John Komlos Quotes

[W]e cannot help but... to organize our thoughts without making some fundamental assumptions... a function of our... mindset, worldview... intellectual and emotional commitments... [that] influence... ideas developed in the discipline.

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

[F]our economists have received Nobel Prizes for Behavioral economics... [T]hat should be the default model. ...Forget about rationality. That's a silly assumption.

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.

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.

People are not rational. Mainstream economics is pre-Freudian... because they don't think about the subconscious mind. Daniel Kahneman... has proven that rationality is impossible for mortals, human beings [with finite minds]... We're not superhuman.

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

[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.

means that many processes are non-reversible... Poor people who go to poor schools... can't get into college and their whole life course is messed up...

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...

[I]n the United States... southerners were 1.5 cm taller than men of the more industrialized North, even though the per capita income was greater in the North. ...Although England had a higher per capita income... as much as 25%, its soldiers were shorter than those of the United States in the eighteenth century. A century later, Irish recruits into the Union Army were taller than soldiers born in England, although English per capital income was... higher...

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.

Because the price of a calorie is much greater if purchased through meat... there was a tendency to substitute away from meat consumption during the early phases of industrialization. This caused the intake of protein... to fall, making it difficult... to fight off nutrition-sensitive diseases.

People who are cheaters, swindlers who can take advantage, especially of poor people... [who] do not have the education... the information. They cannot afford to buy the information so they get the short end of the stick... [O]pportunistic behavior is a big problem in the economy, and economists are not paying... attention...

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