Words matter. These are the best Adam Davidson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Most rich countries have reported increases in happiness as they become richer.
The American dream always meant that anybody willing to put in a hard day’s work could make a decent living. That’s just not true anymore for people without at least some post-high school education.
If your business is really easy to do, don’t gloat. You might be out of a job soon.
We tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans, and think there’s little group over there called Independents that’s maybe 2%. That is not the case, and it has not been the case for most of modern American history.
What we want as an economy is companies and people, you know, working hard to come up with creative ways to be more productive. We don’t want companies and people working hard to lobby government for special tax cuts.
Happiness statistics may be most valuable in smaller, local discussions. Understanding how different sorts of programs affect the well-being of citizens would be enormously helpful to a mayor choosing between building a new bridge or offering a tax cut.
‘Reinventing the Bazaar,’ by John McMillan, is a great and fun introduction to the wild variety and importance of markets throughout history and around the world. I finally understood how a Middle Eastern souk actually works economically and how to compare that to modern-day telecom-spectrum auctions. I love that book.
Whenever you hear news about jobless claims or the unemployment rate, you should translate that in your mind to one simple phrase: Stay in school.
If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer.
Holiday binge-buying has deep roots in American culture: department stores have been associating turkey gluttony with its spending equivalent since they began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century.
Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: ‘It does nothing! It creates chaos! It’s a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry!’
Economics is not a discipline that comes to correct answers – economies are too complex.
The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us.
Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.
The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.
Art is often valuable precisely because it isn’t a sensible way to make money.
Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right – that it sometimes discourages innovation – then we should worry.
One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.
It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.
The America that I think most Americans would want, most economists on the right or left would want, is one in which a smart, ambitious, hardworking person without a huge amount of resources has a pretty good shot, in the end, of beating out a less smart, less ambitious, less hardworking rich person.
A rule of thumb: If the company you work for provides a product or service that’s pretty much the same as what was offered last year and a few years before that, it might be time to start looking for something new.
In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.
A majority of Americans support Social Security and Medicare, a progressive tax system and a government that regulates business in the public interest, but most share deep skepticism about the government’s ability to do all this well.
Unlike physics, economists don’t settle things. There seems to be plenty of room for different conclusions that are still accepted in the academy.
The economy works best when better ideas win out over worse ideas, harder work wins out over less work, when it’s a fair fight in the marketplace.
Like a bottle of wine or a promising college quarterback turning pro, C.E.O.’s are similar to what economists call experience goods: you commit to a price long before you know if they’re worth it.
What there is no dispute about is whether or not China is a currency manipulator. They are a currency manipulator. They actively intervene every single day to keep the value of their currency less than it would be against the dollar than if it floated freely. We think. Even China barely disputes that.
The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.
When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.
A healthy economy is largely a result of a reasonable balance between consumption today and consumption deferred, and it’s pretty clear that balance has been ridiculously out of whack for a while.
