Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (ISBN 0-465-08143-6) is a 2003 nonfiction work by economist Thomas Sowell.
Sowell discuss how basic economics is generally misapplied because politicians think only in Stage One. Stage One is the immediate result of an action, without determining what happens then. He argues that many politicians cannot see beyond Stage One because they do not think beyond the next election. He gives as an example of Stage One Thinking, a State government which raises taxes on a business. The immediate result is more revenue for the State government. However, over the course of time, that business might move bits and pieces of the company to another state or new businesses may choose another state to place a new factory. Over the course of time, the State will lose revenue because businesses will go to other states.
Famous quotes containing the words applied, thinking and/or stage:
“A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Learning without thinking is labor lost; thinking without learning is dangerous.”
—Chinese proverb.
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)