Economist Quotes

"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

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

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

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

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.

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

Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix it." Yet... every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that... the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise.

Lawrence Fertig

I felt I wanted to talk about the Fed's mission, and I wanted to do so in understandable terms, and to emphasize that unemployment is part of our mission. The recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on those who have less education and income—middle-income and low-income families—and the Fed's concern with the job market is a theme I've wanted to get across. Why are we doing all these things that are in the newspapers all the time? I was trying to explain that we're doing this to help American families who are struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Some owners are competent, effective business people who care about the game. Many others do not share these attributes.

Andrew Zimbalist

Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.

The empirical research of the last fifteen years on the structure of large organizations seems to confirm the hypothesis of Herbert Simon that human cognitive limits are a basic limiting factor in determining organization structures.

Jay R. Galbraith

The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.

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

The enemy and his allies are now at the gates of the capitalists' fortress. Is there any hope that the businessman will finally sense the danger to himself and the system of which he is a part and rise to meet the challenge?

Benjamin A. Rogge

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.

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

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.

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

Most innovations fail. And companies that don't innovate die.

Henry Chesbrough

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

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

Theodore Levitt

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 claim that the state and liberty are anti-thetical may be right or it may be wrong. But if it is right it is not tautologically right. Too many libertarians treat it as if it were tautologically right.

They have two distinguishing characteristics. The vast majority of them are laborers, and, as a rule, they expect the violent overthrow of existing institutions by revolution to precede the introduction of the socialistic state. I would not, by any means, say that they are all revolutionists, but the most of them undoubtedly are...
The most general demands of the social democrats are the following: The state should exist exclusively for the laborers; land and capital must become collective property, and production be carried on unitedly. Private competition, in the ordinary sense of the term, is to cease.