death of the living world as an environmental externality. That alone should be an alarm-bell that our framework doesn't serve our time.

what turns a developing into a developed nation is not the amount of foreign aid it attracts, but how the money is spent.