Economist Quotes

Adam Smith

John Maynard Keynes

Dag Hammarskjöld

Alexander Hamilton

Amartya Sen

Paul Krugman

Thomas Robert Malthus

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. So economic models — how any model by definition isn't right. When someone just says, 'Oh, your model is wrong.' That's not much of an insight. What you want to know is, is wrong in important ways or wrong in ways that are less relevant? And you want to know what does the data really say about the model?

Lars Peter Hansen

Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Nearly all educational expenditure should be considered a capital outlay, whether it provides a future return in the form of enhanced taxable income or in terms of an enhanced quality of life.

William Vickrey

Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.

Under capitalism each individual engages in economic planning.

The mere thought of investment in human beings is offensive to some among us. Our values and beliefs inhibit us from looking upon human beings as capital goods, except in slavery, and this we abhor... To treat human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment runs counter to deeply held values. It seems to reduce man once again to a mere material component, something akin to property. And for man to look upon himself as a capital good, even if it did not impair his freedom, may seem to debase him... (But) by investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choice available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare.

Theodore Schultz

Politicians use research findings the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.

Jared Bernstein

The cheaper the stock, the better the outlook for future returns.

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

After my stellar first grade academic achievements, I continued to perform well in the city primary schools - except for penmanship, which was not my forte.

Vernon L. Smith

Every article authored in a prestigious journal in a scholars field of study is like a notch in the six-gun of an Old West gun-fighter, a proof of talent and visible building block of the academic intellectual's reputation pyramid.

Martin Anderson (economist)

Common sense tells us that the world is flat, that the sun goes around the earth, that heavy bodies always fall faster than light bodies, that boats made of iron will sink.

The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.

The Chinese and their government are wedded to a different conception of society and polity: community-based rather than individualist, state-centric rather than liberal, authoritarian rather than democratic. China has 2,000 years of history as a distinct civilization from which to draw strength. It will not simply fold under Western values and institutions.

In a world where routine production is footloose...competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away.

Today we are practically living a trade war, a currency war because the exchange rate today is one of the important factors to determine the competitiveness or not of products. Generalized currency depreciation in my view is an explicit strategy used by countries and that threatens us.

While many of the conflicting claims can be reconciled in terms of the short-run and long-run orientation of Keynesians and monetarists, respectively, and in terms of their contrasting philosophical orientations, neither vision takes into account the workings or failings of the market mechanisms within the investment aggregate. Austrian macroeconomics is set apart from both Keynesianism and monetarism by its attention to the differential effects of interest rate changes within the investment sector, or—using the Austrian terminology—within the economy's structure of production.

Now it is time to encourage the BIS and other regulatory bodies to support studies on stress-test and concentration methodologies. Planning for crises is more important than VAR analysis.

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

In 1965, I was invited to a game theory workshop at Jerusalem which lasted for three weeks and had only 17 participants, but among them all the important researchers in game theory, with few exceptions. Game theory was still a small field. We had heated discussions about Harsanyi's new theory of games with incomplete information. This was the beginning of my long cooperation with John C. Harsanyi.

Reinhard Selten

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

Arthur Cecil Pigou

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

Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

Central to both the theoretical and the empirical validity of factor models is the correct specification of the number of factors.

The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting...

Daniel Ellsberg