Top 100 Quotes About Economics
#1. When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses?
Edmund Phelps
#2. My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.
Poppy Z. Brite
#3. The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.
Joseph Stiglitz
#4. Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.
Alvin E. Roth
#5. The laws you see today are a direct consequence of economic illiteracy in the general population. If every voter learned economics tonight, the laws would change tomorrow.
Ben Mathew
#6. If socialists understood economics they wouldn't be socialists.
Friedrich Hayek
#7. When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.
Joan Robinson
#8. First of all, just because the Tea Party people appear to be generally uneducated, ignorant about the political process, ignorant about economics, confused about their own platform from the beginning, and indelicate when it comes to the craft of diplomacy, doesn't mean they're wrong.
Steven Van Zandt
#9. I think people are hungry for new ideas and leadership in the world of poverty alleviation. Most development programs are started and led by people with Ph.Ds in economics or policy. Samasource is part of a cadre of younger organizations headed by entrepreneurs from non-traditional backgrounds.
Leila Janah
#10. 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
#11. Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.
Peter L. Bergen
#12. I started in college as a business major and finally transferred to home economics and studied making clothes.
Phillip Lim
#13. I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.
Lars Peter Hansen
#14. On the deepest level, problems such as war and starvation are not solved by economics and politics alone. Their source is prejudice and fear in the human heart - and their solution also lies in the human heart.
Joseph Goldstein
#15. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.
Stephen King
#16. The concept of a general equilibrium has no relevance to the real world (in other words, classical economics is an exercise in futility).
George Soros
#17. Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.
Evan Davis
#18. However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.
Garrett Hardin
#19. My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology.
Simon Newcomb
#20. I was an economics major in college, and every summer after school, I would drive my car from California, from Claremont men's college at the time, to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.
Henry Kravis
#21. We shall never have a science of economics unless we learn to discern the operation of law even among the most perplexing complications and apparent interruptions.
William Stanley Jevons
#22. Only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.
Max Brooks
#23. We will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.
N. T. Wright
#24. Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.
Michael Joseph Oakeshott
#25. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once.
Clayton M Christensen
#26. I learned that economics was not an exact science and that the most erudite men would analyze the economic ills of the world and derive a totally different conclusion.
Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill
#27. Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, and not everyone is going to be an entrepreneur, but women who turn to business, turn to economics, because there are people depending on them, I think that their creativity, their resilience, their spirit, embody what's best about entrepreneurship.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
#29. The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.
P. J. O'Rourke
#30. In a paper called 'The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives,' I showed that there were not any mechanisms that would always both produce a stable matching and make it completely safe for all firms and workers to reveal their true preferences.
Alvin E. Roth
#31. I'd like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I'd like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.
Robert Cailliau
#32. I didn't fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major; most everyone else had relatives or family in banking.
Philipp Meyer
#33. Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.
Ludwig Von Mises
#34. When we refer to 'the biblical approach to economics' or the biblical response to politics' or 'biblical womanhood,' we're using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.
Rachel Held Evans
#35. Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party or in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories.
Ludwig Von Mises
#36. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure.
James Hillman
#38. Every short statement about economics is misleading (with the possible exception of my present one).
Alfred Marshall
#39. Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.
Eric Maskin
#40. One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John Green
If you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.
John Green
#41. We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#42. I suspected economics was irredeemable as a policy tool for citizens groups. I saw economics lead its practitioners and citizens alike into a form of brain-damaging indoctrination.
Hazel Henderson
#43. The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.
Richard Thaler
#44. Conservatives have a deeper intellect and tend to have occupations of the brain in fields like engineering, science, and economics. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to flock to occupations of the heart.
Dick Armey
#45. "Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool."
Calvin Trillin
#46. 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
#47. I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#48. It's time to take Economics 101 to Washington. We believe in liberty, we believe in limited government, we believe in free enterprise, we believe in family values and the sanctity of human life, and we all believe Washington needs a good dose of Economics 101.
Kurt Bills
#49. I'm always for lower taxes because lower taxes make people want to do things. Less burden, more fun, and economics is about people wanting to have fun. Growth is fun for people in the marketplace.
Amity Shlaes
#50. I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.
Jerry Brown
#51. Socialism" for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism - in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics. "To be a socialist," says Goebbels, "is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."9
Leonard Peikoff
#52. There's a joke in economics about the drunk who loses his keys in the street but only looks for them under the lightposts. When asked why, he says, 'because that's where the light is.' That's the problem with the deficit.
Christina Romer
#53. We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin.
Leif Johansson
#54. Of the major incentives to improve safety, by far the most compelling is that of economics. The moral incentive, which is most evident following an accident, is more intense but is relatively short lived.
Jerome F. Lederer
#55. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#56. Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.
Charles Wheelan
#57. A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.
Edmund Phelps
#58. The economics of baseball are the big problem. The big clubs make a lot of money and the little clubs don't.
Fay Vincent
#59. [There will be movement toward] behavioral economics ... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#60. Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.
Eugene Fama
#61. Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#62. We cannot leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people
Nikki Giovanni
#63. Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
Steven D. Levitt
#65. Psychology and economics are Stalin's favorable winds. He is also the party 'boss.' But he is, in addition, the Soviet Union's most striking personality.
Louis Fischer
#67. 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
#68. Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Wendell Berry
#69. Everywhere I go, I see incredible examples of communities that have a vision for transportation and how it will impact the quality of life, mobility, economics and opportunity.
Anthony Foxx
#70. The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
Paul Krugman
#71. [A]n important new book ... Professor Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have invented Identity Economics.
Daniel Finkelstein
#72. At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.
Edmund Phelps
#73. 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
#74. A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.
Charles Wheelan
#75. The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.
Elon Musk
#76. For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.
Rudolf Hilferding
#77. Bad economics teaches that computers can design markets. Good economics teaches that markets can design computers.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#78. Economics played a role. Raleighs have gone from six fifty to nine dollars a carton, but there's a three-quarter cent coupon on the back. You can get all kinds of things with them, blenders, everything. I saved up enough one time and got Al Bumbry.
Earl Weaver
#79. Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force - an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares.
Rosser Reeves
#80. Virtually all of the extremely important services that nature provides are completely ignored by conventional economics. The ozone layer, for example, shields all life from DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation.
David Suzuki
#81. Economics is a strange science. Our subject deals with some of the most important as well as mundane issues that impinge on the human condition.
Dale T. Mortensen
#82. Spread the truth-the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.
Lawrence Summers
#84. Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen from one minute to the next. Politics, religion, economics, and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.
John O'Donohue
#85. My motivation was an idea of being able to improve the conditions of life, to try to find a remedy to many of the problems facing the world. That's what led me into economics. I saw it as a way of helping people.
Maurice Allais
#86. Religion to be true must satisfy what may be termed humanitarian economics, that is, where the income and the expenditure balance each other.
Mahatma Gandhi
#87. What makes it [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do.
Milton Friedman
#88. With the variety of fields within economics, broadly conceived and the increasing specialization of scholarly world, the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize honors not only the individual scholar but, implicitly, also a special field or a distinctive method.
Simon Kuznets
#89. The number of hypotheses and theories about climate change are numerous. Quite naturally they have caught the public attention, as any proof of past climactic change points to the possibility of future climate change, which inevitably will have significant implications for global economics.
Eduard Bruckner
#91. Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever
Max Tegmark
#92. Because of economics, you have to feed the demographics that are buying your product. So, as Asia becomes a much more economic influence on the products that are being made from America, I think people have to be sensitive.
Sung Kang
#93. Well, I think first of all, probably the most fundamental thing is that we are a mixed-signal analog semiconductor company, which, along with some of the other well-known names in the industry, enjoys very good economics.
David Milne
#94. I think it is just stupid economics for a government to approach economic management from a strand of thinking regarding unions as enemies.
Bob Hawke
#95. When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance.
Erik Brynjolfsson
#96. At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector.
Antony Beevor
#97. Scotland and England may sometimes be rivals, but by geography, we are also neighbours. By history, allies. By economics, partners. And by fate and fortune, comrades, friends and family.
Douglas Alexander
#98. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.
Aldous Huxley
#99. An economics of systems only-an economics of markets but not of men-is fatally flawed.
George Gilder
#100. The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed ... The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.
E.F. Schumacher
