British Economist Quotes

There seems to be striking similarities between the role of economic statistics in our society and some of the functions which magic and divination play in primitive society.

Historians are pessimistic by nature, because the only future they can imagine is the past.

Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be.

Thomas Robert Malthus

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

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden

It is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again.

E. F. Schumacher

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

John Maynard Keynes

Science might also be defined as the process of substituting unimportant questions which can be answered for important questions which cannot.

Kenneth Boulding

Beware of parting! The true sadness is not in the pain of the parting; it is in the when and the how you are to meet again with the face about to vanish from your view.

Edward George, Baron George

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

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

James Callaghan

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

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

In the second place, a system would involve more variables than those which may be supposed to enter into demand relationships, and so the preliminary work of estimating the necessary time series would also be increased. In the third place, in the simultaneous method of estimation the estimates of the original parameters come to depend on most of the remaining estimates, and so it is quite likely that they will have large sampling variances.

The attempt to isolate economics from other disciplines-notably politics, history, philosophy, finance, constitutional theory and sociology-has fatally disabled its power to explain what is happening in the world.

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

Man is a rational animal, and if human affairs are hard to regulate, his twofold nature is usually the cause. Reason is something ultimate; it would be the same in another planet, or in another universe, as it is here. Animal nature is something contingent; it might have been different. Our life is a compromise, a blend between the animal and the rational.

Ralph George Hawtrey

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

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.

Peter Thomas Bauer

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

William Beveridge

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.

[Functionalism is a] dividing up of activities as to kinds.

People who achieve a sense of meaning in their lives are happier than those who live from one pleasure to another.

Richard Layard, Baron Layard

The fundamental idea of transaction costs is that they consist of the cost of arranging a contract ex ante and monitoring and enforcing it ex post, as opposed to production costs, which are the costs of executing a contract.

Robin Matthews (economist)

Whatever form it takes, the possession of the imaginative gift transforms the problem of accounting for human conduct. For now it is not a question of how given needs are satisfied. Deliberative conduct, choice, the prime economic act, depend for their possibility, when they go beyond pure instinctive animal response to stimulus, upon the conceptual power of the human mind. Choice is necessarily amongst thoughts, amongst things imagined.

G. L. S. Shackle

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.