Economist Quotes

Without recognising indivisibilities — in human person, in residences, plants, equipment, and in transportation — location patterns, down to those of the smallest village, cannot be understood

Tjalling Koopmans

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

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.

The materials collected in this volume are intended to acquaint the student with economic principles as they are manifested in the tangible facts of economic life. A few extracts of primarily theoretical character have been included to represent important aspects of contemporary or historic thought; but for the most part the selections are not so much authoritative formulations of economic laws as concrete case-material embodying such laws, or affording a background of information which the systematic treatises on economics can hardly give and which the teacher certainly cannot often assume that his students will possess.

Leon C. Marshall

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

Arthur Cecil Pigou

Almost anything one says or has said about what society wants or should get is threatened with internal inconsistency.

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.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

Real economic efficiency implies including all resources that affect sustainable human well-being in the allocation system, not just marketed goods and services. Our current market allocation system excludes most non-marketed natural and social capital assets and services that are critical contributors to human well-being. The current economic model ignores this and therefore does not achieve real economic efficiency. A new, sustainable ecological economic model would measure and include the contributions of natural and social capital and could better approximate real economic efficiency.

Robert Costanza

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

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.

The last leg of a bull market always ends in hysteria; the last leg of a bear market always ends in panic.

No arbitrary regulation, no act of the legislature, can add anything to the capital of the country; it can only force it into artificial channels.

John Ramsay McCulloch

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

Most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an alternative. To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support.

Michael Perelman

The advance of technology, like the growth of population and industry, has also been proceeding exponentially.

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.

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

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.

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

The profits of oil, coal, and natural gas companies will have to yield to the imperative of sustaining life on earth.

Converting a classic batch-and-queue production system to continuous flow with effective pull by the customer will double labor productivity all the way through the system (for direct, managerial, and technical workers, from raw materials to delivered product) while cutting production throughput times by 90 percent and reducing inventories in the system by 90 percent as well.

James P. Womack

High tax rates are followed by attempts of ingenious men to beat them as surely as surely as snow is followed by little boys on sleds.

Arthur Melvin Okun

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.