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daveshap / PostLaborEconomics

Collaborative book to promote the idea of Post Labor Economics
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Thomas Sowell quote #13

Open Vacyyyy opened 5 months ago

Vacyyyy commented 5 months ago

I do not have access to "Basic Economy" by Thomas Sowell, where I assume the quote in The simplest definition of “the economy” according to Thomas Sowell is “the allocation of scarce resources with multiple uses.” comes from. Can anyone confirm the source of the quote. I actually could only find this, which states the quote, or something quite similar at least, comes from Lionel Robbins.

daveshap commented 5 months ago

I will get my copy of the book. It's likely that Thomas was quoting Lionel as you discovered.

guillermo-delrio commented 5 months ago

I found it on Thomas' 4th edition of Basic Economics: A common sense guide to the economy, Chapter 1:

Different kinds of economies are essentially different ways of making decisions about the allocation of scarce resources—and those decisions have repercussions on the life of the whole society.

daveshap commented 5 months ago

"Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses." - Lionel Robbins - this is the exact definition, which Sowell was quoting. So we can attribute it to Robbins.

SleeplessOrphan commented 5 months ago

The quote is “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”

This is the full reference for Robbins' quote

Robbins L. (1935). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: MacMillan and Co

There is an interesting paper here on the topic.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3275781/

Ta, Kirsten