Economist Quotes

Adam Smith

John Maynard Keynes

Dag Hammarskjöld

Alexander Hamilton

Amartya Sen

Paul Krugman

Thomas Robert Malthus

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.

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

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

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

Under capitalism each individual engages in economic planning.

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

Dag Hammarskjöld

Investment in girls' education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.

Lawrence Summers

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

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

If you are a marketing professional who wants to reach your buyers directly, many experts will say that the media is the only way to tell your story, and that press releases only to reach journalists - not your buyers directly. They'll say that bloggers are geeks in pajamas who don't matter. They are wrong.

David Meerman Scott

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

We next consider the rule that the investor does or should consider expected return a desirable thing and variance of return an undesirable thing.

Harry Markowitz

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

There is also present another source of energy operating in a more continuous fashion and being more intimately connected with the permanent evolution in human societies.

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.

Thoughts and ideas are not phantoms. They are real things. Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.

Ludwig von Mises

Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.

It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries.

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

They establish contact with the subconscious of the consumer below the word level. They do this with visual symbols instead of words... They communicate faster. They are more direct. There is no work, no mental effort. Their sole purpose is to create images and moods.

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 other economy [or "periphery economy"] is populated by relatively small firms. These enterprises are the ones usually dominated by a single individual or family. The firm's sales are realized in restricted markets. Profits and retained... Techniques of production and marketing are rarely as up to date as those in the center.

Robert T. Averitt

The choice among these alternatives in any given case depends on the degree of difficulty consumers have in making the choice unaided, and on the consequences of errors of judgment. It its the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable. The certification proposal never seems to have been discussed seriously.

The market universe is composed of two types of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today; they are increasingly characterized by intense competition. Blue oceans are all the industries not in existence today; they are untouched and uncontested. To prosper in the future, companies need to go beyond competing; they need to create blue oceans. The issue is how to do so.