Adam Davidson Quotes

"Economics is all about consumption. People either spend money now or they use financial instruments - like bonds, stocks and savings accounts - so they can spend more later."

"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."

"The world I want to live in is a world where everybody is a bit more uncertain about their arguments and is a bit more open to other people's arguments. I think that we can engage ideas without ad hominem attacks."

"The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us."

"Unlike physics, economists don't settle things. There seems to be plenty of room for different conclusions that are still accepted in the academy."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless."

"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."

"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."

"If an alien with an accounting degree touched down in America, it might conclude that we're a weird cult that spends 11 months living frugally and four crazy weeks buying tons of stuff we don't need. It wouldn't be entirely wrong, either."

"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."

"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."

"Lots of countries have great constitutions, but their leaders have a practice of ignoring the rules whenever they feel like it."

"We can fight over what the taxation levels should be, but the tax system should be very, very simple and not distortionary."

"'The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq,' by Hanna Batatu. Few may wish to take on this massive, obscure work, but it changed my life, and I love it."

"If your business is really easy to do, don't gloat. You might be out of a job soon."

"I'm not the first to admit that raising a child in Park Slope, Brooklyn, can bear an embarrassing resemblance to the TV show 'Portlandia.' My wife and I try to have some ironic distance from the culture of organic, chemical-free parenting, but we're often participants."

"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."

"The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information."

"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."

"Art is often valuable precisely because it isn't a sensible way to make money."

"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."

"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."

"When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree."

"The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time."

"To put it simply and a bit crudely: Our economy is demanding more well-educated workers than our schools are providing. To attract this scarce resource, communities have to offer more than just jobs."

"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."

"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."