An early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability — the difficulty that those who pay for informat… - Joseph E. Stiglitz

Advocates of the Austrian tradition often defend the lack of formal modeling and the corresponding absence of formal efficiency theorems: The market economy is an organic process, too complicated to be reduced to the simplistic formal models. The job of the economists is to describe this organic process and to see the kinds of impediments that the absence of a legal structure, on the one hand, or excessive government intervention, on the other, might impose for it. But while they may not resort to, or even like, the standard welfare criterion of Pareto optimality, there are strong normative overtones in their discussions. Darwin may have thought that he was simply describing the evolutionary process when he asserted that it resulted in the survival of the fittest, but such statements require a definition of the "fittest" and an analysis of the general equilibrium, dynamic properties of the system. Today we recognize that evolutionary processes, under a wide variety of circumstances, may not possess "efficiency" properties.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.