20th-century Economist Quotes

A government decision that slashes spending at the wrong time and sends a weak economy into a tailspin can be just as undisciplined as one that unleashes a wasteful spending spree in an overheated environment.

Peter Blair Henry

Index funds do not trade from security to security and, thus, they tend to avoid capital gains taxes.

A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.

One of the most original and most important ideas advanced by Hayek is the role of the 'division of knowledge' in economic society.

A nation's exchange rate is the single most important price in its economy; it will influence the entire range of individual prices, imports and exports, and even the level of economic activity. So it is hard for any government to ignore large swings in its exchange rate...

The "human condition" is always to push forward for the better and economics is the study of that process.

Either we pay the government's bills, or we leave them for our kids to pay. It's that simple.

Laurence Kotlikoff

There seems to be striking similarities between the role of economic statistics in our society and some of the functions which magic and divination play in primitive society.

If we as a society want to cure unemployment, raise real wages, and in other ways improve our economy, we will base public policy on private property rights, the non-aggression principle and the law of free association. In the free and prosperous society, everyone may do precisely as he pleases, provided only that he does not initiate violence against non-aggressors.

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

The default assumption is that - financial crises aside - growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our wellbeing.

Tim Jackson (economist)

Full employment is a socially hazardous goal. In effect, it aspires to restore through political expedients the pre-industrial state of toil that science, engineering, technology and modern management are pledged to overcome.

When government taxes and regulates, what is seen are the visible effects of government contracts, grants, and subsidies. What is not seen are all of the property, business, and jobs that would have been created if citizens were left with the right to choose.

The precision of their goals allows conceptual artists to be satisfied that they have produced one or more works that achieve a particular purpose... a problem solved can free him to pursue new goals.

Not even the most subtle and skilled analysis can overcome completely the unreliability of basic data.

The Chinese and their government are wedded to a different conception of society and polity: community-based rather than individualist, state-centric rather than liberal, authoritarian rather than democratic. China has 2,000 years of history as a distinct civilization from which to draw strength. It will not simply fold under Western values and institutions.

We now have single corporate enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of workers, having hundreds of thousands of stockholders, using billions of dollars' worth of the instruments of production, serving millions of customers, and controlled by a single management group. These are great collectives of enterprise, and a system composed of them might well be called "collective capitalism."

Gardiner C. Means

Next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities.

Men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end.

The stampede toward rational expectations — widely thought to be a revolution, though it was only a generalization of the neoclassical idea of equilibrium—derailed the expectations-driven model building that had just left the station. In the end, this way of modeling has not illuminated how the world economy works.

I had no idea in 1933 what economics was, but I did well in the subject from the start, and when I graduated in 1937 with first class honours LSE gave me a scholarship to do a PhD in industrial economics.

W. Arthur Lewis

There is a history of mathematical models of oligopolistic competition dating from Cournot to the theory of games. There is also a literature generated by institutional economists, lawyers, and administrators interested in formulating and implementing public policy. It has been the tendency of these groups to work almost as though the other did not exist.

Politicians use research findings the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.

Jared Bernstein

A major social problem we face today is how to control the political process that is eroding the free enterprise market system. Although I am pessimistic that we will in fact ever resolve this problem completely, we will surely never solve it unless we develop a viable positive theory of the political process. Such a political theory will not be complete until we also have developed a theory that explains why we get the results we do out of the mass media.

Michael C. Jensen

The creation of economic stories from real life is an ongoing process—because new stories appear every day.

Daniel S. Hamermesh