Economics

"We have to remember we're in a global economy. The purpose of fiscal stimulus is not simply to sustain activity in our national economies, but to help the global economy as well, and that's why it's so critical that measures in those packages avoid anything that smacks of protectionism."

"In short, I believe in an America that is on the march - an America respected by all nations, friends and foes alike - an America that is moving, doing, working, trying - a strong America in a world of peace. That peace must be based on world law and world order, on the mutual respect of all nations for the rights and powers of others and on a world economy in which no nation lacks the ability to provide a decent standard of living for all of its people. But we cannot have such a world, and we cannot have such a peace, unless the United States has the vitality and the inspiration and the strength. If we continue to stand still, if we continue to lie at anchor, if we continue to sit on dead center, if we content ourselves with the easy life and the rosy assurances, then the gates will soon be open to a lean and hungry enemy."

"To take what might seem an "objective", macro-economic approach to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the behavior of early European explorers, merchants, and conquerors as if they were simply rational responses to opportunities—as if this were just what anyone would have done in the same situation. This is what the use of equations so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quantities of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that some will enslave them."

"We know that to compete for the jobs of the 21st century and thrive in a global economy, we need a growing, skilled and educated workforce, particularly in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math."

"The world economy diffuses rather than concentrates wealth."

"Structuralism argues that a liberal capitalist world economy tends to preserve or actually increase inequalities between developed and less developed economies."

"And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics."

"Does the functioning of the world economy tend to concentrate wealth and power, or does it tend to diffuse it?"

"There are reasons to believe that the world economy is once again in the throes of a phase change. There are also reasons to believe that this phase change, like the preceding ones, will involve a paradigmatic shift in the organization of people around their work. If this is so, then our perceptions of what has happened in the past decade or more in the world of work may need to be modified; likewise our perceptions of where those changes are leading us"

"Investors should be cautiously positioned as the global economy and markets face major uncertainties. The downgrade will be a further headwind to growth and job creation in the U.S."

"The world economy is not yet a community--not even an economic community...Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again."

"I would remind you that in the United States we had an increasing gap between the rich and the poor for about 20 years, as we moved into this new economic phase. The same thing happened when we changed from being an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. In the last 2 or 3 years, we started to see the gap close again. And the answer is not to run away from globalization. The answer is to make change our friend. The answer is to have broad access to information and information technology, to have broad-based systems of education and health care and family supports in every country, and to continue to try to shape the global economy."

"Geographically, the global economy is now multi-polar, as new centres of production have emerged in parts of what had been, historically, the periphery of the world economy. The world is now more accurately described as a 'mosaic of unevenness in a continual state of flux'."

"We have a booming global economy but we don't have a global society. Markets reduce everything, including human beings and nature, to commodities. Societies need more than this to prosper — such goals as political freedom and social justice."

"If my theoretical studies have contained any subjective value judgment, then this has amounted at most to a preference for freedom and progress rather than state control of the economy and distribution of such scanty prosperity as may be available for distribution at a given moment. I have wanted to make it clear that this preference is a great common interest of all parties, both in the management of the world economy and in every individual nation. Such a position may be attacked, but it cannot be denominated as party-politics in the ordinary sense."

"A successful economic development strategy must focus on improving the skills of the area's workforce, reducing the cost of doing business and making available the resources business needs to compete and thrive in today's global economy."

"Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis."

"Without even entering into the question of the world economy’s ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody’s productive activity, it’s apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is not the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade."

"If men can learn to be less defensive, more open to others, and more accepting of accountability, they will adapt well to the new global economy."

""Populists" believe in conspiracies and one of the most enduring is that a secret group of international bankers and capitalists, and their minions, control the world's economy."

"I appreciate that in China, people are hungry to prosper in the global economy. What they need is a body of elected representatives who will widely debate and freely pass a strong national energy policy. Selling China an oil company will only take pressure off its rulers and further delay the arrival of democracy."

"Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place."

"History moves in contradictions. The skeleton of historic existence, the economic structure of society, also develops in contradictions. Forms eternally follow forms. Everything has only a passing being. The dynamic force of life creates the new over and over again — such is the law inherent in reality."

"The world economic council (or whatever body represents the resources of the world) must free itself from fraudulent politics, capitalistic influence and its devious scheming; it must set the resources of the earth free for the use of humanity. This will be a lengthy task but it will be possible when world need is better appreciated. An enlightened public opinion will make the decisions of the economic council practical and possible. Sharing and cooperation must be taught instead of greed and competition."

"With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later."

"The distribution of the world's resources and the settled unity of the peoples of the world are in reality one and the same thing, for behind all modern wars lies a fundamental economic problem. Solve that and wars will very largely cease. In considering, therefore, the preservation of peace, as sought for and emphasized by the United Nations at this time, it becomes immediately apparent that peace, security and world stability are primarily tied up with the economic problem. When there is freedom from want, one of the major causes of war will disappear. Where there is uneven distribution of the world's riches and where there is a situation in which some nations have or take everything and other nations lack the necessities of life, it is obvious that there is a trouble-breeding factor there and that something must be done. Therefore we should deal with world unity and peace primarily from the angle of the economic problem."

"It is essential for the future happiness and progress of humanity that there should be no return to the old ways, whether political, religious or economic. Therefore, in handling these problems we should search out the wrong conditions which have brought humanity to its present state of almost cataclysmic disaster. These conditions were the result... of economic systems which lay the emphasis upon the accumulation of riches and material possessions and which leave all the power and the produce of the earth in the hands of a relatively few men, while the rest of humanity struggle for a bare subsistence; and of political regimes run by the corrupt, the totalitarian-minded, the grafters and those who love place and power more than they love their fellowmen... Security, happiness and peaceful relations are desired by all. Until, however, the Great Powers, in collaboration with the little nations, have solved the economic problem and have realized that the resources of the earth belong to no one nation but to humanity as a whole, there will be no peace. The oil of the world, the mineral wealth, the wheat, the sugar and the grains belong to all men everywhere. They are essential to the daily living of the everyday man."

"[T]he most basic duty of any economic system: to protect and maintain and safety."

"In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict."

"The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system."

"Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out."

"Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth's treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply."

"Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook."

"An economic system is not a linear system, and... this fact stands in the way of the determination of the parameters of the system by methods that presume linearity, and... it introduces great difficulties in the extrapolation from past behaviour for purposes of prediction."

"The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes."

"But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that."

"When Roosevelt came along, I approved of his program, generally. I figured an economic system should work for people, not vice versa."

"There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty."

"It's a historical phenomenon that in 250 years, a nation could move from a colony into the most prosperous nation of the world and the leader of the world. It is indeed an achievement, a tribute to the talent of the American nation, the American people and an optimal political and economic system."

"Methods by which engineers stabilise their mechanisms suggest analogous possibilities for stabilising economic systems."

"Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac."

"Most people have no alternative but to sell their ability to work for a wage and inevitably be paid less than the value they produce. This is the capital order, the backbone of our society that we do not criticize or even discuss. It is only through the lens of class that we can escape this trap and understand the functioning of our economic system and the policies implemented to govern it."

"If people no longer accept their condition as low-paid wage laborers without secure employment, our economic system collapses."

"For decades, "experts" have been spreading this numbing story with academic theories spun from the elite circles of the most prestigious universities in the world. By hiding the true nature of the economic system, they atrophy our minds, blocking any possibility of transformative action. But it is possible to escape from capitalism."

"Changing our civilization’s operating system to one that naturally leads to life-affirming policies and practices rather than rampant extraction and devastation. An ecological civilization is both a new and ancient idea. While the notion of structuring human society on an ecological basis might seem radical, Indigenous peoples around the world have organized themselves from time immemorial on life-affirming principles. Every year that we head closer to catastrophe—as greater climate-related disasters rear up, as the outrages of racial and economic injustice become even more egregious, and as life for most people becomes increasingly intolerable—the old narrative loses its hold on the collective consciousness. Waves of young people are looking for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unraveling, one that offers them a future they can believe in. It’s a bold idea to transform the very basis of our civilization to one that’s life-affirming. But when the alternative is unthinkable, a vision of a flourishing future shines a light of hope that can become a self-fulfilling reality. Dare to imagine it. Dare to make it possible by the actions you take, both individually and collectively—and it might just happen sooner than you expect."

"Despite claims of job creation, and the dominant message that business success helps all of us, the reality is that ultimately market gains, or profit, are contrary to the wellbeing of citizens — as one rises, the other decreases. Our current economic system is coercive, and this is the crucial political reality that mainstream economics hides. Even if we feel something is wrong when we get up in the morning to go to a job that means nothing to us, or when we struggle to find time to rest, such an instinctive realization is suffocated by the societal messages that this is the way it should be. The dissonance between our lived experience of daily economic life — that of alienation and struggle — and our acceptance of it, as if , is something constructed, predominantly by economic models that reinforce our surrender to an economic system that I call the "capital order". This term refers to, first, the concentration of decision making power in the hands of private investors; the second, the invisible subjugation of the majority, who are forced to work for someone else's profit."

"The economic structure of the ideal society also resembles the structure of a healthy human body. Production, distribution and consumption should have an organic, interdependent relationship such as that which exists between the digestive, circulatory and metabolic systems. There should not be destructive competition due to overproduction; nor should there be excessive accumulation or overconsumption due to unfair distribution, which would be contrary to the welfare of all people. There should be adequate production of necessary and useful goods, fair distribution to supply what is sufficient for people's needs, and reasonable consumption in harmony with the purpose of the whole."

"Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems. That’s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice... As long as government policies emphasize growth in gross domestic product and transnational corporations relentlessly pursue shareholder returns, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe... We need to forge a new era for humanity — one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior. In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization..."

"With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system."

"The British came to India primarily as traders but ultimately succeeded in carving out a strong empire in India. During their rule of over two centuries, they brought about far-reaching changes in the economic system of India. They completely destroyed the isolationist and self-sufficing character of the village;…"