John Komlos Quotes

[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.

The character is formed during the first few years of life, and the corporations have an impact on the way we think... so ... is not realistic, because producers spend an incredible amount of money in order to condition children and youth to drink Coca-Cola, to depend on the iPhone, to go to hamburger joints, to McDonald's... So adult economics, forget it! You've got to start the analysis with children, and that means that tastes are endogenous [determined within the economic system! ...The assumption of exogenous tastes is toxic.]

I hope the present volume can... improve the teaching of economics by presenting a real-world perspective as opposed to the fantasy world of mainstream textbooks.

Greenspan and Benjamin Bernanke... ignored the evidence because they were blinded by their ideology and the infallibility of the markets. They were prisoners of their own ideology.

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].

George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Krugman, Thomas Schelling, Herbert Simon, Robert Shiller, Joseph Stiglitz, , and Oliver Williamson... these Nobel Prize winning economists... are usually excluded from mainstream Econ 101 textbooks or relegated to obscure footnotes. ...[I]ntroductory textbooks hype a free-market utopia ...Hence ...do not help to understand the essentials of the real existing market economies... Rather, they present a caricature at a level of abstraction that creates a fantasy world and distorts the student's vision... [A] stereotype that markets are efficient... automatically leading to a blissful life, and they continue to sing the praises... keeping any demurrals muted.

Here is the , 2008... the assets of the Federal Reserve is under $1 trillion... and within weeks you have more than a doubling of the assets of the Federal Reserve, and then comes 2 and... 3 and by that time you're at $4 1/2 trillion... and then... comes the Covid crisis and we're up to $7 trillion. Now... that kind of a Capitalism is unsustainable. ...[N]o wonder that there is asset inflation as a consequence... and the stock market went through the roof.

[I]n 2016. ...Trump ...said ...this is a good economy ...tremendous, we've never had it so good... but... people do not kill themselves [or kill strangers] to the extent of 150,000 people per annum in a good economy. You've got to generate a lot of despair in order to do that...

[E]conomics cannot be purged of ideology...

We're not s. We live in a society and we're influenced by social forces, social processes, and that's not included in the DSGE models.

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

The financial crisis of 2008 illustrated... how markets often go haywire, yet textbooks remain unchanged, failing to convey the fundamental flaws and systematic weaknesses of the free-market system.

[Imperfect information is ubiquitous.] People with more [or better] information can take advantage of people with less information, so exploitation becomes a real possibility.

They were also disregarding the real true unemployment rate... even in January of 2016, among African Americans 16%... were unemployed... so this is not full employment... and by education, among African Americans [those who did not finish high school] 32% were unemployed. Now you know why the George Floyds get into trouble with the law. They are not able to find their place in the legal labor market. ...So this is what Marty Feldstein and Donald Trump think of [as] a good economy. Not in my view!

[M]ainstream economics is fundamentally flawed [and] ignores the elephant in the room, which is the real existing economy.