British Economist Quotes

John Maynard Keynes
Thomas Robert Malthus
Alfred Marshall
James Callaghan
Ronald Coase
William Beveridge
John Bowring

Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.

Alfred Marshall
Alfred Marshall
In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

Ronald Coase
Ronald Coase
If a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished.

The theory of the determination of wages in a free market is simply a special case of the general theory of value. Wages are the price of labour.

Custom, that unwritten law,
By which the people keep even kings in awe.

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins
Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins
Anyone who pretends to know if we are out of the woods yet is clearly kidding themselves or misleading their audience.... Things have stabilized in Europe and it's in their interest to be optimistic but the muddle-through is still on.

It would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the transcendent importance of the part the railroad has played in making the Nation what it is to-day. Perhaps it would be within bounds to say that without railroads to bind the States into one homogeneous whole, the Nation never could have attained its present size and importance.

Any one country can be in any of four possible disequilibrium situations. It can be (1) a surplus country with a domestic slump, (2) a surplus country with a domestic boom, (3) a deficit country with a domestic slump, or (4) a deficit country with a domestic boom.

James Meade
James Meade
No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter.

William Beveridge
William Beveridge
Far from the West having caused the poverty in the Third World, contact with the West has been the principal agent of material progress there.

Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4°C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.

Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford
Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford
I once read that more millionaires per capita were created during the Great Depression than at any other time in history.

Management tries to make the best use of the resources available.

Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used.

Paul Collier
Paul Collier
Not even the most subtle and skilled analysis can overcome completely the unreliability of basic data.

R. G. D. Allen
R. G. D. Allen
It is the welfare state that has made capitalism, with all its attendant benefits of economic growth, politically feasible...

Right after we published our first findings, we started getting letters from all over the country saying, "You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics"… I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises as the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true.

W. Brian Arthur
W. Brian Arthur
You cannot now, if you ever could, spend your way out of a recession.

James Callaghan
James Callaghan
If you ever find a man who is better than you are - hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.

By about the year 2000 Communist China will be a superpower built by American technology and skill.

As proposals for estimating the social scarcity prices of natural resources remain contentious, economic accountants ignore them and governments remain wary of doing anything about them.

Partha Dasgupta
Partha Dasgupta
All real capitalisms are impure hybrids, mongrels mixed with other strains.

The default assumption is that - financial crises aside - growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our wellbeing.

The whole Marxian system springs from classical political economy as it found expression in Ricardo.