The Wisdom of My IPE Prof

"Anyone who sends me another email saying the website doesn't work...will be shot."

"Comparative advantage means what you suck at least. It's not what you do best it's what you suck least at. Someone told me that in a few years everything will be made in China and the US will go broke. An absurd argument, of course, but the Chinese do everything better."

"Markets didn't evolve because a despot said, [funny voice] 'I like to watch these markets. I find them very intriguing. They give me knick naks, and such!"

"The special thing about Europe was there was a market for ideas, so if someone was kicked out of England he could go to a university in France and they could advertise - the famous heretic will be giving a lecture tonight, and you'd all go to that one, right?"

"The state is like a toaster."

"It's clear that some people's lives were far less affected by Katrina than others, even though it's never nice losing all your shit."

"You buy the ability to use something, not the thing itself. For instance you don't buy a dishwasher just so you can go around bragging to everyone that you OWN a dishwasher. And you don't have unlimited control over it; you don't go around selling shares of the dishwasher to family members, or to other people in the neighborhood."

"One of the main tragedies for political economists is that the people who really increase the growth of an an economy are so much less sexy than the people who, in fact, ignore the rule of law and the protection of property rights and thus promote an unfavorable environment in which to do business. Have you seen 'Pirates of the Caribbean'? Well, the love interest, the blacksmith Will Turner, played by Orlando Bloom, is a business owner, somone who will have an increasing marginal value (? can't remember what he said here... some econ babble) and her father is therefore quite right to support the marriage, but all the attention goes to Captain Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp, even though his activities greatly increase the risk of investors in trading ships back home in England and the likelyhood that a profit would be made on the transaction. And this is really emphasized in a scene at the end when Elizabeth, played by Keira Knightley, decides to marry Will Turner and he says 'I'm only a blacksmith' and the last line of the film is 'No, you are a pirate!' So that's very disheartening for us."

"The mercantilist partnership is the trading pants of capitalism."

"You probably have an image of the industrial revolution in your head as being a time when everyone was poor and exploited and the streets of London were crowded with pickpockets and grubby urchins and the factories with their black smoke polluting the air, a very Dickensian vision, when...when everything was just knee-deep in shit."

"The world was so sparsely populated, imagine a dorm, you're duking it out with your roommate whenever you want to have sex, but there's all the other rooms in the building available for your use!"

"Capitalism is about doing business with strangers because when we see people from far away speaking with funny voices with different color skins our initial reaction is to make fun of them, and to kill them."