American Economist Quotes

The new morality does not consist in saving but in expanding consumption.

The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory — and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.

Oskar Morgenstern

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

Your friend, rather perversely I think, refers to the "disastrous results" that followed the monetary tightening of Volcker and other more monetarist-minded central bankers without even hinting at the facts that that the tightening was aimed at bringing down inflation rates, and that it succeeded remarkably well in doing precisely that. In other words, the tightening did precisely what monetarism said it would do, and what monetarists' critics at the time, wedded to the view that monetary policy was ineffective, and that inflation was entirely caused by OPEC (or by unions, or by anything except monetary policy) insisted it could not do. And yet your friend imagines that the experience proved the monetarists wrong!

The writings of Joseph Schumpeter contributed an essential part of the broad conceptual framework that now embraces the discussion of dynamic capabilities.

Sidney G. Winter

It's the new management's job to look at the world as it changes, and how do we look at change and take advantage of change, rather than put our head in the ground.

Sanford I. Weill

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

Tax hikes are to markets what bacon grease is to human arteries.

Donald J. Boudreaux

Real economic efficiency implies including all resources that affect sustainable human well-being in the allocation system, not just marketed goods and services. Our current market allocation system excludes most non-marketed natural and social capital assets and services that are critical contributors to human well-being. The current economic model ignores this and therefore does not achieve real economic efficiency. A new, sustainable ecological economic model would measure and include the contributions of natural and social capital and could better approximate real economic efficiency.

Robert Costanza

While many of the conflicting claims can be reconciled in terms of the short-run and long-run orientation of Keynesians and monetarists, respectively, and in terms of their contrasting philosophical orientations, neither vision takes into account the workings or failings of the market mechanisms within the investment aggregate. Austrian macroeconomics is set apart from both Keynesianism and monetarism by its attention to the differential effects of interest rate changes within the investment sector, or—using the Austrian terminology—within the economy's structure of production.

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.

No doubt exists that rent seeking in general leads to serious inefficiencies in this direct sense, but its indirect damage is even worse. Drawing the bulk of intelligent and energetic people in society into activity that has no social product, or may have a negative social product, is more important in explaining the stagnation of these societies than the direct social cost of the rent seeking.

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.

Economics is all about how people make choices. Sociology is all about why they don't have any choices to make.

James Duesenberry

Early critics pointed out REH's fundamental epistemological flaws. … They argued that REH, even if viewed as a bold abstraction or approximation, is grossly inadequate for representing how even minimally reasonable profit seeking participants forecast the future in real-world markets. Nevertheless, … an overwhelming majority of economists has embraced REH as the way to represent how rational individuals think about the future.

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

On October 16, 1929

Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

Without recognising indivisibilities — in human person, in residences, plants, equipment, and in transportation — location patterns, down to those of the smallest village, cannot be understood

Tjalling Koopmans

The profit motive promotes economic growth by creating better products at cheaper prices.

In the end, a theory is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because researchers persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant.

If you look at the speeches he gave just before he left the Fed, it's pretty much After me - the Deluge. I'm getting out while my reputation's intact.

In scientific experimentation we control everything that happens. We determine when it shall occur and where. We arrange circumstances and surroundings, atmosphere and temperatures; possible ways of getting in and possible ways of getting out. We take something that has been in, or put in something that has been out, and see what happens.

Franklin Henry Giddings

It has long been speculated that money predates writing because the earliest examples of writing appear to be records of monetary debts—meaning that the closely intertwined chronology of the development of writing and money will make it impossible to find a written history.

L. Randall Wray

There [is]... a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:

Walton Hale Hamilton

The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.