Economist Quotes

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.

They have two distinguishing characteristics. The vast majority of them are laborers, and, as a rule, they expect the violent overthrow of existing institutions by revolution to precede the introduction of the socialistic state. I would not, by any means, say that they are all revolutionists, but the most of them undoubtedly are...
The most general demands of the social democrats are the following: The state should exist exclusively for the laborers; land and capital must become collective property, and production be carried on unitedly. Private competition, in the ordinary sense of the term, is to cease.

We cannot simply rely on a program of pollution abatement in country A [the polluting country] for this would impose costs on A with no offsetting benefits to the polluting country. The OECD's Polluter-Pays-Principle is thus inconsistent with our insistence on a Pareto improvement. Mutual gains to the countries necessarily require the victim country B to make some payments to A.

The precision of their goals allows conceptual artists to be satisfied that they have produced one or more works that achieve a particular purpose... a problem solved can free him to pursue new goals.

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

Most innovations fail. And companies that don't innovate die.

Henry Chesbrough

The point is that coordination can be achieved by either of two means: (1) with no one dictating anyone else's precise behavior, but everyone observing a set of rules, or (2) with someone (or perhaps more than one) directing the behavior of others. We refer to the first of the two means as coordination by rules and the second as coordination by command.

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

Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

The contraction from 1929 to 1933 was by far the most severe business-cycle contraction during the near-century of U.S. history we cover and it may well have been the most severe in the whole of U.S. history.

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.

I was sometimes brought to a standstill, and at times almost despaired of making further progress... I knew no one of whom I could ask a question or receive any kind of instruction, and the subject was therefore at times very painful.

To reverse the trend and reduce the role of government in our lives, and thus alleviate the government deficit and inflation pressures, is a giant educational task. The social and economic ideas that gave birth to the transfer system must be discredited and replaced with old values of individual independence and self-reliance. The social philosophy of individual freedom and unhampered private property must again be our guiding light.

If grade inflation continues, a college bachelor's degree will have just as much credibility as a high school diploma.

Walter E. Williams

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

An inequality-furthering phenomenon is technological development. But need it be? Increasingly we get the feeling that technological development is not simply something given, but that it may be guided, within limits.

If all properly economic problems were solved once for all... the social struggle and strife would... [not necessarily] be reduced in amount or intensity... in the absence of some moral revolution which could by no means be assumed to follow in consequence of this change itself.

Realistically, it will be a case of muddling through, struggling from one crisis to the next. It is difficult to forecast how long this will continue for, but it cannot go on endlessly. Governments will pile up more debt — and then one day, the house of cards will collapse.

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

If a train stops at a train station, what do you think happens at a work station?

The rules of workplace democracy are founded in solidarity and mutual trust. They are at the core of a historic process which promises to introduce a new economy, and thereby a new society, after capitalism.

Economics takes a while to learn, even if much of it is in a way quite simple. It is simple to be wrong as well as to be right, and it is none too easy to distinguish between them.

There [is]... a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:

Walton Hale Hamilton

Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business.

Either we pay the government's bills, or we leave them for our kids to pay. It's that simple.

Laurence Kotlikoff