Macroeconomics Quotes

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics. ~ Paul Krugman

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory. ~ Edmund Phelps

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students. ~ Tim Harford

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently. ~ Joseph Stiglitz

Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth. ~ Alex Berenson

Peter Montiel has long set the highest standard for lucid textbooks on the macroeconomics of developing countries. Now in this new edition of his superb classic Macroeconomics in Emerging Markets, he has surpassed even himself. He uniquely fills the gap between rich-country-obsessed macro- and micro-obsessed developing-country analysis. No student of the macroeconomics of development will henceforward be able to do without this book. ~ William Easterly

Microeconomics: The study of who has the money and how I can get my hands on it.Macroeconomics: The study of which government agency has the gun, and how we can get our hands on it. ~ Gary North

I never believed in the virtue of fiscal stimulation of the economy; I was strongly focused on longer-term growth and thus on supply-side reforms. The whole transformation after socialism was about the supply side. (This is why conventional Western macroeconomics, with its focus on the demand side, was ill prepared to deal with the reforms after socialism.) ~ Anders Aslund

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information. is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science. ~ Paul Samuelson

From this failure to expunge the microeconomic foundations of neoclassical economics from post-Great Depression theory arose the "microfoundations of macroeconomics" debate, which ultimately led to a model in which the economy is viewed as a single utility-maximizing individual blessed with perfect knowledge of the future.
Fortunately, behavioral economics provides the beginnings of an alternative vision of how individuals operate in a market environment, while multi-agent modelling and network theory give us foundations for understanding group dynamics in a complex society. These approaches explicitly emphasize what neoclassical economics has evaded: that aggregation of heterogeneous individuals results in emergent properties of the group, which cannot be reduced to the behavior of any "representative individual." These approaches should replace neoclassical microeconomics completely. ~ Steve Keen

We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn't the fact that they were primitive - the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed. ~ Paul Krugman

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation. ~ Robert C. Merton

I'm not a macroeconomics person. ~ Bill Gates

I think what Bob Shiller and I are doing is we're focusing on macroeconomics and the role of psychology in macroeconomics. ~ George Akerlof

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Excerpt from page 113

[On Malaysia's Prime Minster's anti-capitalism and anti-globalization policies in September 1997]
"Ah, excuse me, Mahathir, but what planet are you living on? You talk about participating in globalization as if it were a choice you had. Globalization isn't a choice. It's a reality. There is just one global market today, and the only way you can grown at the speed your people want to grow is by tapping into the global stock and bond markets, by seeking out multinationals to invest in your country and by selling into the global trading systems what your factories produce. And the most basic truth about globalization is: No one is in charge. You keep looking for someone to complain to, someone to take the heat off your markets, someone to blame. Well, guess what, Mahathir, there's no one on the other end of the phone!"

"The Electronic Heard cuts no one any slack... The herd is not infallible. It makes mistakes too. It overreacts and it overshoots. But if your fundamentals are basically sound, the herd will eventually recognize this and come back. They herd is never stupid for too long. In the end, it always responds to good governance and good economic management. ~ Thomas L. Friedman