Thread by @SmartSyncServ

If you haven't liked Economics in your school or college, pick up the book, "Basic Economics" by @ThomasSowell and you will change your mind.

There's not a single equation or chart. Simple words with lots of examples.

A thread on some of the quotes in no particular order.

1. Economics is a study of cause & effect relationships. Its purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources that have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

2. As an entrepreneur in India put it: 'Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.

3. Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed.

4. Failure is part of the natural cycle of a business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.

5. When wheat prices soar, for example, nothing is easier for a demagogue than to cry out against the injustice of a situation where speculators, sitting comfortably in their AC offices, grow rich on the sweat of farmers toiling in the fields for months under a hot sun.....

The years when the speculators took a financial beating at harvest time, while the farmers lived comfortably on the guaranteed wheat prices paid by speculators, are of course forgotten.

6. When laws & policies make honesty increasingly costly, then govt is, in effect, promoting dishonesty. Such dishonesty can then extend beyond the particular laws & policies in question to a more general habit of disobeying laws, to the detriment of the whole economy & society.

7. In short, honesty is more than a moral principle. It is also a major economic factor. While govt can do little to create honesty directly, in various ways it can indirectly either support or undermine the traditions on which honest conduct is based. ....

This it can do by what it teaches in its schools, by the examples set by public officials, or by the laws that it passes. These laws can create incentives toward either moral or immoral conduct. .....

Where laws create a situation in which the only way to avoid ruinous losses is by violating the law, the government is in effect reducing public respect for laws in general, as well as rewarding specific dishonest behavior.

8. Treating the causes of higher prices & higher int rates in low-income neighborhoods as being personal greed or exploitation, & trying to remedy it by imposing price controls & int rate ceilings only ensures that even less will be supplied to those people thereafter.

9. Among the greatest external costs imposed in a society can be those imposed politically by legislators & officials who pay no costs whatever, while imposing Bn of $ in costs on others, in order to respond to political pressures from advocates of particular ideologies.

10. In the complexities of real life, seldom is any argument right 100 percent of the time or wrong 100 percent of the time.

11. The difference is that one system involves each individual making choices for himself or herself, while the other system involves a small number of people making choices for millions of others.

12. If low-wage employers make workers worse off than they would be otherwise, then it is hard to imagine why workers would work for them. “Because they have no alternative” may be one answer. ...

But that answer implies that low-wage employers provide a better option than these particular workers have otherwise—and so are not making them worse off. Thus the argument against low-wage employers making workers worse off is internally self-contradictory. What would make...

low-wage workers worse off would be foreclosing 1 of their already limited options. This is especially harmful when considering that low-wage workers are often young, entry-level workers for whom work experience can be more valuable in the long run than the immediate pay itself.

13. Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, ....

because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.

14. Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies. Its fundamental concern is with the material standard of living of society as a whole and how that is affected by particular decisions made by individuals and institutions. One of the ways of

doing this is to look at economic policies and economic systems in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue. This means that consequences matter more than intentions

—not just the immediate consequences, but also the longer run repercussions of decisions, policies, and institutions.

15. Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.

16. People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them.

17. Success is only part of the story of a free market economy. Failure is at least as important a part, though few want to talk about it & none want to experience it. When the same resources—whether land, labor or petroleum—
can be used by different firms & different industries

to produce different products, the only way for the successful ideas to become realities is to take resources away from other uses that turn out to be unsuccessful, or which have become obsolete after having had their era of success.

18. Economics is not about “win-win” options, but about often painful choices in the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Success and failure are not
isolated good fortunes and misfortunes, but inseparable parts of the same process.

19. All economies—whether capitalism, socialism, feudalism or whatever —are essentially ways of cooperating in the production and distribution of goods and services, whether this is done efficiently or inefficiently, voluntarily or involuntarily.

20. However useful economics may be for understanding many issues, it is not as emotionally satisfying as more personal and melodramatic depictions of these issues often found in the media and in politics.

Dry empirical questions are seldom as exciting as political crusades or ringing moral pronouncements. But empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others,

rather than in excitement or a sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works.

The former may be sufficient for purposes of politics or moral preening, but not for the economic advancement of people in general or the poor in particular.

If you enjoyed the quotes, go ahead, buy the book and read it. 🙂

~End~