Economist Quotes

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

Under central planning neither planners, managers, nor workers had incentives to promote the social economic interest. Nor did impeding markets for final goods to the planning system enfranchise consumers in meaningful ways. But central planning would have been incompatible with economic democracy even if it had overcome its information and incentive liabilities. And the truth is that it survived as long as it did only because it was propped up by unprecedented totalitarian political power.

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

Tax hikes are to markets what bacon grease is to human arteries.

Donald J. Boudreaux

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.

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

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)

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 firm as a relatively durable organizational structure is able to deal with the lack of knowledge about the future fruits of research and development and innovation. Its relative internal stability means that it can carry unquantifiable risks which would be eschewed in the volatility of the market. In particular large firms are able to set up and sustain R&D departments with their own funds. It is widely recognized that atomized, small-scale private enterprise is not well able to make such long-term commitments.

Geoffrey Hodgson

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

Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships.

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

It has long been speculated that money predates writing because the earliest examples of writing appear to be records of monetary debts—meaning that the closely intertwined chronology of the development of writing and money will make it impossible to find a written history.

L. Randall Wray

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

Jared Bernstein

The enemy and his allies are now at the gates of the capitalists' fortress. Is there any hope that the businessman will finally sense the danger to himself and the system of which he is a part and rise to meet the challenge?

Benjamin A. Rogge

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.

Adam Smith, Say, and especially C. J. Kraus, one of the best teachers of Adam Smith's theory, are my guides. The aim of my work is to present, in my own arrangement, their writings and thoughts clearly and plainly, together with some of my own observations.

Fryderyk Skarbek

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

Arthur Cecil Pigou

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

Theodore Levitt

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.