Economist Quotes

Every improvement in our conceptions of justice, as well as in the machinery for the administration of justice, whereby a closer approximation to exact justice may be secured, will make for social peace, though the mere adjudication of conflicting interests will not remove the conflicts themselves nor their cause. That lies deeper than legislatures or courts can probe.

Thomas Nixon Carver

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

Daniel S. Hamermesh

The EMH cannot apply in a world in which investors differ in their expectations, in which the future is uncertain, and in which borrowing is rationed.

A government decision that slashes spending at the wrong time and sends a weak economy into a tailspin can be just as undisciplined as one that unleashes a wasteful spending spree in an overheated environment.

Peter Blair Henry

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

If once the mind is thoroughly penetrated with the knowledge that money is only a tool, invented for one specific purpose, the heavy cloud of obscurity, may I add, of repulsiveness which lowers over currency will vanish away.

Some bodies of knowledge emerge over time in a process of coevolution with the location in which they are embedded.

Jonas Ridderstråle

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

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.

James Buchanan … produced several seminal contributions to the literature prior to the appearance of The Calculus, and a continual stream of books and articles afterward. I view Buchanan's Nobel Prize as a reward for this great body of work, and not just limited to The Calculus. Pursuing this line of reasoning, Gordon Tullock's prodigious research output following the publication of The Calculus also justifies a Nobel Prize. Indeed, Tullock's (1967c) seminal analysis of rent seeking, and his subsequent work on this topic might be regarded as sufficient achievements for the awarding of a prize.

Men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end.

Speak... of the separation of ownership and active leadership. Ordinarily the problem is stated in terms of the divorce between ownership and "control". This last word is badly overused, and it needs to be precisely defined... Our procedure... will be to study the ownership of officers and directors and then to ascertain the extent to which non-management stockholdings are sufficiently concentrated to permit through ownership the wielding of considerable power and influence (control?) over management by an individual, group or another corporation.

Robert Aaron Gordon

Most of economics can be summarized in four words: 'People respond to incentives.' The rest is commentary.

Steven Landsburg

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

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

Bill Bonner (author)

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

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.

As has been stated, the purpose of money is to split barter into two parts so that the seller is free to find his source of supply later and elsewhere. This is the sole purpose of money. Any effort to use money to serve another purpose is perversive; and this statement condemns the entire managed money philosophy.

The boot and shoe makers, either as shoemakers or cordwainers, have been the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. A highly skilled and intelligent class of tradesmen, widely scattered, easily menaced by commercial and industrial changes, they have resorted with determination at each new menace to the refuge of protective organizations.

John R. Commons

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

Formal debate is a kind of game. In the time limit, the order of speakers, the alternation of sides, the give and take of rebuttal, the fixed rules of conduct, the ethics of the contest, the qualifications for success, and the final awarding of victory, debate has much in common with tennis.

William Trufant Foster

The profit motive promotes economic growth by creating better products at cheaper prices.

"Any graduate of the ___ Business School should be able to beat an index fund over the course of a market cycle."
Statements such as these are made with alarming frequency by investment professionals. In some cases, subtle and sophisticated reasoning may be involved. More often (alas), the conclusions can only be justified by assuming that the laws of arithmetic have been suspended for the convenience of those who choose to pursue careers as active managers.

William F. Sharpe