American Economist Quotes

I felt I wanted to talk about the Fed's mission, and I wanted to do so in understandable terms, and to emphasize that unemployment is part of our mission. The recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on those who have less education and income—middle-income and low-income families—and the Fed's concern with the job market is a theme I've wanted to get across. Why are we doing all these things that are in the newspapers all the time? I was trying to explain that we're doing this to help American families who are struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

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.

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.

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.

The point is that coordination can be achieved by either of two means: (1) with no one dictating anyone else's precise behavior, but everyone observing a set of rules, or (2) with someone (or perhaps more than one) directing the behavior of others. We refer to the first of the two means as coordination by rules and the second as coordination by command.

Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organized activities happen the way they are planned.

Philip B. Crosby

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

Inclusive economic institutions require secure property rights and economic opportunities not just for the elite but for a broad cross-section of society.

Daron Acemoğlu

Fit is a feasible set of equally effective internally consistent patterns of organizational context and structure.

Andrew H. Van de Ven

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.

Robert H. Frank

Investment in girls' education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.

Lawrence Summers

General advertising is Cyrano. He comes under your window and sings; people get used to it and ignore it. But if Roxane responds, there's a relationship. We move the brand relationship up a notch. Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship.

Lester Wunderman

Because internal organization experiences added bureaucratic costs, the firm is usefully thought as the organization of last resort: try markets, try hybrids (long term contractual relations into which security features have been crafted), and resort to firms when all else fails (compatatively).

Oliver E. Williamson

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

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

Every improvement in our conceptions of justice, as well as in the machinery for the administration of justice, whereby a closer approximation to exact justice may be secured, will make for social peace, though the mere adjudication of conflicting interests will not remove the conflicts themselves nor their cause. That lies deeper than legislatures or courts can probe.

Thomas Nixon Carver

"Any graduate of the ___ Business School should be able to beat an index fund over the course of a market cycle."
Statements such as these are made with alarming frequency by investment professionals. In some cases, subtle and sophisticated reasoning may be involved. More often (alas), the conclusions can only be justified by assuming that the laws of arithmetic have been suspended for the convenience of those who choose to pursue careers as active managers.

William F. Sharpe

Much time was wasted and ink spilled in the late 1960s and early 1970s trying to interpret the lagged effect of prices on wages as reflecting adaptive lags in the formation of expectations. But if we have learned anything from the new Keynesian economics of Fischer, Taylor, Blanchard, and their younger followers, it is that price and wage inertia is compatible with rational expectations.

Robert J. Gordon

Think of the firm as a gigantic tub of whole milk. The farmer can sell the whole milk as it is. Or he can separate out the cream, and sell it at a considerably higher price than the whole milk would bring. (Selling cream is the analog of a firm selling debt securities, which pay a contractual return.) But, of course, what the farmer would have left would be skim milk, with low butter-fat content, and that would sell for much less than whole milk. (Skim milk corresponds to the levered equity.) The Modigliani-Miller proposition says that if there were no cost of separation (and, of course, no government dairy support program), the cream plus the skim milk would bring the same price as the whole milk.

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

Bill Bonner (author)

Every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

I believe that in years to come, historians will see the beginning of the 21st century as the 'golden age' of real estate.

We cannot simply rely on a program of pollution abatement in country A [the polluting country] for this would impose costs on A with no offsetting benefits to the polluting country. The OECD's Polluter-Pays-Principle is thus inconsistent with our insistence on a Pareto improvement. Mutual gains to the countries necessarily require the victim country B to make some payments to A.

The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting good.

William McChesney Martin