Principles of Economics Quotes

“Far from bringing about destitution, the reduction of consumption is the only path to abundance.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“Mandating laws against humans’ self-interested nature does not change human nature; it reduces the incentive to behave legally and so destroys society’s respect for laws.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“What we really value are not resources, but economic goods made from resources. That is what requires time, and that is what is scarce. That is the scarcity from which all other scarcities originate. The raw material is everywhere around us, but the time to produce economic goods from it is scarce.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings, and actions. Goods, commodities, and wealth and all the other notions of conduct are not elements of nature; they are elements of human meaning and conduct. He who wants to deal with them must not look at the external world; he must search for them in the meaning of acting men.1 —Ludwig von Mises”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“The extent to which strangers can expect to deal peacefully with one another, respecting each other’s bodies, property, and will, is the extent to which they live in a civilized human society.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“One common misconception in economics involves confusing value and price. The mere fact that humans willingly choose to engage in exchange shows that this notion is untenable. If a person pays $10 for a good, she is not valuing it at $10, she is valuing it at more than $10 because she willingly gives up $10 in exchange for the good. The seller, on the other hand, clearly values the good at less than $10, as he willingly gives it up for that amount.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“The sacrifice of present consumption by capital owners in exchange for future reward is economically no different from the sacrifice of leisure by workers in exchange for future reward.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“Individuals and ideologies that decry the evils of capital are impotently and ignorantly railing against the inevitability of the human mind resorting to using tools to achieve its ends.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“Labor, as a resource, is very precious precisely because it competes with leisure for the scarcest of resources—human time.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics

“He must economize it as he economizes other scarce factors. The economization of time has a peculiar character because of the uniqueness and irreversibility of the temporal order.”
― Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics