In This Economy? Quotes

“Just as the value of money is a collective belief, the behavior of every market is determined by the collective decisions of millions of investors based on their perceptions of reality. Markets reflect the foibles (and triumphs!) of human behavior and decision-making.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“We do know that the Mesopotamians charged interest on loans before they discovered how to put wheels on carts.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“When you first start paying off a traditional fixed-rate mortgage, a larger portion of your monthly payment goes toward paying off the interest, not the principal. This is because the interest is calculated based on the remaining balance of the loan, which is highest at the beginning. As you continue to make payments, the principal amount reduces. Thus the interest calculated on this decreasing principal also reduces. Over time, a greater portion of your monthly payment goes toward the principal, allowing you to pay off the loan more quickly as you advance through the mortgage term.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Barbara Alice Mann of the University of Toledo wrote, “Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumph: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in!” Fairness is subjective, and the balance of equality and equity is a delicate dance. But in regard to housing, supply has always been the problem. The core fact of the housing issue is that we need more of it, but there needs to be an evolution of regulations in order to make that happen.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Barbara Alice Mann of the University of Toledo wrote, “Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumph: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in!”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“When we give people space to process things that happen around them and to them, they can make better decisions. When they make better decisions, they are able to do cooler things. Social safety nets are not bad things; they enable people to grow into what they have the potential to be.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Money begets more money. And what happens when you become really wealthy is that you get into investing. Though most Americans’ net worth is tied up in their homes, the very wealthy hold a majority of their wealth in stocks and private businesses.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Workers who hold stock in a company have a stake in what they make and are more likely to feel invested in the company’s success. They aren’t working to make billions of dollars for five dudes in suits in a boardroom somewhere; rather, they are working to make money for themselves. This enables them to build wealth over time and creates a much more inclusive and equitable economy.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“If someone can’t afford a stable place to live, life becomes very hard. When there is a disconnect between security and existence, it becomes much more difficult to function. If people’s basic needs aren’t being met, they can’t focus on much else. With more time to think and more time to process, they make better choices and their stability increases. Safety delivers returns. Security creates growth. It is imperative to invest in people—and that begins with paying them a living wage.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“I know the last few years of economic news have been… disorienting. Reality feels almost like a dream state. That’s because the algorithms controlling our news feeds reward alarmism over objectivity, and the Fed—and all other central banks, for that matter—purposefully speaks in vague, wordy language—known as Fedspeak, defined by the economist Alan Blinder as “a turgid dialect of English”—in an attempt to stop the markets from overreacting, and with the unfortunate side effect of confusing everyone.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Why is it that we’ve become so much better at things like engineering and physics, but not economics? There could be all kinds of answers to that question, but a big one is that economics is one of the few fields that requires equal parts precise technical knowledge and an appreciation for how messy, flawed, emotional, and irrational people can be.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“If a bottle of aged grape piss can sell for thousands of dollars, what other trillion dollar industries and worldviews are constructed on a foundation of mass preference falsification and status driven self-deception?”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The way that we think about the economy is going to have to evolve. It probably can’t be based on Big Growth forever. As economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas wrote in 2022, “As trend GDP growth slows due to aging demographics and slower productivity gains, there may be more frequent periods of negative GDP growth without an increase in unemployment, making the distinction between increasing slack and declining activity more relevant than in the past.” (Author’s emphasis.)”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it—information is not knowledge. And history is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Lack of cooperation and doomerism are heavy on the spirit—and they can drown us in ineptitude if we aren’t careful. So how do we fix it?”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The writer and director Paul Auster touched on the complex nature of understanding others, underscoring the necessity of communication in his book The Invention of Solitude: Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely. I do not want to presume anything.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“We have a surplus of things we don’t need and a shortage of things we do need. We need more workers. We need more homes. We need more public transit. We need more green energy. We need, we need, we need. This endless cycle of “need” can be exhausting to hear because a lot of this is not things that the average person can really go out and fix. If someone could flip a switch that helps enact policy around immigration reform and nuclear power plants, that would be amazing! But it takes collective action to achieve anything substantial.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“George Saunders wrote in Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, “Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“We are increasingly forgetting about our commonalities. Many people have explored the disintegration of communities that has come with suburbanization and social media-ization, but it’s becoming increasingly stark. The complexity scientist Peter Turchin explored this in his 2013 piece “The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America,” and so many parts of it still ring true: “What we have then, is a ‘strange disappearance’ of cooperation at all levels within the American society: from the neighborhood bowling leagues to the national-level economic and political institutes.” We are breaking away from one another. This is not a novel phenomenon—as the piece outlines, the same thing happened in ancient and medieval empires. However, polarization is bad; it leads to less progress and eventual stagnation.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“How well people expect stocks and cryptocurrencies to perform has a role in how they do perform in the long run. So reality is really about expectations. The economy is made up of people, right? So it checks out that what people think is going to happen (expectations) will drive their behavior (reality) and thus the Fed’s response (policy). I mean technically, we are all the Federal Reserve.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There’s a short memoir called The Crane Wife by C. J. Hauser. Hauser had recently broken off an engagement and headed to Texas to study whooping cranes for a novel. This is what she says: Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind. It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? (Author’s emphasis.)”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There’s a short memoir called The Crane Wife by C. J. Hauser. Hauser had recently broken off an engagement and headed to Texas to study whooping cranes for a novel. This is what she says: Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Here’s the secret, though: Inflation doesn’t need to be 2 percent all the time. It’s simply the general direction in which things are meant to be headed. And to be clear, we don’t know what it takes to get down to 2 percent and we don’t know if 2 percent is the right target in the first place. As are other things in this book: it’s uncertain.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There are a lot of examples of central banks losing their independence, as political interference begins to influence monetary policy. “In Turkey, central bank independence is now an endangered species,” political scientists writing in Foreign Policy warned in 2022. As of the time of writing of this book, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has fired three bank governors who disagreed with his economic agenda, packing the bench with loyalists who enable his meddling. Despite surging inflation peaking at 85.5 percent in October 2022, Erdoğan pushed to lower interest rates dramatically, a puzzling move that defied economic orthodoxy. Naturally, this has raised concerns about the central bank’s ability to maintain price stability independently and do its job well.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The Fed was established and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. (His wife, Edith Wilson, who was also the first woman to hold a driver’s license in Washington, D.C., probably played an outsized role. When Woodrow collapsed from a stroke in 1919, Edith Wilson took the helm of the ship, making decisions on behalf of the president and serving as his filter and access control point. She reviewed documents, worked with advisers, and went to meetings, acting as a pseudopresident in the day-to-day operations of the country. So it might seem as though it was just another group of dudes deciding the fate of the future, but perhaps the story is more complicated than that.)”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There should be no doubt by now that markets, economists, and pretty much everyone for the past generation has underrated the power/utility/capacity of fiscal policy, and overrated the power/utility/capacity of monetary policy.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work