John Komlos Quotes

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...

In the United States, beginning with the birth cohorts of the 1830s, adult male stature declined, by more than two centimeters. Men appear to have been quite underweight... an average... of 126 pounds... in their late teen-age years, even though... the economy was expanding rapidly... (between 1840 and 1870, per capita net national product increased by more than 40%). In the Hapsburg Monarchy, the decline in stature during the second half of the eighteenth century was between three and five centimeters. A similar pattern was found for industrializing Montreal. The birth weight of infants there fell after the 1870s, indicating that the nutritional status of mothers was declining.

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.

The ideological commitment to "," ...has brought us to our current, precarious situation.

The US became a dual economy... which generated a lot of despair. Half the population is doing well and the other half is getting by... or getting by in very difficult circumstances... Trump would not have won otherwise in 2016. That's the basis of the Trump revolution... against... the political elite, the foreign policy elite, the intellectual elites.

[H]umanistic economics advocates a creation of a capitalism with a human face. That requires a paradigm shift... away from a rat race, [away from] a social Darwinistic economy with a few winners and many losers.

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.

Although scientists have been interested in the study of human height from a medical, biological, or anthropological point of view for centuries, economic historians became aware of the implications of quantifying al status only recently.

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].

[T]eachers of economics should admit... that while markets do well in some circumstances they only do so within an appropriate institutional framework and... in others... [they] often tip the stream of benefits toward a few insiders.

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.

[W]e should begin... economic analysis with empirical evidence instead rather than on ivory-tower theorizing.

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.

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...

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.