American Economist Quotes

A relevant notion of efficiency must refer to scarcity and people as they are, not as they could be.

Harold Demsetz
Harold Demsetz
It has become clear from the rumblings and soul-searching in the field of competitive strategy that a revolution is brewing. Managers and strategy researchers are discovering that existing models of strategy are nearly obsolete in the intensity of today's fast-paced competition. Some have called for a more dynamic approach, even questioning the sustainability of competitive advantage in this new environment. But so far, this revolution-waiting-to-happen has had no leader. Now it has.

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.

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.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but its pretty much the whole game today.

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.

Is marketing management an art or a science? Some marketing observers maintain that good marketing is more of an art and does not lend itself to rigorous analysis and deliberation. Others strongly disagree and contend that marketing management is a highly disciplined enterprise that has much in common with other business disciplines.

A company's ability to innovate, improve, and learn ties directly to the company's value.

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

Henry Paulson
Henry Paulson
Most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an alternative. To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support.

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.

Edmund Phelps
Edmund Phelps
Efforts to preserve all industries will lower the national standard of living.

Michael Porter
Michael Porter
The relationship of agency is one of the oldest and commonest codified codes of social interaction. We will say that an agency relationship has arisen between two (or more) parties when one, designated as the agent, acts for the other, designated the principal, in a particular domain of decision problems. Examples of agency are universal.

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.

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

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.

The boot and shoe makers, either as shoemakers or cordwainers, have been the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. A highly skilled and intelligent class of tradesmen, widely scattered, easily menaced by commercial and industrial changes, they have resorted with determination at each new menace to the refuge of protective organizations.

John R. Commons
John R. Commons
Speak... of the separation of ownership and active leadership. Ordinarily the problem is stated in terms of the divorce between ownership and "control". This last word is badly overused, and it needs to be precisely defined... Our procedure... will be to study the ownership of officers and directors and then to ascertain the extent to which non-management stockholdings are sufficiently concentrated to permit through ownership the wielding of considerable power and influence (control?) over management by an individual, group or another corporation.

The term monopoly as used in the law is not a tool of analysis but a standard of evaluation. Not all trusts are held monopolistic but only" bad" trusts; not all restraints of trade are to be condemned but only" unreasonable" restraints.

Briefly stated, the Follett philosophy is that any enduring society, any continuously productive industrial organization, must be grounded upon a recognition of the motivating desires of the individual and of the group. Consistently, Miss Follett sought to force home a realization of the fact that the democratic way of life, implemented by intelligent organization and administration of government and of industry, is to work toward an honest integration of all points of view, to the end that every individuality may be mobilized and made to count both as a person and as an effective part of his group and of society as a whole.

Clearly, the broad effect of economic evolution until about 1920 was to increase the concentration of jobs in the cyclically volatile industries, and this was a major force tending to intensify declines of employment during business contractions. Since then, the continued progress of technology, the very factor which originally was mainly responsible for the concentration in the cyclical industries, has served to arrest this tendency. The upward trend of production in manufacturing and the other highly cyclical industries has remained rapid in recent decades.

Arthur F. Burns
Arthur F. Burns
We believe that, in order to understand contemporary economic decision making, we need to supplement the study of market factors with an examination of the internal operation of the firm – to study the effects of organizational structure and conventional practice on the developments of goals, the formation of expectations, and the execution of choices.

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:

The materials collected in this volume are intended to acquaint the student with economic principles as they are manifested in the tangible facts of economic life. A few extracts of primarily theoretical character have been included to represent important aspects of contemporary or historic thought; but for the most part the selections are not so much authoritative formulations of economic laws as concrete case-material embodying such laws, or affording a background of information which the systematic treatises on economics can hardly give and which the teacher certainly cannot often assume that his students will possess.

Although good administrators are not necessarily interchangeable, there appear to be certain recurring aspects of administrative work to which attention may be profitably directed.