it is dochs oars, sûnt 2001

Quote of the Day | 0530

John Maynard Keynes famously looked forward to a day when “economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists”. It’s a nice piece of self-deprecation, but it’s also an analogy worth exploring. We ...

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Quote of the Day | 0603

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to ...

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Quote of the Day | 0603

In Herr Blatter’s case, he doesn’t know what a scheduled flight is. He has no idea. He hasn’t taken one for about 40 years. He always has to buy a private jet out of Zurich. Even if he was ...

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Quote of the Day | 0604

Before the invasion, Iraq’s oil industry was sputtering, largely walled off from world markets by international sanctions against the government of Saddam Hussein, so his overthrow always carried the promise of renewed access to the country’s immense reserves. Chinese state-owned ...

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Quote of the Day | 0606

Before now, I had never really understood how the 1930s could happen. Now I do. All one needs are fragile economies, a rigid monetary regime, intense debate over what must be done, widespread belief that suffering is good, myopic politicians, ...

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Quote of the Day | 0607

traditional publishers know what their authors sold (how many copies, when, where, in what genre) but they don’t know who bought them. Amazon does – perforce, it’s on Internet, every transaction is written, a complete contract between seller and buyer, ...

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Quote of the Day | 0611

American thought doesn’t seem interested whatsoever in studying, for example, why even a nation like Spain has five years’ higher life expectancy than America now, why American democracy was so fragile, why American living standards are the lowest in the ...

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Quote of the Day | 0614

The average music buyer is younger than the average book buyer. Young people have long been a primary market for popular music. Young people also tend to have the spare time, the tech savvy, the obliviousness to risk, the constrained ...

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Quote of the Day | 0617

Here is the deepest and, to many serious journalists, most disturbing truth about the future of news: The audience will control it. They will get the kind of news they choose to get. Not the kind they say they want, ...

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Quote of the Day | 0619

Finance is an amoral world, bordering on the immoral. Take the financial transaction tax. The idea: there is horrific poverty so let's levy a tiny tax and use it to alleviate that. But when I suggest to my clients this ...

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Quote of the Day | 0620

The only politician who seemed to understand The Black Swan is David Cameron. He was convinced that there is great hidden risk in the economy in a world that has become much more complex in the past 25 years. He ...

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Quote of the Day | 0621

But British Petroleum didn't give up on trying to subvert and avoid the decisions of democratic governments. In particular its own, British, government. Adam Curtis, 'BP and the Axis of Evil'

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Quote of the Day | 0621

Does it matter -- if the shoe fits? Well yeah, if it doesn’t truly fit. There are four main differences between men and women’s feet: a narrower heel cup (where the shoe grips the heel), a wider forefoot leading to ...

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Quote of the Day | 0626

The Brexiteers say you will “regain control”. But it won’t feel like that. Instead, the economy lurches to recession; there’s upheaval in Westminster; no plan to allay concerns about immigration; another referendum in Scotland; a steep slide in Britain’s standing ...

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Quote of the Day | 0627

The world is full of tremendous and terrible existential risks these days. Climate change is one. But there are many others. Financial crisis, economic ruin, stock market crashes, social catastrophes like school shootings. These risks should be distributed better in ...

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Quote of the Day | 0629

Breeding tomatoes to have the perfect colour ruins their flavour, a genetic study has shown, explaining why many people believe supermarket tomatoes are tasteless. 'Breeding tomatoes for best colour ruins taste'

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Quote of the Day | 0630

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws. Malcolm Gladwell, ...

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Quote of the Day | 0703

we have failed to communicate basic economic concepts to politicians, journalists and businesspeople, never mind the public. Let me be clear I am blaming us, the economists, for that. I have been astonished by the number of people in recent ...

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Quote of the Day | 0705

Imagine that the arguments triggered by the Hindenberg disaster were about the fire extinguishers and parachutes that airships should carry, rather than about the design flaws that might cause them to ignite. Unfortunately, today’s debates about banking reform have just ...

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Quote of the Day | 0706

times of broad-based economic progress also tended to lead to moral progress, to “greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy”. Reverse the economic gains and the moral gains may also evaporate. Tim Harford, "We’re ...

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Quote of the Day | 0707

you can't opt out from having information collected, retained and analyzed. Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera, "Erasing all digital footprints 'impossible'"

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Quote of the Day | 0708

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact. Daniel Kahneman, 'This Much I KNow'

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Quote of the Day | 0710

no amount of reorganizing can simply do away with €350 billion ($473 billion) in government debt. How to cope with this debt without ruining the European project is the most pressing question of recent weeks. After 20 years of bad ...

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Quote of the Day | 0712

Has any country ever gone into international treaty negotiations hoping to emerge with a status greatly inferior to the one it already enjoys? What do we want? National humiliation. When do we want it? Now. Fontana O'Toole, 'Britain has gone to ...

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Quote of the Day | 0717

Similarly, successful traders will be given more responsibility, first heading their departments and then leading the bank itself. They will gain a reputation as the kind of person who can handle risk, and they will believe their own publicity. The ...

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Quote of the Day | 0720

Buying $2 worth of bananas boosts GDP; having $20 worth of fun on the Web does not. And this effect is a big one. Each day more enjoyment, more social connection, and, indeed, more contemplation are produced on the Web ...

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Quote of the Day | 0728

asking if climate change “causes” specific events is the wrong question: “The relevant question is: ‘Is climate change impacting these events and making them more extreme?’, and we can say with great confidence that it is.” Michael Mann (Penn State ...

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Quote of the Day | 0730

[...] it’s become apparent that selling ad space is an unsustainable revenue model for media as a whole. It is from the chaos of this moment that the relationship between content and capital will be defined for generations to come. ...

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Quote of the Day | 0809

Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests. Noam Chomsky, 'America in ...

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Quote of the Day | 0811

Meanwhile, European policy makers and central bankers are wrecking one of the most fascinating projects in human history, the unity and friendship among the countries of Europe. This is beyond depressing. Way beyond.Kantoos Economics, 'The continued embarrassment that is European ...

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Quote of the day | 0816

Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its "Bang" mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet ...

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Quote of the Day | 0817

You may think you're defending your favorite platform because it's just that good. But, according to a recently published study out of the University of Illinois, you may instead be defending yourself because you view criticisms of your favorite brand ...

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Quote of the Day | 0822

The fact that there is an enormous crisis with huge unemployment rates in the peripheral countries does not mean, however, that the Euro is in crisis. It would be in crisis only if these peripheral countries, including Spain, would leave ...

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Quote of the Day | 0824

China is having its first fully-fledged capitalist crisis. To date its response to it has been to try to sustain the unsustainable: to transfer the bubble from housing to the stockmarket, and to keep the stockmarket rising like some production ...

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Quote of the Day | 0903

In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused ...

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Quote of the Day | 0907

today’s historians are far humbler about what they can hope to achieve than modern economists. Historians know that no big question is ever definitively settled. They know that every big and interesting topic will be revisited, revised and examined from ...

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Quote of the Day | 0909

economists had good enough intellectual frameworks to have seen the risk of something like the banking and balance sheet crisis that burst upon us in 2008. But they ignored that risk. My best answer is that they were caught up in ...

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Quote of the Day | 0910

We had the catastrophe. And in our history every time we’ve had a major collapse like this, we’ve had a government with a strong enough backbone to step in and say “Okay, how can we fix the problem?” And many ...

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Quote of the Day | 0910

If and when the euro eventually breaks up it will destroy the common market and the European Union. Europe will be worse off than it was when the effort to unite it began, because the breakup will leave a legacy ...

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Quote of the Day | 0913

As we saw with banks, Toyota's problem, the BP oil spill, an economic system with a severe agency problem builds a natural tendency to push and hide risks in the tails, even without help from the economics establishment. ...

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Quote of the Day | 0914

the question is whether most Think Tanks may actually be preventing people thinking of new visions of how society could be organised - and made fairer and freer. That in reality they have become the armoured shell that surrounds all ...

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Quote of the Day | 0914

Why does Gillette need to market so many different kinds of razors and blades? It's the "clog the shelves" theory of marketing. Take up more space on the shelves, and you will look like the better product. The benefit is purely ...

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Quote of the Day | 0918

The commentators most caught up in the romanticized notion of newspaper cite the potential loss of the newspapers’ “watchdog” function. Let’s be honest. Most newspapers in the U.S. aren’t watchdogs, and most of the rest don’t spend an inordinate amount ...

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Quote of the Day | 0918

if we are going to get serious about reducing health-care costs—and improving health-care outcomes—we need to address the 20 percent of medical care that is unnecessary and dangerous. The public should demand disclosure of a hospital’s patient-outcome statistics. After ...

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Quote of the Day | 0919

Books, like newspapers, are an essentially middle-class phenomenon whose market is the self-improving professional. As a bourgeois medium, books and their authors depend on the cash nexus. Johnson went straight to the point with: "No man but a blockhead ever ...

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Quote of the Day | 0921

Here are the Huffington Post’s “principles”: Take an original story available on the internet, preferably outside a paywall. Match the subject of the story against a traffic analysis of what readers like on your superblog. Process the story according a compression ratio of ...

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Quote of the Day | 0921

Ultimately, that’s the point everyone seems to agree on - bike thieves are assholes. For everything else, there is little consensus and hard evidence. However, some things are clear and explain a lot of the bike theft that occurs.'What Happens ...

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Quote of the Day | 0925

It turned out that when people felt comfortable - when they were put in a relaxed and pleasant environment - they were more willing to take irrational risks, to place losing bets on games of chance. Jonah Lehrer, 'Why being relaxed ...

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Quote of the Day | 0928

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. Milton Friedman

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Quote of the Day | 0930

the idea that content is king has great intuitive appeal. I consume media content based on what I enjoy or find useful—surely the best company is the one with the best content! Reinforcing this simple observation is the intense emotional ...

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Quote of the Day | 0930

The company claimed to have broken no law. That is precisely the problem. Our societies are being destroyed by this legal corruption. University professors are in cahoots with pharmaceutical companies that think nothing of charging hundreds of thousands of dollars ...

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Quote of the Day | 1002

Looking at the pattern of algorithmic systems like Google and Facebook, I started thinking about how that applies to financial markets. A system like Google has hundreds of factors that are being taken into account, but they all have a ...

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Quote of the Day | 1006

3. Economics cannot be studied in isolation. Any serious thought about economics will soon run into political questions such as the nature of power, or philosophical and psychological ones such as the nature of rationality.Stumbling and Mumbling, 'What I learned ...

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Quote of the Day | 1007

There is another, final, side to this class system à l’Anglaise. It seems to breed a perspective on the world that is zero-sum. Your class system is a form of ranking. For one to go up, another must go down. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1011

[...] the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; ...

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Quote of the Day | 1015

The financial system is an archetypical complex, adaptive socioeconomic system - and has become more so over time. In the early years of this century, financial chains lengthened dramatically, system-wide maturity mismatches widened alarmingly and intrafinancial system claims ballooned exponentially. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1017

in an effort to maintain global demand for U.S. dollars, another system was created called the petrodollar system. In 1973, a deal was struck between Saudi Arabia and the United States in which every barrel of oil purchased from the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1019

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking. John Maynard Keynes via

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Quote of the Day | 1024

A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens ...

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Quote of the Day | 1024

this is what will kill oil: It will cost less to hail an autonomous electric vehicle than to drive the car that you already own. Seth Miller, This is how big oil will die

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Quote of the Day | 1026

What this crisis has really been about is not cash flow or credit. It’s nothing to do with liquidity — what it’s really been all about is words. It’s the drying-up of mouths, the logorrhoea jam, the stammer and mutter ...

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Quote of the Day | 1028

the University of Vermont’s report also speaks to our philosophical attitude to faeces. Why do we spend billions of pounds getting rid of our waste – other than out of a strange hatred of our own bodily functions? Imagine what ...

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Quote of the Day | 1030

For two decades the world seemed to be convinced that all indicators pointed in the same direction: more democracy, more economic openness, more human rights, more international cooperation. Optimists believed it would happen fast, while pessimists warned of possible setbacks. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1030

the Holocene was a freakish gift to humanity that we have exploited and taken for granted. We are now assisting at its funeral. Peter Forbes, 'We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normal'

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Quote of the Day | 1101

Does this mean that we should cease to teach ‘standard’ economic theory to our students? Surely not. If we did so, these students would not be able to follow the current economic debates. As Max Planck has said, “Physics is ...

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Quote of the Day | 1103

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. H.L. Mencken

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Quote of the Day | 1105

any view of a well-managed society would be “why not deal with the threat of climate change?” “Particularly because the way you’d do it would actually stimulate the economy.” Joseph Stiglitz, 'America should be a warning to other countries'

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Quote of the Day | 1106

Since 97% of transactions now go through the big two credit cards, and Paypal, the effect is that US corporations control the day-to-day economic interactions between two people in another country entirely. Indeed, the fix WikiLeaks is in points to a ...

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Quote of the Day | 1107

Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire ...

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Quote of the Day | 1108

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The ...

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Quote of the Day | 1110

The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when ...

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Quote of the Day | 1110

It is difficult to impose ideas onto people on the level of argument; people will resist, often outright and without consideration. The natural, critical, conscious mind serves essentially as a spam box, trapping and discarding the vast multitude of input ...

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Quote of the Day | 1110

A few years ago, Guy Mayraz, who is now a behavioural economist at the University of Melbourne, conducted a test of wishful thinking. He divided experimental subjects into “farmers”, who benefited from high wheat prices, and “bakers”, who profited when ...

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Quote of the day | 1114

Artists, sportsmen, surgeons, plumbers, and the rest of us have secret voices of doubt, inner reservations about ourselves, but if you go to work with money, and make money, you can be proved right in the most inhumanly pure way. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1114

Car manufacturers are worried that younger people in particular don't aspire to own cars like we used to in the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s. Designers commonly say that teenagers today aspire to own the latest smartphone more than ...

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Quote of the Day | 1116

The methodology of economics is so strong that we have had a large impact on many fields, from political science to sociology and even neuroscience. It’s been a very successful paradigm in that what economics does very well is think ...

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Quote of the Day | 1118

in Iceland, talking to a waitress in a café in the summer of 2009, about eight months after the króna collapsed and the whole country effectively went bankrupt under the debts incurred by its overextended banks. I asked her what ...

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Quote of the Day | 1119

Financial markets are supposed to be a means to an end -- a more prosperous and stable economy as a result of good allocation of resources and better management of risk. But instead, financial markets didn't manage risk, they created ...

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Quote of the Day | 1119

Instead, advises Cuban, Murdoch needs to aggregate his strongest products, drawing on the vast resources of his empire, to package tailored media to specific demographics. As an example, he cites an imagined “Newsjunkies Subscription” that includes access to every News ...

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Quote of the Day | 1120

The attempt by countries to bolster the faltering financial system has in fact increased their dependency on the financial markets to such an extent that their policies are now shaped by two sovereigns: the people and creditors. Creditors and investors ...

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Quote of the Day | 1121

In the current policy debate, debt is often invoked as a reason to dismiss calls for expansionary fiscal policy as a response to unemployment; you can’t solve a problem created by debt by running up even more debt, say the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1121

All of these reasons have something in common. They all suggest that economic growth is helpful in preserving the legitimacy of the state. Sustained mass unemployment can generate riots and crime or - remember the 30s - worse. The higher ...

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Quote of the Day | 1127

As European countries have dug themselves deeper and deeper into debt in recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in this dependence. Governments are addicted to borrowed money -- and banks meet this need by purchasing sovereign bonds. As ...

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Quote of the Day | 1202

Bleak is chic  

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Quote of the Day | 1203

[...] politics and power play a far larger role in determining both the success of economics and the success of economics than economists are prepared to admit in public. Or, more succinctly, sociology provides a much better account of economics’ ...

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Quote of the Day | 1205

Electricity production is rife with externalities. Mining for raw materials often causes water pollution, habitat destruction and socio-economic harm. Burning coal pollutes the air, sickening and killing people, and introduces toxic mercury into the aquatic food chain. Nuclear-power plants require ...

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Quote of the Day | 1208

The real wreckers, according to him, are the publishers and entertainment firms using digital technology to undermine the traditional rights of readers. “What they're doing is throwing away copyright rules that describe what rights readers have to a book, and ...

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Quote of the Day | 1208

We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It’s ...

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Quote of the Day | 1211

The iron route to understanding the modern state is to follow the money flow to the professions. Simon Jenkins, In its mania for jailing people, Britain has declared trivial offences crimes

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Quote of the Day | 1213

the proportion of resources that we expend on lighting has remained virtually unchanged for the past three centuries, at about 0.72% of gross domestic product. As Saunders and his colleagues observe in their journal article, “This was the case in ...

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Quote of the Day | 1215

Too much of our political debate just insults people’s intelligence and just suggests that every facet of Brexit you don’t like is purely a feature of only the Prime Minister’s version of it, rather than intrinsic to leaving. Sir Ivan Rogers ...

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Quote of the Day | 1219

Any purely rational, self-interested person would lie for the money. But people who had an emotional aversion to dishonesty might not. The researchers ultimately ran their test on 258 students from various majors, including business, economics, the humanities, sciences, law, ...

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Quote of the Day | 1221

a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect.'The Overjustification Effect'

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Quote of the Day | 1222

22 years ago, Joel Waldfogel, an economist, wrote an article titled The Deadweight Loss of Christmas, in which he quantified something we all instinctively know: a lot of the presents that people give and receive aren’t terribly well chosen. We ...

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Quote of the Day | 1224

Economics has become the most successful social science by being dogmatic and imperialistic; the implication is that an introduction to economics is all you really need to design policy. Dan Ariely in: 'Better the Devil You Know'

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Quote of the day | 1224

We learn that while more statistics per capita are collected for baseball than perhaps any other human activity, seasoned scouts still surpass algorithms in predicting the performance of players. Since poker depends as much on luck as on skill, professionals ...

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Quote of the Day | 1225

Dr. Richard G. Miller, who worked for BP from 1985 before retiring in 2008, said that official data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), US Energy Information Administration (EIA), International Monetary Fund (IMF), among other sources, showed that conventional oil ...

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Quote of the Day | 1227

Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1229

In an age of historic stagnation and depression, the most potentially depressing thing in 2011 has been the continued absence of the economy from serious political debate. Mick Hume, 'Bleak midwinter of the economy'

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Quote of the Day | 1310

confusion pricing, seems to be the curse of our age. There is certainly reason to worry: I’ve written in this column before about the research of the economists Catherine Waddams Price and Chris Wilson, who studied customers who had overcome ...

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