Economicus Quotes & Sayings

A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income. — Lord Chesterfield

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. — Ivan Illich

You have to remember what's most important in life. I am loved by so many people and have a wonderful job. I know I'm incredibly blessed. I am a completely lucky human being. — Troian Bellisario

I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops.
If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually. — Rosa Brooks

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area but leave him intact ...
He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down on him, whereupon he follows he line of the resultant — Thorstein Veblen

Economics, as it is often taught today, portrays us as homo economicus-someone who doesn't vote in presidential elections, doesn't return lost wallets, and doesn't leave tips when dining out of town. Julie Nelson reminds us that most people aren't really like that. She helps point the way to a richer, more descriptive way of thinking about economic life. — Robert H. Frank

Be reflective ... and stay away from the theater as much as you can. Stay out of the theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, its corroding influence. Once become — Minnie Maddern Fiske

It's paramount we take ownership of our lives. Sadness is greatly due to our having sacrificed ourselves over to a power outside of ourselves. We need to be proactive in creating positive thoughts and actions that will align ourselves with where we want to be and what we want to feel in life. — Kaiden Blake

We are, after all, homo economicus. — Charles Stross

A bulger of a place it is. The number of the ships beat me all hollow, and looked for all the world like a big clearing in the West, with the dead trees all standing. — Davy Crockett

But if all maximizing models are really arguing is that "people will always seek to maximize something," then they obviously can't predict anything, which means employing them can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It's called "cynicism." Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it "science. — David Graeber

In effect, the poor person is a rich person left to fend for him or herself, without the support of institutions that help the person to take 'good' decisions. — Rabbi Cohen