There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behaviour of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world. Paul Dirac
But Churchill was not a splendid Chancellor. He had one great decision in front of him and he got it wrong. In March 1925 he summoned four economists to dine at the Treasury to thrash out the burning economic issue of the day – the Gold Standard ... Globalisation with Britain at the centre ... The radical young economist John Maynard Keynes thought that going back to gold would devastate Britain’s already weakened industry. By instinct Churchill was also against ... And hell it was. The return to the Gold Standard made British exports more expensive, including coal ... An industrial dispute was coming to the boil. The mine owners stood firm. Then at one minute to midnight on the third of May 1926 the TUC called a general strike. Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
Why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won’t lose money? Reds 1981 starring Warren Beatty & Diane Keaton & Jack Nicholson & Gene Hackman & Edward Herrmann & Jerzy Kosinski & Paul Sorvino & Maureen Stapleton & Nicolas Coster & William Daniels & E Emmet Walsh & Ian Wolfe & Bessie Love et al, director Warren Beatty, him to her
What does a capitalist do? ... What does he make besides money? ... The workers do all the work, don’t they? Well what if they got organised? ibid. Reed
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. Karl Marx
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves. Karl Marx
We have come to recognize that there are potential desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. A government which lacks authority will have little ability short of cataclysmic crisis to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary. Samuel P Huntingdon, The Crisis of Democracy
In rich countries like Britain globalisation is well advanced. The disastrous selling off of the railways and the creeping privatisation of everything, from healthcare to air traffic control – the financial pages proclaim a booming economy, yet one in five British children grows up in poverty. There are almost ten million Britons living in poverty ... All over the world millions of ordinary people are asking why they have no say in decisions that bring hardship to their lives ... Why should we accept a system of winners and losers? John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, ITV 2001
If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion. George Bernard Shaw
No interference. Marquis d’Argenson, Rene Louis d’Argenson, 1694-1757
History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them. B R Ambedkar
The ‘rational expectations’ school holds that agents do not know the future, but they formulate their expectations on the basis of a satisfactory knowledge (i.e. a theory) of how the economy functions. If we add propositions to the effect that each agent’s decisions are based on its maintained theory of system behavior, that general equilibrium theory is an apt representation of the world, and that those whose behavior is consistent with this apt theory will be successful, then an equilibrium and equilibrating view of the economy emerges ... If the economy does not conform to the general equilibrium theory, if it is endogenously unstable, and if units behave accordingly, then rational expectations will exacerbate instability. Hyman P Minsky, Stabilizing the Unstable Economy
Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury Group – a circle of avant-garde intellectuals that included Russell and the novelist Virginia Woolf. Even amongst the high company his genius stood out. Great Thinkers in Their Own Words 2/3: The Grand Experiment, BBC 2011
Like Russell, Keynes was deeply affected by the First World War as he witnessed the tragic fate of the men who returned from the trenches. The government had promised a land fit for heroes. But in the twenties and thirties Keynes could only see poverty and above all unemployment. In 1936 Keynes published his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which overturned all previous economic thinking. It argued governments should spend more not less during hard times to stimulate the economy. ibid.
If the state could spend on armaments in the wartime, why couldn’t it spend money keeping people out of poverty in peacetime? ibid.
And when the day of peace came Keynes’s economic policies were finally put into action. ibid.
Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge. He produced a government report infused with Victorian morality, proposing a social security scheme to combat want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The plan was controversial. ibid.
The new Jerusalem had finally come. The ideas of Keynes and Beveridge triumphed after the war. Britain had close to full employment. A National Health Service. Free schooling for all. The old were given pensions and slums were cleared for new housing. ibid.
Russia’s economy became a giant Petri-dish of Chicago-school market economics, but among the cultures they were busy cultivating was a Frankenstein that slipped out through the door of their laboratory almost unnoticed ... The coupling of a privatised foreign-trade mechanism with the retention of rock-bottom subsidized commodity prices gave birth within months to the entirely new species of robber-baron – the Russian oligarch. Misha Glenny, McMafia
The process of enrichment was quite simply the grandest larceny in history and stands no historical comparison ... the biggest single flight of capital the world has ever seen. ibid.
The Soviet bureaucrats who still administered the state did not understand how to monitor, regulate or adjudicate the principles of commercial exchange. ibid.
Despite the murders and the shoot-outs, the Russian mob actually ensured a degree of stability during the economic transition. ibid.
The rape of Russia’s assets enjoys pride of place in the boom of the global shadow economy during the 1990s. Not only did the oligarchs succeed in turning Russia upside down, but their actions had a huge economic and social impact on countries throughout Western Europe. ibid.
Throughout the world it is the most adventurous wholesale traders and risk-takers in the licit economy who are most closely associated with criminality in popular perception. Being at the heart of the global economy, trade is a key component in the world of organised crime. ibid.
The world economy has never experienced a change comparable to the release of 1.25 billion people’s energy that followed China’s renewed reforms in 1991. ibid.
The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour [von Neumann and Morgenstern] was in every way a revolutionary book. In line with Morgenstern’s agenda the book was a ‘blistering attack’ on the prevailing paradigm in economics and Olympian Keynesian perspective, in which individual incentives and individual behaviour were often subsumed, as well as an attempt to ground the theory in individual psychology. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
Nash wrote his first paper, one of the great classics of modern economics, during his second term in Princeton. The Bargaining Problem is a remarkably down-to-earth work for a mathematician, especially a young mathematician ... behaviour that economics had long considered part of human psychology, and therefore beyond the reach of economic reasoning, was, in fact, amenable to systematic analysis. ibid.
Efficiency, sustainability and preservation are the enemies of our economic system. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, 2011
The economic paradigm we live in now is a Ponzi scheme. ibid.
Two things are inevitable: inflation and bankruptcy. ibid.
What are we, fucking stupid? ibid.