Economist Quotes

Far from the West having caused the poverty in the Third World, contact with the West has been the principal agent of material progress there.

Peter Thomas Bauer

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.

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

Daniel S. Hamermesh

In the future a typical factory will host three workers: a man, a computer and a dog. The computer will do all the work. The man will feed the dog. And the dog's job? To bite the man - if he touches the computer.

Todd G. Buchholz

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

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

Donald J. Boudreaux

Even during the period when Rome lost much of her ancient prestige, an Indian traveler observed that trade all over the world was operated with the aid of Roman gold coins which were accepted and admired everywhere.

It is most important that top management be quality-minded. In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below.

Joseph M. Juran

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.

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

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.

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

We believe that, in order to understand contemporary economic decision making, we need to supplement the study of market factors with an examination of the internal operation of the firm – to study the effects of organizational structure and conventional practice on the developments of goals, the formation of expectations, and the execution of choices.

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

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

Laurence Kotlikoff

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.

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

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

Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

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

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

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

Gustave de Molinari

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

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.

As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

Robert J. Shiller

In 1965, I was invited to a game theory workshop at Jerusalem which lasted for three weeks and had only 17 participants, but among them all the important researchers in game theory, with few exceptions. Game theory was still a small field. We had heated discussions about Harsanyi's new theory of games with incomplete information. This was the beginning of my long cooperation with John C. Harsanyi.

Reinhard Selten