John Komlos Quotes

[O]ur starting point should not be Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but his Theory of Moral Sentiments... that we possess an innate empathy toward our fellow human beings. Morality and ethical principles... We ought not expunge these from the economics canon.

Blackboard economists said that globalization would be good for Americans. ...It had a few winners and... many losers. ...It ...led to an epidemic of Deaths of Despair in which so much was destroyed in America. Hyper-globalization destroyed... neighborhoods and cities and everything in the ... It was like an atomic bomb hit... Alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses accelerated... the destruction of human lives.

[Oligarchs] are spending a lot of money on lobbies to influence government, and... the laws are made to benefit those that already are privileged.

[E]conomics—despite the extensive use of mathematics—will not be a rigorous discipline until it is based... on verifiable empirical evidence.

[I]f we're not able to shift our paradigms, if we are stuck in the Arrow–Debreu world, then we're going to become the neoserfs of the oligarchs. Just like Aldous Huxley predicted in his novel, a Brave New World

[E]conomics ought to aspire to... a just society... in which compassion is as important as efficiency, if not more so.

Being isolated from markets... had its advantages as long as the population density did not exceed the carrying capacity of the land, because subsistence peasants/farmers had little choice but to consume all of their own food output. Once they became integrated... they had to compete with other segments of the population for food, which tended to impinge on their nutritional intake...

Economists disregard the... crucial result that people can be conditioned and... corporations can take advantage of that.

The recent election of Donald Trump was fueled by... an economic system that skews its benefits to a select few and leaves too many... scrambling to eke out a bare existence.

Status seeking is important. Relative incomes matter... Mainstream... economists said inequality was not a problem, and that's how we got an oligarchy [and populism].

[N]utritional advantages of the were quite pronounced by the early eighteenth century. Thereafter, the height of the American population was above European norms until the mid-twentieth century, confirming the extent to which the new... environment was favorable from a human biological point of view.

Greenspan... out of hand and cold-bloodedly thwarted [warnings of , , Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Joseph Stiglitz, Nassim Taleb, John Taylor, and] 's valiant efforts to regulate derivatives a decade before the meltdown.

[A] more unequal distribution in income will have a negative effect on the mean height of a population.

Taxes are not all bad. ...[T]axes are used for infrastructure investments, for schooling, for basic research, and to bail out markets when they go haywire.

I consider my views to be progressive, democratic, and humanitarian. ...[W]e could restructure the economy ...to improve our lives by focusing on increasing our life satisfaction instead of on income growth.