Economist Quotes

All ignorance, like all knowledge, tends thus to be opportunist.

If you look carefully, almost all Old Money secrets can be traced to a single source: a longer-term outlook.

Bill Bonner (author)

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

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

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)

Efforts to preserve all industries will lower the national standard of living.

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

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.

Keeping a book on macroeconomics up to date is a challenging and neverending task. The field is continually evolving, as new events and research lead to doubts about old views and the emergence of new ideas, models, and tests. The result is that each edition of this book is very different from the one before. This is truer of this revision than any previous one.

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

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

Walter E. Williams

Because internal organization experiences added bureaucratic costs, the firm is usefully thought as the organization of last resort: try markets, try hybrids (long term contractual relations into which security features have been crafted), and resort to firms when all else fails (compatatively).

Oliver E. Williamson

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

The stampede toward rational expectations — widely thought to be a revolution, though it was only a generalization of the neoclassical idea of equilibrium—derailed the expectations-driven model building that had just left the station. In the end, this way of modeling has not illuminated how the world economy works.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).

William J. Bernstein

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

The bottom line is that monetary policy is a lot harder in the post-crisis world. We have learned a lot from the past five years, but there is still much we do not know. Policymakers, including the new Federal Reserve chair, are going to need flexible minds, good research, and the wisdom of ordinary Americans if they are going to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

Christina Romer

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.

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

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 business of a Political Economist is neither to recommend nor to dissuade, but to state general principles, which it is fatal to neglect, but neither advisable, nor perhaps practicable, to use as the sole, or even the principal, guides in the actual conduct of affairs.

Nassau William Senior

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 trouble with the aid-dependency model is, of course, that Africa is fundamentally kept in its perpetual childlike state.

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.

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

Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky