Economic Facts and Fallacies Quotes

“Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or where we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“While “greed” is one of the most popular—and most fallacious—explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives, when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay in the slightest. Any serious explanation of corporate executives’ salaries must be based on the reasons for those salaries being offered, not the reasons why the recipients desire them.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“What is called “planning” in political rhetoric is the government’s suppression of other people’s plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“The more highly competitive the market for labor and for the employer’s products, the higher the cost paid for discrimination and consequently the less leeway the employer has for indulging his prejudices without risking his own profits and ultimately the financial survival of the business. On the other hand, enterprises not subject to the full stress of a competitive market—monopolies, non-profit enterprises, government agencies—have greater leeway.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“It has often been claimed that there has been very little change in the average real income of American households over a period of decades. It is an undisputed fact that the average real income—that is, money income adjusted for inflation—of American households rose by only 6 percent over the entire period from 1969 to 1996. That might well be considered to qualify as stagnation. But it is an equally undisputed fact that the average real income per person in the United States rose by 51 percent over that very same period.3 How can both these statistics be true? Because the average number of individuals per household has been declining over the years. Half the households in the United States contained six or more people in 1900, as did 21 percent in 1950. But, by 1998, only ten percent of American households had that many people.4 The average number of persons per household not only varies over time, it also varies from one racial or ethnic group to another at a given time, and varies from one income bracket to another. As of 2007, for example, black household income was lower than Hispanic household income, even though black per capita income was higher than Hispanic per capita income, because black households average fewer people than Hispanic households. Similarly, Asian American household income was higher than white household income, even though white per capita income was higher than Asian American per capita income, because Asian American households average more people.5 Income comparisons using household statistics are far less reliable indicators of standards of living than are individual income data because households vary in size while an individual always means one person. Studies of what people actually consume—that is, their standard of living—show substantial increases over the years, even among the poor,6 which is more in keeping with a 51 percent increase in real per capita income than with a 6 percent increase in real household income. But household income statistics present golden opportunities for fallacies to flourish, and those opportunities have been seized by many in the media, in politics, and in academia.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions. China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to “restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture.”28”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“In the Occident the city has been the greatest opportunity and the worst influence; a place of creation and decay, of freedom and subjection, of riches and poverty, of splendor and misery, of communion and lonesomeness—an optimal milieu for talent, character, vice and corruption. Eric Hoffer”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“In a multibillion dollar corporation, one person’s business decisions can easily make a difference of millions—or even billions—of dollars, compared to someone else’s decisions. Those who see paying such a person $10 million or $20 million a year as coming at the expense of consumers or stockholders have implicitly accepted the zero-sum view of economics. If the value of the services rendered exceeds the pay, then both consumers and stockholders are better off, not worse off, whether the person hired is a corporate CEO or a production line employee.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on woman and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence—as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“While families had incentives to curtail women’s work outside the home, employers had countervailing incentives to try to tap this large potential source of workers. Early New England mill owners, for example, tried to reassure parents of the safety and propriety of letting their daughters work in their businesses by having all-female workforces, often overseen by older women who in effect were chaperons, especially when the young women lived away from home.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“The replacement of human muscle by machine power, and the growing importance of industries and occupations not dependent on either, have made sex differences and age differences no longer as significant as they had once been.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“No matter how much is done to promote health, more could be done. No matter how safe things have been made, they could be made safer. And no matter how much open space there is, there could be still more. Obvious as this may seem, there are advocates, movements, laws, and policies promoting an open-ended commitment to more of each of these things, without any indication of a limit, or any principle by which a limit might be set, much less any consideration of alternative uses of the resources that some people want devoted to whatever desirable thing they are promoting.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Many desirable things are advocated without regard to the most fundamental fact of economics, that resources are inherently limited and have alternative uses. Who could be against health, safety, or open space? But each of these things is open-ended, while resources are not only limited but have alternative uses which are also valuable.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Perhaps the most detrimental consequences of the implicit assumption of zero-sum transactions have been in poor countries that have kept out foreign trade and foreign investments, in order to avoid being “exploited.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“In short, reducing the set of mutually acceptable terms tends to reduce the set of mutually acceptable results, with both tenants and landlords ending up worse off on the whole, though in different ways.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“The end result was that people stopped investing in apartment buildings, and a huge shortage in rentals and housing forced many Egyptians to live in horrible conditions with several families sharing one small apartment. The effects of the harsh rent control is still felt today in Egypt. Mistakes like that can last for generations.2”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“voluntary economic transactions—whether between employer and employee, tenant and landlord, or international trade—would not continue to take place unless both parties were better off making these transactions than not making them.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with “social justice,” “equality,” and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups—all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Money is simply an artificial device to provide incentives for economic behavior affecting the production of real wealth.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Since all countries around the world began poor, what requires an explanation is not why there is poverty but how some countries rose out of poverty to become prosperous.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Among the many preconceptions that cannot be subjected to any empirical test because they are so subjective is the notion that third-party observers know better what is good for people than those people know themselves.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Attempting to control simultaneously for part-time versus full-time employment and for the effect of children and domestic responsibilities, another study found “that the gender pay gap is 5 percent for part-time workers age 21–35 without children, under 3 percent for full-time workers age 21–35 without children, and that there is no pay gap for full-time workers age 21–35 living alone.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Put differently, how much of male-female differences in income has been due to employer discrimination and how much to other differences arising from social restrictions or other factors is a question rather than a foregone conclusion. Many social restrictions, especially in the past, have been based on attempts to forestall problems growing out of the attraction of the sexes for one another.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

“Women’s rise in higher-level occupations in the second half of the twentieth century continued to follow the rise in their age of marriage, which rose sharply and finished the century significantly higher than it was at the beginning,14 while the birth rate fell sharply and was much lower at the end of the century than it was at the beginning.15 As the age of first marriage climbed to record high levels, women rose to record high levels in higher education and higher occupations.”
― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies