Top 100 Economist Quotes
#1. An economist is someone who knows all the answers to last years' questions.
Robert Orben
#3. A respected health economist said that these plans would cost a trillion dollars more a year.
Hillary Clinton
#4. My father was an agricultural economist. In 1989 he was posted to Mbarara, a small town on the Uganda-Rwanda border.
Giles Foden
#5. In any sane society, a farmer is a billion times more important than an economist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#6. However, the fact that an economist offers a theoretical analysis does not and should not automatically command respect. What is needed is some assurance that the analysis is actually relevant.
Paul Krugman
#7. 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
#8. If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.
Karl Rove
#9. ...she was, after all, a practical woman and the daughter of an economist.
Mary Doria Russell
#10. An economist is a man who, when he finds something works in practice, wonders if it works in theory.
Walter Heller
#12. 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
#13. Just because you read a report in the 'New York Times,' the 'Economist,' or, yes, 'The New Yorker' doesn't make it true. But we do know that a few people have evaluated that story with what strikes me as fairly objective standards of reason.
Michael Specter
#14. I am a woman, I am a housewife, I am a government official, I've been twice a government secretary, I've been leader of a parliamentary group, I am an economist.
Josefina Vazquez Mota
#15. Give an economist a result you want, and he'll find the numbers to justify it.
David Baldacci
#16. Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.
Thomas J. Sargent
#17. 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.
#18. We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism.
Paul Ormerod
#19. I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
Alan Greenspan
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.
Nicholas Stern
#23. In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem.
Bill Bryson
#24. 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
#25. Paying for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya's world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA.'1 This was the opening paragraph in The Economist's article of 27 May 2013, 'Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?
Victor Kgomoeswana
#26. Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.
Warren Buffett
#27. 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
#28. (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
#29. Indeed, as noted by economist Menzie Chinn, there is no visible relationship between top tax rates and overall economic growth, at least in the ranges the U.S. experienced.39
Erik Brynjolfsson
#30. President Harry S. Truman is said to have famously asked for a one-handed economist, noting that "all my economists say, on the one hand and on the other.
Greg Ip
#31. 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
#32. survival of the fittest" - which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer
Douglas Brinkley
#33. An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
Nicolas Chamfort
#34. If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.
Paul Krugman
#36. The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.
Eric Alterman
#37. I need something to fall back on if fame doesn't work. I'll have to become an economist or something.
Nolan Gould
#39. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.
Henry Hazlitt
#40. The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.
Ben Bernanke
#41. Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn't be surprised by the effects of deregulation.
Jane Smiley
#42. Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another.
Bernard Baruch
#43. The business of a Political Economist is neither to recommend nor to dissuade, but to state general principles, which it is fatal to neglect, but neither advisable, nor perhaps practicable, to use as the sole, or even the principal, guides in the actual conduct of affairs.
Nassau William Senior
#44. History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
Edward Gibbon
#45. I am not and should not be considered an economist.
Sylvia Porter
#46. As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How
Christine Kenneally
#47. A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens.
George Stigler
#48. If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.
Larry Page
#49. A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.
Christina Romer
#50. You still don't like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don't marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#51. (Economist Robert Higgs wrote a book about this phenomenon titled Crisis and Leviathan, in which he argues that government intervention inevitably creates future problems, which results in the government's intervening even more in an attempt to correct them.)
Glenn Beck
#52. My name is Mart Laar. I have been twice Prime Minister of Estonia, and I'm not an economist.
Mart Laar
#53. An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Laurence J. Peter
#55. Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives?
Jim Cooper
#56. I like to read the 'Financial Times' when I'm traveling. 'Economist.' 'Ad Busters.'
Mos Def
#57. 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
#58. And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance rates.
Steven D. Levitt
#59. You do not have to be an economist to know that putting up the cost of employing someone is a pretty barking thing to do when you're trying to get out of a recession.
David Cameron
#60. Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.
Tim Harford
#61. Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.
Milton Friedman
#62. As the economist Herman Daly once put it: The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.
Bill Bryson
#63. I'm Harvard-educated; I'm an economist by training. I'm an author, a journalist, as well as being active in community development.
Winona LaDuke
#64. I love magazines. I always read 'Time,' 'Newsweek' and 'The Economist.' When I get my hair cut, French 'Vogue,' French 'Elle,' 'Paris Match' - I read them all in 10 minutes.
Janine Di Giovanni
#65. The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.
Ilana Mercer
#66. As many will remember, a respected Army Corps economist filed a whistleblower complaint about the Corps' use of faulty data to justify lock and dam expansion.
Ron Kind
#67. I'm no economist. I don't even play one on TV. I'm just a husband, a father, a taxpayer.
Mark McKinnon
#68. Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.
Eric Maskin
#70. 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
#71. I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
Mark Twain
#72. The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.
George Stigler
#73. Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the worlds resources will be negotiated.
Ottmar Edenhofer
#74. Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#75. My ma is an economist. My dad is a software engineer.
Suraj Sharma
#76. My brother Carl became a physicist; I became an economist.
George Akerlof
#77. A friend of mine was asked to a costume ball a short time ago. He slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist.
Ronald Reagan
#78. When I was starting out, when I put aside my career as an economist. I looked at every book, went to every show, did my first stories, developed my first films. A fabulous time.
Sebastiao Salgado
#79. 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
#80. Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II ... wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases.
John Chamberlain
#81. No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.
Walter Bagehot
#82. After taking risk into account, do more managers than you'd see by chance outperform with persistence? Virtually every economist who studied this question answers with a resounding 'no.'
Eugene Fama
#83. The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.
Murray Rothbard
#84. Be saving, but not at the cost of all liberality. Have the soul of a king and the hand of a wise economist.
Joseph Joubert
#85. An economist's definition of hatred is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others.
Edward Glaeser
#86. I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.
Amory Lovins
#87. Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
Thomas Carlyle
#88. The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#89. I am not a politician; I've never run for anything in my life. I'm an economist. I'm a broadcaster. I've been an adviser. I worked for Ronald Reagan.
Lawrence Kudlow
#90. 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
#91. An economist is a man that can tell you ... what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too.
Will Rogers
#92. 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
#93. Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#94. The World Bank has not invariably been my favorite organization. The power to do good goes almost always with the possibility to do the opposite, and as a professional economist, I have had occasions in the past to wonder whther the Bank could not have done very much better.
Amartya Sen
#95. 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
#96. Never trust an economist with your job. Learn about economics yourself. And make up your own mind about what might protect your job - and what might destroy it.
Jim Stanford
#97. I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
Milton Friedman
#98. 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
#99. You can't be a good economist unless you're also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician.
Aldous Huxley
#100. A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.
Steven D. Levitt
