Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
Trickle-down economics - it didn't work. The whole idea was supply-side economics: give rich people a lot of money; they'll spend it, it'll go into the economy. Here's what we found out - rich people, really good at keeping all the money. That's how they got rich. If you want it in the economy, give it to the poor people. You know what they're really good at? Spending all their money.
I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.
If you make a really good product that people want and are willing to pay for, money will come.
The normal metric of measuring progress has actually been the rate of growth, OK? It's not a wrong metric, but it's not a full metric.
High Frontier places a bullet-proof vest on our bare chest. High Frontier is as non-aggressive as a bullet-proof vest. There is no way to kill anyone with High Frontier - all that High Frontier can do is to keep others from killing us.
If you really want love, ask for it. Those who are willing to ask are often the ones who receive.
Eat what you want to eat, but just be willing to pay the price. If you know you want to eat more cake or more cookies, be willing to work out a lil bit more. I think that's the problem people have is you want to eat bad, but yet you don't want to pay the price to work it off.
People actually have the nerve to ask me if I want to go to a haunted house. Why would I want to go to a place where I have to pay my money for creepy strangers to be able to harass me without legal repercussions?
There's a notion of art in this country that you have to be nutty or special or "called" in order to be an artist. I believe the questions everyone should ask themselves are, "Do you want to do it? Are you willing to do it poorly? Are you willing to do the work of doing it? Are you willing to persist when everybody tells you it's silly?" If you're willing to do that, then you can do it.
I'm actually very ordinary, except people get to pay their money to come watch me work. The same way that we go to McDonald's.. we don't care about the guy behind the counter, but if he was doing something special, we'd pay our money to go watch him cook that hamburger.
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
Work begets work. Just work. If you work, people will find out about you and want to work with you if you're good. So work anywhere you can. That's why I've changed my mind about these theatres where people work for free or have to pay money. I think it's kind of terrible that they feel they have to, but you know what? They're working.
Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
People are still willing to do an honest day's work. The trouble is they want a week's pay for it.
People want the answer to cancer, and they're not going to get it without spending money, because money is frozen energy that unfreezes itself when you pay people to work.
Despite all the taxes people pay, there supposedly isn't any money in this country for art. Of course, this makes an artist ask himself: "Well, then, what are you doing with the 100 million I pay each year? What happened to that money?" And he doesn't get an answer.