# Quote — Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

> Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

- Author: [Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson.md)
- Book: [Red Mars](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars.md)
- Page: 297
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson#Red_Mars_(1992)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/anyway-thats-a-large

## More from this book

> In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

p. 431 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/in-games-there.md)

> The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short. But useful idiots.

p. 395 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/the-weakness-of-businessmen.md)

> “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.”
>
> Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!”

p. 88 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/red-mars/being-on-mars.md)