Top 100 Quotes About Economists
#2. Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.
Edgar Fiedler
#3. Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.
Ludwig Von Mises
#4. Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college.
Bill Vaughan
#5. Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.
Derek Bok
#6. Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.
Adam Davidson
#7. Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad.
Frans De Waal
#8. The eurozone status quo is neither tolerable nor stable. Mainstream economists would call it an inferior equilibrium; I call it a nightmare - one that is inflicting tremendous pain and suffering that could be easily avoided if the misconceptions and taboos that sustain it were dispelled.
George Soros
#9. He saves his iciest hate for economists. Taleb has no use for the "charlatanic" field, comparing economic research to medieval medicine.
Anonymous
#10. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.
Ha-Joon Chang
#11. Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. ...
And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.
Milton Friedman
#12. Over the last decade, economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything.
Gavyn Davies
#13. Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.
Ben Bernanke
#14. The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.
James Buchan
#15. The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it.
Andy Hargreaves
#16. For me, geopolitical issues are becoming more important, because how can you understand economy if you don't understand geopolitics? People think economists just deal with spreadsheets and charts. That's a narrow-minded caricature.
Nouriel Roubini
#18. Ever since the Great Depression, economists have known that demand shortages tend to persist in the wake of severe financial crises like the ones that happened in 1929 and 2008.
Bob Frank
#19. When you poll all of the economists, uh, across America that I think are intellectually honest they would all, or maybe not all, but 95% of them 96% of them would say you know we really have got a powerful economy.
Donald Evans
#20. The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize.
Kurt Bills
#21. In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.
Karl Marx
#22. Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right - that it sometimes discourages innovation - then we should worry.
Adam Davidson
#23. The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population.
Herbert A. Simon
#24. Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary.
David Suzuki
#25. Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather then the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.
Jim Stanford
#26. Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.
Peter Drucker
#27. Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Peter Drucker
#28. Why did God invent economists? To make weathermen feel good about themselves.
David I. Rozenberg
#29. Economics is too important to leave to the economists.
Steve Keen
#30. The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.
John T. Flynn
#31. You're crazy, Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists,
Douglas Adams
#32. The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#33. Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of.
Oliver Goldsmith
#34. Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago persuasively argue that one of the biggest reasons for the nation's current obesity epidemic is that food is now so much cheaper and easier to prepare.
Charles Duhigg
#35. Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.
Paul Krugman
#36. Future generations of economists will look at the trickle-down theory in much the same way we now look at witch burning, slavery, and the Sinclair C5.
John Niven
#37. That economic decisions are made without certain knowledge of the consequences is pretty self-evident. But, although many economists were aware of this elementary fact, there was no systematic analysis of economic uncertainty until about 1950.
Kenneth Arrow
#38. Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.
Rebecca West
#39. At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.
John Rawls
#40. Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.
Harry S. Truman
#41. We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools.
Alison Gopnik
#42. Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.
Nina Easton
#43. 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
#44. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Edmund Burke
#46. "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
#47. Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it.
William Easterly
#48. There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#49. People today don't become economists to make the world a better place.
Tim Harford
#50. 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
#51. I can't speak for them, of course, but I believe that most economists would accept the view that, while you sometimes can make a score by sheer luck, you can't do it constantly, unless you're willing to put the resources in.
Merton Miller
#52. Ever since economists revealed how much universities contribute to economic growth, politicians have paid close attention to higher education.
Derek Bok
#53. Here, economists will recognize the principle of price differentiation formulated by the engineer-economist Jules Dupuit in 1849: "To set a price for a service, don't base it on what it costs the provider, but instead set the price according to the importance of the service to the user."[10]
Bernard Girard
#54. The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.
Joan Robinson
#55. In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#56. 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
#57. Economists and psychologists get confused when they are asked 'out of syllabus' questions by life!
Saurabh Sharma
#58. All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
George Stigler
#59. The road to climate stability is straight and the solutions simple, and yet scientists, economists, industrialists and politicians are busy making them complicated
Satish Kumar
#60. Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.
Joseph Stiglitz
#61. People are beginning to understand there is nothing in the world so remote that it can't impact you as a person. It's not just diseases. Economists are now beginning to say if we are going to have good markets in Africa, we're going to have to have healthy people in Africa.
William Foege
#62. The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.
B.W. Powe
#63. The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'
Ben Bernanke
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Some economists estimate that for every family that goes bankrupt, there are about 15 more who are in the same amount of financial trouble and would profit from bankruptcy but just haven't filed.
Elizabeth Warren
#67. Most economists would concede that, in theory, government has the tools to smooth the business cycle. The problem is that fiscal policy is not made in theory; it's made in Congress.
Charles Wheelan
#68. Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
Milton Friedman
#69. Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
Daniel Kahneman
#70. 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
#72. [Economists' advice] is something like patent medicine - people know it is largely manufactured by quacks and that a good percentage of the time it won't work, but they continue to buy the brand whose flavor they like.
Barbara Bergmann
#73. Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they'll all turn over together.
Paul Samuelson
#74. Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
Aldo Leopold
#75. Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.
Paul Krugman
#76. If you put two economists xin a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.
Winston Churchill
#77. When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.
Jerry Brown
#78. 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
#79. The traditional story of economists has been to say education explains what the returns are to school. I say, 'Okay, that's fine, but what explains the education? How much is just a matter of my giving you a poor kid versus a rich kid?'
James Heckman
#80. I am often considered almost not a part of the profession of Establishment economists. I am even referred to as a sociologist. And by that, economists usually do not mean anything flattering.
Gunnar Myrdal
#81. Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't.
Robert Orben
#82. Liberal economists conceive of societies as black boxes connected by exchange rates; as long as exchange rates are correct, what goes on inside the black box is regarded as not very important.
Robert Gilpin
#83. If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't be a bad thing.
Peter Lynch
#84. A good accountant is someone who told you yesterday what the economists forcast for tomorrow
Miles Thomas
#85. To economists, prices serve as crucial signals to producers and consumers. In a regulated market, the state sets prices high enough for private companies to cover their costs and earn a guaranteed profit for their investors. But in a deregulated market, prices should vary with demand and supply.
Alex Berenson
#87. I guess economists, it's a bit like scientists; you have definitely fewer women in that field.
Christine Lagarde
#88. Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.
Christina Romer
#89. Nobody at CNBC owns gold. Nobody at Bloomberg owns gold. Gold is being constantly talked down by the media, and Fed officials, and economists, who also don't own any gold. They're all stocked up in equities.
Marc Faber
#90. During the two centuries since the publication of 'The Wealth of Nations,' the main activity of economists, it seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith's system, to correct his errors and to make his analysis vastly more exact.
Ronald Coase
#91. Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#92. What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.
Theodore Schultz
#93. Any economic network is largely dependent on trust if it is to function well. As economists put it, a high degree of trust lowers the costs of transactions and compensates for a lack of information. According to the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama, trust is a key prerequisite for prosperity.
Daniel Ammann
#94. The job of economic theorists is to prove theorems. The job of policy economists is to figure out which theorems to apply.
N. Gregory Mankiw
#95. People who are rich find it hard to understand the behavior of poor people. Economists are no exception, for they, too, find it difficult to comprehend the preferences and scarcity constraints that determine the choices that poor people make.
Theodore Schultz
#96. Among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.
Thomas Piketty
#97. Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.
Nathan Myhrvold
#98. Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.
Helen Keller
#99. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.
Ronald Coase
#100. You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.
Margaret Thatcher
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