Economic Theory Quotes

#1. Free market capitalism is far more than economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility-the highway to the American Dream.

George W. Bush

#2. ...whatever their intentions, the topic addressed by Arrow and Debreu was the coherence of economic theory, not the coordination of economic activities.

Brian J. Loasby

#3. Early economic theory was rooted in the Italian, French, and Spanish traditions, which were subjectivist oriented. Then it shifted onto the terrible path by Smith and Ricardo and the British classical tradition, which is 'objectivist' - values are in inherent in production.

Murray Rothbard

#4. The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question.

John Bates Clark

#5. Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners' obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.

Robert Higgs

#6. In economic theory the conclusions are sometimes less interesting than the route by which they are reached.

Piero Sraffa

#7. I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems.

John Maynard Keynes

#8. For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.

Ernest Mandel

#9. My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.

James Meade

#10. Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

Abraham Maslow

#11. We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.

Jeremy Grantham

#12. The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#13. On traditional economic theory:
We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.

Richard H. Thaler

#14. Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.

Murray Rothbard

#15. Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.

Yanis Varoufakis

#16. In short, both experience and economic theory imply that the US could now t to a more competitive dollar without experiencing either increased inflation or decreased economic growth.

Martin Feldstein

#17. We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

Dan Ariely

#18. My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.

James Meade

#19. There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of mathematics.

Sir John Richard Hicks

#20. A potentially useful property of forecasts based on cointegration is that when extended some way ahead, the forecasts of the two series will form a constant ratio, as is expected by some asymptotic economic theory.

Clive Granger

#21. We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

B.W. Powe

#22. It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

Douglass North

#23. The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.

James Tobin

#24. Basic economic theory. People behave differently based on how much they think something's worth. Because everyone got their chips for free, people made huge bets on every hand - no matter what they were holding. People who play with everything on the line - for real - don't act like that.

Elle Lothlorien

#25. Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.

Paul Samuelson

#26. The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.

Eric Maskin

#27. We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.

Daniel Kahneman

#28. One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.

Emily Oster

#29. Evidence and economic theory suggests that control of the Internet by the phone and cable companies would lead to blocking of competing technologies.

Marvin Ammori

#30. The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.

Michael Lewis

#31. As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.

Robert Mundell

#32. Conventional economic theory ... counts the depletion of resources as the accumulation of wealth.

Mark Lynas

#33. Economic theory dictates that the value of a company is basically the present value of its future profits. To estimate Facebook's value through its future profits, we need to have a view on its user growth and how this will evolve in the next 10 to 50 years.

Didier Sornette

#34. The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.

Herman E. Daly

#35. Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity.

Muhammad Yunus

#36. To put it bluntly, there isn't one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore's success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.

Ha-Joon Chang

#37. Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis.

Ludwig Von Mises

#38. As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist

Dalai Lama

#39. It is obvious that the monetary union among 17 very different European countries does not work. As an economist, I know that the Eurozone is not an optimum currency area, as defined in economic theory.

Vaclav Klaus

#40. Actually, the idea of economic man is an efficient way of excluding women. We have historically allocated women certain activities and said that she must do them because she is a woman. Then we create an economic theory that states that these activities have no economic meaning.

Katrine Marcal

#41. Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory.

Murray Rothbard

#42. I have never believed that central banks should have rigid inflation targeting. That is not a good thing to stabilize. There is nothing in economic theory to back this.

Robert Mundell

#43. Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price.

George Stigler

#44. Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#45. If I really believed in Friedman's economic theory, then I'd be quite satisfied to spend the rest of my life with a garden hose shoved down my throat, being filled with custard by representatives of the people of China.

Nigel Lawson

#46. 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

#47. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.

Kwame Nkrumah

#48. We survived the 1980's. Back then, the economic program was called 'trickle down.' That actually meant they were pissing on you. How the whole theory goes was this: 'We have all the money. If we drop some, it's yours. Go for it.'

Bill Maher

#49. Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed

John Maynard Smith

#50. Most investors give too much credence to the theory that prices are rational; they presume that a market collapse must have been justified by serious economic trouble.

Kenneth Fisher

#51. Karma theory is a spiritual philosophy used to explain and maintain the economic status of Asia.

Stephen H. Wolinsky

#52. Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally.

Christian Lous Lange

#53. Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#54. The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data.

Tony Judt

#55. We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#56. For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'

Emma Watson

#57. Unless we understand what it is that leads to economic and financial instability, we cannot prescribe
make policy
to modify or eliminate it. Identifying a phenomenon is not enough; we need a theory that makes instability a normal result in our economy and gives us handles to control it.

Hyman Minsky

#58. I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

Gerard Debreu

#59. As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing - as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law.

Gary Bauer

#60. Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events.

Llewellyn Rockwell

#61. Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.

Gordon Brown

#62. I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.

Pankaj Mishra

#63. After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.

John Harsanyi

#64. At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.

Matthew Stewart

#65. Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. - Thomas Sowell (2016)

George Gilder

#66. In the mid-'60s in Berkeley, the theory of measure spaces of economic agents became one of my main interests.

Gerard Debreu

#67. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

Marc Andreessen

#68. Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory ... : 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.

E.L. Doctorow

#69. Observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

Jane Jacobs

#70. Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions - political, economic,
psychological, military - that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.

Roger Trinquier

#71. The standard growth theory tells us that economic growth in per capita basis comes from mainly two sources: capital deepening and total factor productivity growth, or TFP growth.

Toshihiko Fukui

#72. We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

Tim Wirth

#73. Mitt Romney's primary season embrace of the social and economic agenda of the more rabid elements of his party doomed him, especially the shrill immigration rhetoric and the harshly insensitive theory that no additional sacrifice or contribution should be sought from those at the top.

Eliot Spitzer

#74. This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.

Garet Garrett

#75. Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

George Will

#76. In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.

Edward Bernays

#77. Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.

Paul Samuelson