John Komlos Quotes

Deregulation was supposed to make the economy more efficient... but instead it led to the financial crisis... and Blackboard Economists did not even see the crisis coming when it was around the corner.

Anthropometric history... has the advantage of having an abundant evidential basis beginning with the seventeenth century... This approach acknowledges... the inherent multidimensionality of the concept "" and asserts that the several dimensions might not move synchronously, and therefore they ought not to be collapsed into a single indicator...

[F]ree markets, being a human invention, often become dysfunctional; they do not deserve our blind faith.

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.

The meltdown of 2008 was a wasted crisis... because the homeowners were not bailed out. The financial sector was bailed out, the banks... the bankers... but... 8 million homeowners were thrown out of their homes.

In all studies without exception, the positive relationship between social status and physical stature has been consistently documented in various societies and at different times. ...[E]ven in egalitarian America, social standing affected height throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the wake of the New Deal, these effects became less pronounced as became less skewed.

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.

[W]ith 250 years of growth... we... have 78% of the US workers living from paycheck to paycheck. No savings. ...40% of adults do not have $400 for an emergency expense.

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.

was supposed to be good for the economy. It meant small government, low taxes, trickle down economics, , and all of these turned out to be bad... The slogan was to starve the beast... the government...

Wealth is... political power... and that's how we got from a democracy, to an oligarchy, to a plutocracy. Economists forgot completely about the need for countervailing power... and the oligarchs have taken over...

The importance of is accentuated by the debate over the course of the material standard of living during the early phases of the industrial revolution, when food consumption still accounted for as much as three-fourths of total income among the laboring classes, even in the most advanced European societies.

So why were economists so wrong? The problem is that economics is an axiomatic theory, it's deductive, based on assumptions almost all of which are false [with] too many omitted factors, and they don't care about contradictions. They don't care about people killing themselves... That's not an economic problem.

Friedrich Hayek made a tremendous mistake in arguing that The Road to Serfdom leads through tyrannical governments... because there are multiple roads to serfdom... [A]nother... leads through the tyranny of oligarchs.

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