Economists From Canada

"The 4,400 business corporations that disappeared by merger during 1968 were a small number compared with the 12,000 that disappeared by failure, or the 207,000 new corporations that were formed. Even the $43 billion in securities exchanged in mergers that year were only 3.3 percent of the market value of corporate securities."

"During 1968, more than forty-four hundred companies disappeared by mergers involving an estimated $43 billion in securities—an all-time record. In this tidal wave of mergers, which subsequently crested and receded, conglomerate firms accounted for either a substantial or a preponderant fraction, depending upon the definition of ‘conglomerate’ adopted."

"But beginning in the 1960’s, an adverse tide of public opinion began to rise against business… Frustration over the Vietnam War added fuel to the fires of discontent. Suddenly, consumerism, stock-holderism, racial equalitarianism, antimilitarism, environmentalism, and feminism became forces to be reckoned with by corporate managements. For the most part, they replaced the classical ‘isms’—[[w:Socialism | socialism, Communism, syndicalism, fascism—as the main driving forces seeking the reform of the American business system."

"The growth of the British company population was not interrupted, as it was in the United States, by the economic depression of the 1930’s and World War II. By the middle 1960’s, the United Kingdom was more densely populated with companies in relation to its human population than was the United States, although the reverse had been true in 1935."

"[ Proposition 13 ] would precipitate a revolutionary reform—one long overdue—in California state and local finance… People’s incomes are not closely related to their ownership or use of housing. Hence, the present tax system unjustly burdens the young family with large housing needs and the older couple who want to live in their family home or their retirement pensions. Stability of home or apartment occupancy is an important social goal. The present tax system weakens our society by threatening to force people out of their homes."

"Property tax bills are rising much faster than family incomes…. They threaten to erode away that foundation of American society: the American-owned home…. We must deliver an unmistakable message to our elected representatives that no longer will we permit misuse of the property tax to finance welfare, health, educational and other governmental services that serve all people in our state. Such government spending programs should be paid for by revenues collected from all the people."

"We’re going to have some very unpleasant circumstances. There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that. ... Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law once it’s there … It’s going to take some fortitude to stand up."

"We have seen it other places, that equivalent of religious zeal leading to flouting of the law in a way that could lead to death … Inevitably, when you get that fanaticism, if you will, you’re going to have trouble. ... Are we collectively as a society willing to allow the fanatics to obstruct the general will of the population? That then turns out to be a real test of whether we actually do believe in the ."

"Harry Johnson was notorious in his lifetime as a living machine for producing economic literature: during a relatively short career of twenty-seven years, he produced over five hundred academic papers, one hundred and fifty book reviews, thirty-five books and pamphlets, and hundreds of newspaper articles, many of which were written on trains and aeroplanes; so prodigious was his output that articles by him continued to appear years after his death, conveying the uncanny impression that he was still hard at it in Heaven. Moreover, almost nothing he wrote was tossed off. On the contrary, the average quality of his output was astonishingly high, synthesising apparently unrelated contributions by others and restating previous results with a verve that made them stand out like new. But writing was only one of his many activities. He travelled ceaselessly to conferences around the world and lectured at universities up and down Europe, America, Africa and Asia. His frantic energy was fuelled by wood-carving and alcohol, producing the one while listening and consuming the other while writing."

"The euro is the way in which congresses and parliaments can be stripped of all power over monetary and fiscal policy. Bothersome democracy is removed from the economic system."

"The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system."

"Mundell’s models allowed a significant role for fiscal policy, especially under fixed exchange rates. However, the treatment was entirely Keynesian—an increased budget deficit operated solely by raising the aggregate demand for goods. Moreover, increases in government spending and cuts in taxes had pretty much the same effect on the economy."

"Consider John Kenneth Galbraith or Lester Thurow, both leading economists in the view of the general public, both with all the formal qualifications, both totally ignored by the academic mainstream. Or consider Robert Mundell, who is still revered for his contributions to international monetary theory, yet whose later incarnation as the father of supply-side economics has similarly been ignored."

"The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do."

"The old and the new differ in many respects... The dispute centers on five main issues:"

"Many writers within the NIE have argued for the efficiency of market and spontaneous processes very broadly, utilizing only weak arguments by analogy. A closer analysis of invisible- hand, common law, and even competitive market processes reveals that there are no guarantees that the inefficient will be eliminated in favour of the efficient or socially beneficial. This may occur, but whether or not it does will depend on the specifics of the case."

"This book provides a detailed picture of the institutionalist movement in American economics concentrating on the period between the two World Wars. The discussion brings a new emphasis on the leading role of Walton Hamilton in the formation of Institutional economics, on the special importance of the ideals of “science” and “social control” embodied within the movement, on the large and close network of individuals involved, on the educational programs and research organizations created by institutionalists, and on the significant place of the movement within the mainstream of interwar American economics."

"This book examines and compares the two major traditions of thought that have attempted to incorporate institutions within economics. These are the "Old" (or American) Institutionalist tradition of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons and Ayres, and the "New" Institutionalism that has developed more recently from neoclassical and Austrian sources. The discussion is organized around a set of key problems involving the use of formal or nonformal analytical methods, individualist or holistic approaches, the respective roles of rational choice and rule following behavior, the relative importance of spontaneous evolution and deliberative design of institutions, and questions relating to the normative appraisal of institutions."

"This book is a product of my long-standing interest in questions relating to institutions and their relation in economic life. Initially, this interest took me to the study of the American institutionalist tradition (now often called the "old" institutional economics, or OIE) and to a series of articles on Veblen, Mitchell, Commons and Ayres (Rutherford 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1987), a line of work I have continued to pursue (1990a, 1990c, 1992a, 1992b). These pieces are written from the point of view of a sympathetic critic."

"In recent times Samuel Hollander has been lampooned rather than praised for seeing supply and demand mechanisms everywhere in the classical writers. Even Mark Blaug (1978:66) writes of Hollander as making Smith into more of a Léon Walras than a Ricardo, which I deem not to be a reductio ad absurdum but rather a merited compliment for Smith. (Given their respective dates, we might better compliment Walras for his Smith-like approach to general equilibrium.) Followers of Piero Sraffa or Marx, who are not identical sets, agree in their desire to reject mainstream equilibrium theory. In the sense of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), they want to regard the classical (i.e., the pre-1870) system as an alternative paradigm, a different and better paradigm to the modern ones. That is why they reproach Hollander for claiming to discern supply and demand content in the classical writers and why they prefer a Ricardo to a Smith."

"WILLIAM VICKREY DIED on October 11, 1996, three days after the announcement that the 1996 Bank of Sweden prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel was being awarded to him and to Professor James Mirrlees of Cambridge “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.” Vickrey was eighty-two years old and had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since April 1996. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences refers specifically to his work in the mid-forties on income taxation, then in the early sixties on auctions. With characteristic independence, Vickrey reacted by privileging instead his work of the late thirties on cumulative averaging of income for tax purposes and his then current concern with unemployment. Early insights, lifetime dedication, and late recognition are unmistakable traits of a truly remarkable career devoted to economics in the service of the public sector."

"Market Anti-Inflation Plans In such a context, it should be clear that balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief."

"Jacob Viner used to assign exam questions that showed how Ricardo’s Chapter 2 recognized (in modern parlance): P_2 / P_1 = \frac{\text{marginal cost in labour}_1}{\text{marginal cost in labour}_2} = \frac {1/\left[{\partial {Q}_/\partial{L}_}\right]}{1/\left[{\partial {Q}_/\partial {L}_}\right]} But, Viner insisted, this was compatible with rent’s being 99 per cent of national income and labour’s importance being derisory. Would that more historians of economic analysis had taken Viner’s EC 301 or brooded more on Ricardo’s text."

"A comparable error was made by Professor Jacob Viner in an important article on laissez-faire in Smith’s economics. He contrasted the mature realism of The Wealth of Nations with the youthful idealism of the Moral Sentiments, and quoted five passages from the ethical work as evidence for his view of it. The first of his quotations was in fact written for the far from youthful sixth edition."

"The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities."

"Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad — yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there's nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they're played out."

"Can you imagine feds saying we don't like your answers."

"Well, in a case like this, what do we do? We spit in our hands and we start over!"

"It is true, it is true that we were beaten, but in the end, by what? By money and certain ethnic votes, essentially."

"America had come to the rescue of Korea's "troubled banks". The auction of commercial bank assets was an obvious fraud."

"In a cruel irony, speculators - rather then elected politicians - are the shots on crisis management. In an absurd logic, those who foster financial turbulence have been invited by the G7 Finance ministers to identify policies which attenuate financial turbulence."

"The Cayman Islands, a British Crown colony in the Caribbean, for instance, is the fifth largest banking center in the world,"

"Legal and illegal activities had become inextricably intertwined."

"A new global financial environment has unfolded in several stages since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971."

"The collapse of the standard of living, engineered as result of macro-economic policy, is without precedent in Russian history: " We had more to eat during the Second World War.""

"For the West, the enemy was not "socialism" but capitalism. How to tame and subdue the polar bear, how to take over the talent, the science, the technology, how to buy out the human capital, how to acquire the intellectual property rights?"

"Lost in the barrage of images and self-serving analysis are the economic and social causes of the conflict."

"Macro-economic policy had accelerated the "expulsion" of landless peasants from the countryside leading to the formation of a nomadic migrant labor force moving from one metropolitan area to another."

"Moreover, the entire international trading system is prone (from the lower echelons to top state officials) to corruption and bribery by foreign contractors."

"Macro-economic reform undermined the legal economy, reinforced illicit trade and contributed to the recycling of "dirty money" towards Peru's official and commercial creditors."

"While Financier George Soros was investing money in Kosovo's reconstruction, the George Soros Foundation for an Open Society had opened a branch office in Pristina establishing the Kosovo Foundation for an Open Society (KFOS) as part of the Soros' network of "non-profit foundations" in the Balkans."

"The experience of Somalia shows that famine in the late 20th century is not a consequence of a shortage of food. On the contrary, famines are spurred on as result of a global oversupply of grain staples."

"Global poverty is an "input" on the supply side; the global economic system feeds on cheap labor."

"The civil war in Rwanda and other ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives."

"The budget targets imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions, combined with the effects of the devaluation, trigger the collapse of public investment."

"Mainstream economics scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory ("applied economics")"

"According to the World Bank, the concentration of wealth and the structures of corporate economic power have no bearing on woman's rights."

"In return, US surpluses of genetically engineered maize (banned in the European Union) were being dumped on the horn of Africa, in the form of emergency aid."

"Humanity is undergoing, in the post-Cold War era, an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population."

"Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape."