Quotes About Economics

#1. However, I have a low opinion of people with narrow political horizons. Someone who talks about the environment and knows nothing about economics can make as many mistakes as someone who does the opposite.

Sigmar Gabriel

#2. Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.

Edgar Fiedler

#3. An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Edward Abbey

#4. These days no one can make money on the goddamn airline business. The economics represent sheer hell.

C. R. Smith

#5. Even professors of economics, to say nothing of the public, do not generally have scientific minds.

Frank Knight

#6. Home Economics stands for the ideal home life for today unhampered by the traditions of the past and the utilization of all the resources of modern science to improve home life.

Ellen Swallow Richards

#7. After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.

Gunter Grass

#8. Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics.

Robert Nozick

#9. I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.

Tyler Cowen

#10. The theory of Economics must begin with a correct theory of consumption.

William Stanley Jevons

#11. Obama is a fine, very impressive person. He really is. Unfortunately, everything that he is doing in economics is exactly wrong. He is a crappy president.

Arthur Laffer

#12. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

Ira Sachs

#13. To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.

Henry Hazlitt

#14. Arguing that the only problem with a free market is lack of competition, is like arguing that that the only problem with prostitution is that there aren't enough pimps.

Quentin R. Bufogle

#15. Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.

Ludwig Von Mises

#16. Inflation takes from the ignorant and gives to the well informed.

Venita VanCaspel

#17. Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

Tyler Cowen

#18. Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

Bill Vaughan

#19. Economics is about creating win-win situations. But in sports, someone loses.

Stan Kroenke

#20. My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

Dave Hickey

#21. Life is like a curve, horizontally or vertically, we are at origin point

Estiana Cahyawati

#22. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

John Steinbeck

#23. Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people's stuff.

George Carlin

#24. Selling is a painful necessity, buying is what makes it all worthwhile.

Steven E. Landsburg

#25. Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

Ben Bernanke

#26. The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#27. At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#28. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

Charlie Munger

#29. [U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.

Milton Friedman

#30. If you don't own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

Ray Dalio

#31. Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.

Alastair Reynolds

#32. The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

Adam Davidson

#33. Netflix changed the economics of offering niches and, in doing so, reshaped our understanding about what people actually want to watch.

Chris Anderson

#34. If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.

Ludwig Von Mises

#35. Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.

Ha-Joon Chang

#36. It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.

Frantz Fanon

#37. In economics, when you put together a highly elastic thing and a highly inelastic thing, you create extraordinary potential for turbulence, volatility, and for unstable prices.

Adair Turner

#38. Many find in sex and economics the meaning of life and the reason of it all. The consequence of this is that the goal of life for many has become a relief of tension.

Sachindra Kumar Majumdar

#39. Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.

Paul Samuelson

#40. Start with the idea that you can't repeal the laws of economics. Even if they are inconvenient.

Lawrence Summers

#41. Man is smart - If money would have grown on trees, we would have used green leaves as money.

Amit Kalantri

#42. She'd been fed anti-consumerist bullshit by her parents but didn't understand simple economics.

S.A. Tawks

#43. Basic Economics 101. It's the most complicated simple subject there is.

Rush Limbaugh

#44. Economics, as it has emerged, can be made more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behaviour and judgment.

Amartya Sen

#45. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.

Polykarp Kusch

#46. It seems that's there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that "the cheapest will survive". This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated.

J.G. Farrell

#47. In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

Ronald Coase

#48. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Steven D. Levitt

#49. In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.

John Tukey

#50. If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have been trying to run it. We must run the economy for everybody

Henry Hazlitt

#51. Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class.

Bernie Sanders

#52. I think there are two areas where new ideas are terribly dangerous: economics and sex. By and large, it's all been tried, and if it's really new, it's probably illegal or dangerous or unhealthy.

Felix Rohatyn

#53. There has always been, and there always will be, an economic cycle.

Nigel Lawson

#54. The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

Jack Vance

#55. 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

#56. There's not a single country that actually approaches economics in a pure, free market, capitalist way. I like the free market - but it very much exists only in textbooks. If I had a choice, and we could live in a very pure world, I would be a supporter of the free markets.

Dambisa Moyo

#57. I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.

Clive Granger

#58. Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.

A.E. Samaan

#59. January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Sendhil Mullainathan

#60. Behavioral economics tells us that people often focus too much on the wrong things, and tend to focus on aspects of the job that are salient. So, for example, the pay is salient, especially the starting pay.

Alan Krueger

#61. In economics, one of the most important concepts is 'opportunity cost' - the idea that once you spend your money on something, you can't spend it again on something else.

Malcolm Turnbull

#62. 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

#63. I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

Jeff Koons

#64. I don't think all the blame lies with Wall Street. I think a lot of the blame lies with the [George W.] Bush administration. They went back to trickle-down economics. They took their eye off the mortgage market, they took their eye off the finance markets, and we ended up in a big mess.

Hillary Clinton

#65. We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#66. At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

James Tobin

#67. A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.

Steven D. Levitt

#68. If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).

John Kenneth Galbraith

#69. But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

Joseph Stiglitz

#70. There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

Isabel Paterson

#71. Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#72. And one of the worst effects was that by suppressing critical thought, it also suppressed critical thought in the field of economics and hampered the development of economics - and the country would fall back further and further in the economic competition with the West.

Stefan Heym

#73. Talent, just like gold or any other precious commodity is subject to the same demand & supply economics

Gyan Nagpal

#74. There'll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics.

Walter Wriston

#75. Culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.

Leon Trotsky

#76. This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

Paul Krugman

#77. When people believe that the local government and economy serve their needs. There is little desire to protest.

Auliq Ice

#78. I'm constantly being courted by labels and their backing. Obviously the market is there when you talk about the economics and the numbers, but it's hard to give up the freedom of being able to do whatever you want.

Brian McKnight

#79. Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into.

Lee Child

#80. I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic.

Deborah Kara Unger

#81. Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

P. J. O'Rourke

#82. I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

John McCain

#83. As consumers and as voters we can say 'no' to rogue economics and demand regulation.

Loretta Napoleoni

#84. What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

Paul A. Samuelson

#85. By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

John Maynard Keynes

#86. In economics, the majority is always wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#87. It's well proved economics that if a country which is rich and a country that is poor come together in global trade, sooner or later the standard of living of the poor country will go up towards that of the rich country.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

#88. The '90s were extremely diverse, almost like a laboratory of the new century. There was much experimenting around, in politics, economics, gender and family structures, and also in fashion. There was a cloud of possibilities which kept us all dizzy.

Jil Sander

#89. Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.

Joel Bakan

#90. Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing.

Tom Robbins

#91. The use of market values and technology as a social barometer has devalued the worth of individuals, rendered irrelevant the quality of their lives, and stunted their creativity.

Sulak Sivaraksa

#92. I'd call it a new version of voodoo economics, but I'm afraid that would give witch doctors a bad name.

Geraldine Ferraro

#93. In economics, you always want to ask 'And then what?'

Warren Buffett

#94. Economics is not a discipline that comes to correct answers - economies are too complex.

Adam Davidson

#95. Well, I feel that we're kind of fortunate that this book gives the whole world a lesson in economics and how to get out of the mess that we're all in. It's basic message is to try and stop spending as much and try to release some of your assets to pay off your debt.

Jerry Bruckheimer

#96. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.

Isabel Paterson

#97. I don't care who writes a nation's laws-or crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economics textbooks

Paul Samuelson

#98. The federal budget deficit is the biggest single impediment to revitalizing the American economy.

Alice Rivlin

#99. Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

Aldous Huxley

#100. The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.

Niall Ferguson