Economist Quotes

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.

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

Paul Zane Pilzer

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)

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

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 creation of economic stories from real life is an ongoing process—because new stories appear every day.

Daniel S. Hamermesh

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

The speed at which we moved the ball in small spaces and our quality was superb. We played the ball through needles and it was very difficult for Aston Villa.

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

Walter E. Williams

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

There is a very real danger that financial regulation will become a wolf in sheep's clothing.

There are many reasons there was higher inflation in the 1970s. But that is a complicated story that deals with much more than tax policies.

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.

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

Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

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

A situation where people can grow old without having a job that rewards them individually while adding to the collective well-being is morally unacceptable.

Franco Modigliani

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.

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.

In a world where routine production is footloose...competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away.