American Economist Quotes

Alexander Hamilton

Paul Krugman

Joseph Stiglitz

Paul Samuelson

John Kenneth Galbraith

Ludwig von Mises

Under capitalism each individual engages in economic planning.

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. So economic models — how any model by definition isn't right. When someone just says, 'Oh, your model is wrong.' That's not much of an insight. What you want to know is, is wrong in important ways or wrong in ways that are less relevant? And you want to know what does the data really say about the model?

Lars Peter Hansen

The mere thought of investment in human beings is offensive to some among us. Our values and beliefs inhibit us from looking upon human beings as capital goods, except in slavery, and this we abhor... To treat human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment runs counter to deeply held values. It seems to reduce man once again to a mere material component, something akin to property. And for man to look upon himself as a capital good, even if it did not impair his freedom, may seem to debase him... (But) by investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choice available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare.

Theodore Schultz

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models.

Learning can be defined as occurring under two conditions. First, learning occurs when an organisation achieves what it intended; that is, there is a match between its design for action and the actual outcome. Second, learning occurs when a mismatch between intention and outcome is identified and corrected; that is, a mismatch is turned into a match.... Single-loop learning occurs when matches are created, or when mismatches are corrected by changing actions. Double-loop learning occurs when mismatches are corrected by first examining and altering the governing variables and then the actions.

The choice among these alternatives in any given case depends on the degree of difficulty consumers have in making the choice unaided, and on the consequences of errors of judgment. It its the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable. The certification proposal never seems to have been discussed seriously.

Central to both the theoretical and the empirical validity of factor models is the correct specification of the number of factors.

But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.

The role of expectations is not limited to monetary policy but is crucial in many areas of economics, as Bob showed in his later research on investment, unemployment, taxation, public debt management, and asset pricing. In all of these situations, the appropriate evaluation of policy takes account of the way that expectations would be rationally formed.

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

The failure to find the right niche for people - or to let them find their own perfect niches - is a major reason that so many workplaces are mediocre, even toxic, in spite of the presence of talent. Leaders of great groups give them whatever they need and free them from everything else.

It was a global depression, had many causes, the whole story requires you to look at the whole international system. But policy errors in United States, as well as abroad, did play an important role. And in particular as I said, the Federal Reserve failed in this first challenge in both parts of its mission. It did not use monetary policy aggressively to prevent deflation and the collapse in the economy, so it failed in its economic stability function. And it didn't adequately perform its function as lender of last resort allowing many bank failures and a resulting contraction in credit and also with the money supply. So, in that respect, again, the Fed did not fulfill its intended mission.

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

Jared Bernstein

Global warming is the most prominent form of mass hysteria raging across the world today.

Common sense tells us that the world is flat, that the sun goes around the earth, that heavy bodies always fall faster than light bodies, that boats made of iron will sink.

The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unnecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them.

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

Marriner Stoddard Eccles

What was critical for the maintenance of pegged exchange rates, I argue in this book, was protection for governments from pressure to trade exchange rate stability for other goals.

Barry Eichengreen

The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting...

Daniel Ellsberg

In most, if not quite all, parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia.

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

Fred E. Foldvary

Why don't we have libertarian anarchy? Why does government exist? The answer implicit in previous chapters is that government as a whole exists because most people believe it is necessary.

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.