American Economist Quotes

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.

Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and the long term. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.

Simon Kuznets
Simon Kuznets
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."

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.

The construction of an economic model, or of any model or theory for that matter (or the writing of a novel, a short story, or a play) consists of snatching from the enormous and complex mass of facts called reality, a few simple, easily-managed key points which, when put together in some cunning way, become for certain purposes a substitute for reality itself.

Public choice then came along and provided analyses of the behavior of persons acting politically, whether voters, politicians or bureaucrats. These analyses exposed the essentially false comparisons that were then informing so much of both scientific and public opinion. In a very real sense, public choice became a set of theories of governmental failures, as an offset to the theories of market failures that had previously emerged from theoretical welfare economics. Or, as I put it in the title of a lecture in Vienna in 1978, public choice may be summarized by the three-word description, 'politics without romance'.

James M. Buchanan
James M. Buchanan
There are many reasons there was higher inflation in the 1970s. But that is a complicated story that deals with much more than tax policies.

Lawrence Klein
Lawrence Klein
It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).

If a train stops at a train station, what do you think happens at a work station?

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

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

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

Though he may not always recognise his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers.

How did language develop? In much the same way an economic order develops through the market—out of the voluntary interaction of individuals, in this case seeking to trade ideas or information or gossip rather than goods and services with one another.

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

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
On October 16, 1929

Irving Fisher
Irving Fisher
Government was never during the 1970s able to bring itself to meet the first fundamental requirement of a successful price-stabilization policy — namely, that its policies, quite simply, would not accommodate inflation.

Paul McCracken (economist)
Paul McCracken (economist)
Humanity, having learned to perform miracles of production, must at last learn to use its miraculous powers not to degrade itself and destroy its home but to make the world a better place to live in for itself and its progeny for millennia to come.

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

If all properly economic problems were solved once for all... the social struggle and strife would... [not necessarily] be reduced in amount or intensity... in the absence of some moral revolution which could by no means be assumed to follow in consequence of this change itself.

The other economy [or "periphery economy"] is populated by relatively small firms. These enterprises are the ones usually dominated by a single individual or family. The firm's sales are realized in restricted markets. Profits and retained... Techniques of production and marketing are rarely as up to date as those in the center.

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.

Property rights define the institutional basis of power relations in production, exchange and accumulation, rather than just the relationship of actors to property. The ability to manipulate property rights affords the state important leverage over the balance of power among actors in the economy.