
“The moral aspect of oil nationalization is more important than its economic aspect.”
Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 3, Finance Basics, p. 59
“The moral aspect of oil nationalization is more important than its economic aspect.”
Source: The rise of the western world, 1973, p. vii, Preface
“Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists.”
Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 3, More trade, fewer ideologies, p. 83
Context: The importance of international trade for economic development cannot be overemphasized. But free trade is not the best path to economic development. Trade helps economic development only when the country employs a mixture of protection and open trade, constantly adjusting it according to its changing needs and capabilities. Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists.
Preface (1997), p. ix.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982
Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)
“Economics deals with the behavior of commodities rather than with the behavior of men.”
Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, New York: Truman Talley Books, E.P. Dutton, 1986, p. 21.
1980s
1957, p. 119
Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 11
Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 69
Context: There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics. How many dreary papers have I had to referee in which the author is looking for something that corresponds to entropy or to one or another form of energy. Nonsensical laws, such as the law of conservation of purchasing power, represent spurious social science imitations of the important physical law of the conservation of energy; and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg Principle of indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.