Top 51 Economics Economists Quotes
#1. The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
Joan Robinson
#2. Economists who speak the English tongue are strangely intimidated by mathematical symbols.
Al Nichol
#3. Economists agree about economics - and that's a science - and they disagree about economic policy because that's a value judgment ... I've had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree.
Franco Modigliani
#4. Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.
Kurt Bills
#5. The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by 'one-handed' economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.
Dani Rodrik
#6. Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
Thomas Sowell
#7. The first essential for economists ... is to ... combat, not foster, the ideology which pretends that values which can be measured in terms of money are the only ones that ought to count.
Joan Robinson
#9. Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor ...
Andrew Lo
#10. 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
#12. People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#13. There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.
Joseph Stiglitz
#14. The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to contribute.
Dani Rodrik
#15. My principal work now lies in tracing out the exact nature and conditions of utility. It seems strange indeed that economists have not bestowed more minute attention on a subject which doubtless furnishes the true key to the problems of economics.
William Stanley Jevons
#16. The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
Paul Krugman
#17. Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe.
Michael Kinsley
#18. Capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to economists. Achieving a critical comprehension of it requires perspectives beyond those characteristic of modern economics. That is why this is a history not of economic ideas, but of ideas beyond the capitalist economy.
Jerry Z. Muller
#19. Economists like to strike the pose of a scientist. I know, because I often do it myself. When I teach undergraduates, I very consciously describe the field of economics as a science, so no student would start the course thinking he was embarking on some squishy academic endeavor.'1
Ha-Joon Chang
#20. In my experience, economists rarely believe passionately in, or care passionately for, the free market. They are generally more concerned to reveal the market's imperfections, to further their own professional importance.
Terence Kealey
#21. Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#22. No one knows anything about economics. It's the great lie of the economists. By contrast in football people might have contrasting opinions, each of which has some validity. But the economists always speak in conditionals - what a mess.
Vicente Del Bosque
#23. Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.
Richard Davenport-Hines
#24. We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
Milton Friedman
#25. You know and I know and economists know that trickle-down economics doesn't work.
Dannel Malloy
#26. An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Laurence J. Peter
#27. Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.
Thomas Piketty
#29. Economics is too important to leave to the economists.
Steve Keen
#30. The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#31. Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.
Harry S. Truman
#32. He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.
Richard Davenport-Hines
#33. "Murphys law of economic policy": Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.
Alan Blinder
#34. Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.
Ha-Joon Chang
#35. The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.
Joan Robinson
#36. My folks are economists and have taught economics and social science so I grew up with those kind of conversations around the dinner table.
Seth Gordon
#37. Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let's cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people - even most economists - expect.
Tyler Cowen
#38. Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.
Richard Thaler
#39. Most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.
Alice Rivlin
#40. Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.
Edgar Fiedler
#41. A good accountant is someone who told you yesterday what the economists forcast for tomorrow
Miles Thomas
#43. Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#44. I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.
Mark Skousen
#45. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
John Maynard Keynes
#46. To the despair of every economist, it seems almost impossible for most people other than trained economists to comprehend how a price system works. Reporters and TV commentators seem especially resistant to the elementary principles they supposedly imbibed in freshman economics. Second,
Milton Friedman
#47. Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.
Vivienne Westwood
#48. She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the economists by their distraught look and slightly glazed-looking eyes.
Iain M. Banks
#49. The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Jean-Paul Kauffmann
#50. The unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges. It is impossible to invalidate the economists demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least a great part of it.
Ludwig Von Mises
#51. Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
