Economist Quotes

Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed. ~ Michael Lewis

...she was, after all, a practical woman and the daughter of an economist. ~ Mary Doria Russell

But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts. ~ Paul Ormerod

The joint committee invited economists of many economic stripes to model what would happen if America switched from the current code to a unified income tax or a consumption tax. Every economist who modeled reported that the consumption tax would increase long-term economic growth. ~ Neal Boortz

Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other. ~ Harry S. Truman

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals. ~ Benjamin Graham

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse. ~ Hazel Henderson

The economists will have to revise their theories of value. ~ Albert Einstein

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences. ~ Gary Becker

All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things. ~ Victor Cousin

My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot. ~ Jennifer Gilmore

For those of you who may be unaware, [Michael] Boskin is the economist/weasel/fraud who helped to officially distort the CPI, making it more or less worthless as a measure of inflation. The Boskin Commission ... was an act of cowardice. Rather than man up and say fix this, its broken, we can't afford it ... ~ Barry Ritholtz

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires.
Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of th ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography. ~ Sebastiao Salgado

'The Economist' is a biased organization. ~ Ali Babacan

Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10.6 trillion.) At the rate money flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for the next four years. ~ Michael Lewis

The five stages of model development. - Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn't work. - Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist ~ Sam L. Savage

I'm an economist by training. I don't really work as an economist. I only worked briefly as an economist. ~ Ben Stein

(At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained that housework was the only job that had not been modernized.) ~ Ann Jones

The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it. ~ Andy Hargreaves

The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist. ~ Tim Jackson

Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre. ~ Harold Innis

If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me. ~ Clayton Christensen

What makes a terrorist? Are the drivers primarily political or economic? Princeton economist Alan Krueger has made a great study of this question ... What Makes a Terrorist lacks a question mark. That's because Krueger, marshaling persuasive statistics and analysis, comes down firmly on the side of politics, noting most terrorists are middle-class and well-educated. ~ Thomas P.M. Barnett

When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves. ~ Jerry Brown

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, ~ Paul Kalanithi

We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense. ~ Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Universally, the better gold the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold mine country that is traversed by good roads, or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

But that is the strange thing about the future. Nothing ages faster than yesterday's dreams of tomorrow. ~ The Economist

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'm not going to put my lot in with economists. ~ Hillary Clinton

Easterly, a celebrated economist, presents one side in what has become an ongoing debate with fellow star-economist Jeffrey Sachs about the role of international aid in global poverty. Easterly argues that existing aid strategies have not and will not reduce poverty, because they don't seriously take into account feedback from those who need the aid and because they perpetuate western colonial tendencies. ~ Amy Lockwood

I had a choice. I could become an economist & managing director. I choose to do something else. I would have become much, much richer than I am. I choose to not do that. It's that simple. ~ Odd Nerdrum

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. ~ John Maynard Keynes

There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth
Galbraith offers an economic explanation for "the persistence of the view of homemaking as a 'higher calling'": the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, "has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue. ~ Naomi Wolf

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are. ~ Nate Silver

English majors understand human nature better than economists do. ~ Jane Smiley

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible. ~ Alfred A. Knopf

survival of the fittest" - which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer ~ Douglas Brinkley

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. ~ Laurence J. Peter

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state. ~ Noam Chomsky

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful. ~ Paul Krugman

academic literature. Major influences on my thinking include Douglass North, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on institutions; the pre-eminent economist of modern Africa, Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Plundered Planet; Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital; Andrei Shleifer and his numerous co-authors, who have pioneered an economic approach to the comparative study of legal systems; and Jim Robinson and Daron Acemoglu, whose book Why Nations Fail asks similar questions to the ones that interest me. ~ Niall Ferguson

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk. ~ Richard Thaler

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. ~ Frederic Bastiat

In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source
next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. ~ Friedrich Engels

Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa saw markedly increasing literacy rates, accompanied with a decrease in their standard of living. We can multiply the examples (Pritchet's study is quite thorough), but I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon here again. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them. ~ Christian Rudder

With various people complaining about "price gouging? ... economist Walter Williams has coined a new term: "Tax gouging." But government is never accused of either "greed" or "gouging" ? not even when they bulldoze people's homes in order to turn. ~ Thomas Sowell

payment, an economist was included in the product-design team. Microeconomists no longer just study how existing firms work, they help design new ones. ~ Anonymous

At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions. ~ John Rawls

Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't. ~ Robert Orben

The institutional arrangement whereby most professional economists are heavily burdened with teaching and administrative duties may militate against a sufficient admixture of the more laborious forms of statistical and field work. ~ Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod

Launching an innovative premium jelly bouillon into a highly competitive market at the height of austerity, for example, might not have been thought the wisest move. Yet with people eating out less, the demand for high-quality convenience products that enable people to cook at home has grown. As ~ Jaideep Prabhu, Paul Polman, The Economist Navi Radjou

One speaks with great respect of economists, if only because they represent such a variety of opinions. ~ Robert Menzies

Economist should be spelled echonomist, because they all repeat each other. ~ Jarod Kintz

Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921,45 is something that you can put a price on. Say that you'll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11.46 This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a "bad beat" in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you'll make a profit from your opponents making desperate draws with insufficient odds. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure. You might have some vague awareness of the demons lurking out there. You might even be acutely concerned about them. But you have no real idea how many of them there are or when they might strike. Your back-of-the-envelope estimate might be off by a factor of 100 or by a factor of 1,000; there is no good way to know. This is uncertainty. Risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt. ~ Nate Silver

I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news. ~ Tim Harford

If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory. ~ Ronald Reagan

Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is "one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books" because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers. ~ David Horowitz

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying. ~ Noam Chomsky

People today don't become economists to make the world a better place. ~ Tim Harford

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. ~ Daniel M. Gilbert

Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does. ~ Ilana Mercer

A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure. In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is "conspicuous consumption," that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.2 ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom. ~ Edward Gibbon

Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times. ~ Thomas J. Sargent

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. ~ George Stigler

What I'm asking for is a new economic order. I don't know how to construct that; I'm not an economist. ~ Michael Moore

I am not an economist, but things are not as bad as they seem. I have a great deal of confidence in our future. ~ Walt Disney Company

You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis. ~ Thomas Sowell

Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history. ~ Molly Ivins

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount of blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don't fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom. ~ Juan Williams

Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist. ~ George Bernard Shaw

For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us. ~ Wendell Berry

I need something to fall back on if fame doesn't work. I'll have to become an economist or something. ~ Nolan Gould

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read 'The Lost Symbol', by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it. ~ The Economist

Government spending? I don't know what it's all about. I don't know any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he doesn't know much. ~ Will Rogers

We Americans commercialize everything. Look at what we did to Christmas. Christmas is Jesus' birthday. Now, I don't know Jesus, but from what I read he was the least materialistic person who ever walked the earth. No bling on Jesus. He kept a low profile and we turned his birthday into the most commercial day of the year. In fact we have a whole Jesus birthday season. And then at the end of it, we have the nerve to have an economist come on TV and say what a horrible Jesus birthday season we had. ~ Chris Rock

In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis. ~ William Stanley Jevons

Every company that has an economist working for him has one employee too many. ~ Warren Buffett

Give an economist a result you want, and he'll find the numbers to justify it. ~ David Baldacci

Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

In 1925, when Britain went back to the gold standard, that was supported by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Bank of England, the civil service, the CBI, the TUC, the Times, the Economist; that consensus was very strong. ~ Ed Balls

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs. ~ Peter Blair Henry

Struggle toward the capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible - or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible.
In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday's reading;
the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that "One sows and another reaps." I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work. ~ Paul Kalanithi

It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

I'm not a politician, I'm not an economist. I'm just a simple Brian surgeon and a scientist who's trying to do my best every day. ~ Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back ~ John Maynard Keynes

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For economist the real world is often a special case. ~ Edgar Fiedler

Today, the Power Elite is more geographically concentrated in specific areas. Economist Jamie Galbraith found that if you measured inequality across counties in the United States in the 1990s, half the rise occurred in 5 counties out of 3,150: New York, New York; King County, Washington; and San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo in Northern California.24 ~ Christopher L. Hayes

An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too. ~ Charles Eisenstein

Here, economists will recognize the principle of price differentiation formulated by the engineer-economist Jules Dupuit in 1849: "To set a price for a service, don't base it on what it costs the provider, but instead set the price according to the importance of the service to the user."[10] ~ Bernard Girard