Top 100 Quotes About Economists
#1. 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
#2. Economists say the inability to delay gratification is a primary predictor of economic failure in life.
Brian Tracy
#3. One Blue Dog Democratic House Member reminded me earlier this month of the saying that 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' He wondered if his fellow Members weren't more in need of advice from psychiatrists than from economists at this point.
John Fund
#4. Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.
Ha-Joon Chang
#5. Given the large uncertainties at each major step of the case for reliance on a carbon tax, economists should reconsider their current support for such a policy.
Robert P. Murphy
#6. Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.
Rowan Williams
#7. Inequality makes the pie of things smaller, yet economists measure the size of the pie not by how much substance it contains but by its price. It is entirely possible, therefore, for economists to measure as growth what most people experience as economic decline.
Moshe Adler
#8. Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.
Herbert Stein
#9. Economists are always recommending the elimination of this or that market imperfection ... no astrophysicist recommends the elimination of planets that he does not like.
Lester Thurow
#10. Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.
Ronald Reagan
#11. That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.
George Stigler
#12. In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed.
Robert Gilpin
#13. 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
#14. Although economists have studied the sensitivity of import and export volumes to changes in the exchange rate, there is still much uncertainty about just how much the dollar must change to bring about any given reduction in our trade deficit.
Martin Feldstein
#15. Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#16. Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
Vladimir Lenin
#17. Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#18. He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.
Ludwig Von Mises
#19. If economists were good at business, they would be rich men instead of advisers to rich men.
Kirk Kerkorian
#20. 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
#21. Whatever may be the distribution of uncertainty among economists, the public only gets to hear from those who have certain opinions.
Herbert Stein
#22. When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.
Adam Davidson
#23. 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
#24. What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
Edward Abbey
#25. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
Daniel M. Gilbert
#26. Most economists use 'fixed' and 'pegged' as interchangeable or nearly interchangeable terms for exchange rates.
Steve Hanke
#27. We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.
Cornel West
#28. Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
Noam Chomsky
#29. 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
#30. I don't want to get into the 'who's a hostage-taker' discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It's a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it's really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it's a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.
Paul Ryan
#31. Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.
Edmund Phelps
#32. Our biggest challenge is to eliminate the popular perception that economists don't have anything useful to say.
Mark Zandi
#33. The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#34. When economists get it right, the world gets better.
Dani Rodrik
#35. Economists are behavioural psychologists, but they think more is better; they want to make everyone richer. They should pause. More's not necessarily better
David Hemenway
#36. Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators.
Peter Thiel
#37. 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
#38. The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in ground,
Kenneth S. Deffeyes
#39. The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.
Jeff Goodell
#40. Economists must always be prepared for surprises: they find many in trying to find order in the universe of their study.
Simon Kuznets
#41. In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.
Alfred Adler
#42. In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.
Eugene Linden
#43. 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
#44. Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.
Ha-Joon Chang
#45. Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.
Robert J. Shiller
#46. For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.
Thomas Piketty
#47. Unlike physics, economists don't settle things. There seems to be plenty of room for different conclusions that are still accepted in the academy.
Adam Davidson
#48. Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.
Michael Bloomberg
#49. Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.
Thomas Piketty
#50. To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.
Mark Helprin
#51. I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#52. In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it.
George Akerlof
#53. 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
#54. Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.
Emily Oster
#55. Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?
Yasheng Huang
#56. 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
#58. With more than 67 percent of the Nation's freight moving on highways, economists believe that our ability to compete internationally is tied to the quality of our infrastructure.
Dennis Hastert
#59. I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs.
John Sulston
#60. 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
#61. What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.
Leonor Varela
#62. Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods.
Eric Maskin
#63. English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
Jane Smiley
#64. 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
#65. The poor are no less rational than anyone else - quite the contrary. Precisely because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices:They have to be sophisticated economists just to survive.
Abhijit V. Banerjee
#66. THERE is widespread agreement among economists that abuse of credit constitutes one of the chief unwholesome elements in business booms and is mainly responsible for the ensuing crash and depression.
Benjamin Graham
#67. Engineers do engineering, i.e. they build bridges. So engineering needs engineers. The economy does NOT need economists. Economists do not make economy, but they try it and that is why we have so much problems with some financial models.
Steve Keen
#68. There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will prompt them to investigate its activities more closely.
Ronald Coase
#69. Some economists believe that the Greeks' work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the classical virtues can do nothing to offset the dearth of innovation that plagues the economy.
Edmund Phelps
#70. 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
#71. Economists typically think that your happiness goes up as you get more money, but the more you have, the less each additional dollar matters. This means that you value money most in times when you have less income and more expenses.
Emily Oster
#72. We are all amateur attention economists, hoarding and bartering our moments - or watching them slip away down the cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.
Tom Chatfield
#73. Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people.
Richard Thaler
#74. I would say that folks who have looked at this issue for a long time, whether it's Elizabeth Warren or many other economists, will tell you that right now, yes, we do need a 21st century Glass-Steagall legislation.
Hillary Clinton
#75. People dreaming ,economists steals their dreams and politicians kills it
Mohammed Sekouty
#76. One speaks with great respect of economists, if only because they represent such a variety of opinions.
Robert Menzies
#77. 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
#78. Reciprocal marketing, promotions and links. In public good experiments, behavioral economists have demonstrated that the potential for reciprocal actions by players increases the rate of contribution to the public good, providing evidence for the importance of reciprocity in social situations.
Carl William Brown
#79. Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.
James Surowiecki
#80. The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
Paul Krugman
#81. We've had a number of economists supporting our legislation. And here's where we are. The American people can judge. Six largest financial institutions in America today have assets of roughly $10 trillion; equivalent to 58 percent of the GDP of the United States of America.
Bernie Sanders
#82. We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.
Wendell Berry
#84. Economists' unanimity that bad business is ahead is the most reassuring news possible. It's very unlikely that this will be the one time they're right.
Malcolm Forbes
#85. Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
Tyler Cowen
#86. If Mexican farm labor is so much cheaper, maybe we should be growing our fruits and vegetables in Mexico. There's absolutely no reason to import Mexicans to do something they could do at home and then sell to us. I believe this is what economists call "competitive advantage".
Ann Coulter
#87. With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.
Nassau William Senior
#88. Buying is an activity understood by economists. Shopping is a phenomenon of interest to anthropologists and sociologists.
Marc Gobe
#89. The obstacles facing academic economists are formidable, for tenure and professional advancement still depend to a large extent on a willingness to comply with and to work within the tenets of orthodox theory.
Paul Ormerod
#90. 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
#91. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
Atul Gawande
#92. Economists sometimes do try to reduce behavior to law-like predictability. But people respond differently to different primes, to different contexts even from one moment to the next. We possess multiple selves that are aroused by different circumstances.
David Brooks
#93. I may be only a fish and chip shop lady, but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping.
Pauline Hanson
#94. The institutional arrangement whereby most professional economists are heavily burdened with teaching and administrative duties may militate against a sufficient admixture of the more laborious forms of statistical and field work.
Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod
#95. Economists suggest that we should assess the value of decisions in terms of two considerations: the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.
Cass R. Sunstein
#96. Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?
Ha-Joon Chang
#97. The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
Nate Silver
#98. I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Zygmunt Bauman
#99. Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.
Thomas Piketty
#100. In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
