20th-century Economist Quotes

Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used.

Don't ask from whom the economy hides; it hides from you!

Fred E. Foldvary

The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships.

Most "original" ideas aren't completely original, but instead are the result of two basic methods for generating ideas: problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems.

The relationship of agency is one of the oldest and commonest codified codes of social interaction. We will say that an agency relationship has arisen between two (or more) parties when one, designated as the agent, acts for the other, designated the principal, in a particular domain of decision problems. Examples of agency are universal.

Stephen Ross (economist)

Social costs... are all direct and indirect losses sustained by third persons or the general public as a result of unrestrained economic activities.

Karl William Kapp

The scholars who understand it hesitate to speak out boldly for fear people will not understand. The people, who understand it quite easily, also fear to speak out while they wait for the scholars to speak out first. The difference between our present situation and that of the story is that it is not the emperor but the people who are periodically made to go naked and hungry and insecure and discontented - a ready prey to less timid organizers of discontent for the destruction of the civilization.

Biographies are like anthologies, especially anthologies of poetry. One's eyes are magnetically directed to what ought to be there but isn't, as well as to what oughtn't to be there but is.

Mary Stocks, Baroness Stocks

Most of economics can be summarized in four words: 'People respond to incentives.' The rest is commentary.

Steven Landsburg

Some bodies of knowledge emerge over time in a process of coevolution with the location in which they are embedded.

Jonas Ridderstråle

By about the year 2000 Communist China will be a superpower built by American technology and skill.

Antony C. Sutton

Almost anything one says or has said about what society wants or should get is threatened with internal inconsistency.

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.

The enemy and his allies are now at the gates of the capitalists' fortress. Is there any hope that the businessman will finally sense the danger to himself and the system of which he is a part and rise to meet the challenge?

Benjamin A. Rogge

At this point, then, a junction is effected between the previously developed train of thought on countervailing passions and the doctrine of interest. Both doctrines originated in Machiavelli; yet the final outcome—the promotion of avarice to the position of the privileged passion given the job of taming the wild ones and of making in this fashion a crucial contribution to statecraft—would have greatly surprised and outraged him.

Albert O. Hirschman

Realistically, it will be a case of muddling through, struggling from one crisis to the next. It is difficult to forecast how long this will continue for, but it cannot go on endlessly. Governments will pile up more debt — and then one day, the house of cards will collapse.

There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can't get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.

William Easterly

There were a large number of Jews who held more favorable positions than they should have, according to their percentage of the population. Germans should have held those positions.

If you look carefully, almost all Old Money secrets can be traced to a single source: a longer-term outlook.

Bill Bonner (author)

There is a very real danger that financial regulation will become a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation.
In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means.

Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons that it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control.

Thomas Schelling

"Be in high-growth markets." In the old economic order, in the age of market share, volume growth was a guarantor of success. Growth was what we were taught to pursue. It created higher profits for all, including market share laggards, companies with poor business designs, and companies that were poorly managed. A rising tide raised all boats. One manager articulated the classic view: "There are no management problems that volume growth can't solve. Even if we manage poorly, rising revenue helps cover the mistakes we made."

Adrian Slywotzky