American Economist Quotes

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

Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix it." Yet... every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that... the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise.

Lawrence Fertig

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

Nicholas Eberstadt

Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self-image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them.

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

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

James Duesenberry

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

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.

Leon C. Marshall

As has been stated, the purpose of money is to split barter into two parts so that the seller is free to find his source of supply later and elsewhere. This is the sole purpose of money. Any effort to use money to serve another purpose is perversive; and this statement condemns the entire managed money philosophy.

The profits of oil, coal, and natural gas companies will have to yield to the imperative of sustaining life on earth.

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

The rules of workplace democracy are founded in solidarity and mutual trust. They are at the core of a historic process which promises to introduce a new economy, and thereby a new society, after capitalism.

If a man stands with his left foot on a hot stove and his right foot in a refrigerator, the statistician would say that, on the average, he's comfortable.

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.

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

There can never be in human knowledge any such thing as finality. Always at the end there is a mystery; it will always be there.

The surplus of society overrides all our traditions and shapes all our philosophies.

Either we pay the government's bills, or we leave them for our kids to pay. It's that simple.

Laurence Kotlikoff

The "human condition" is always to push forward for the better and economics is the study of that process.

A nation's exchange rate is the single most important price in its economy; it will influence the entire range of individual prices, imports and exports, and even the level of economic activity. So it is hard for any government to ignore large swings in its exchange rate...

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

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

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Robert C. Merton

Being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do.

The advance of technology, like the growth of population and industry, has also been proceeding exponentially.