Economist Quotes

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.

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.

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

Looking back the great American 'stabilization' [and boom] of 1922-1929 was really a vast attempt to destabilize the value of money in terms of human effort by means of a colossal program of investment [driven by too easy credit]... which succeeded for a surprisingly long period, but which no human ingenuity could have managed to direct indefinitely on sound and balanced lines.

Dennis Holme Robertson

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)

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

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

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

Steven Landsburg

The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory — and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.

Oskar Morgenstern

Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and the long term. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.

We now have single corporate enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of workers, having hundreds of thousands of stockholders, using billions of dollars' worth of the instruments of production, serving millions of customers, and controlled by a single management group. These are great collectives of enterprise, and a system composed of them might well be called "collective capitalism."

Gardiner C. Means

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

There can never be in human knowledge any such thing as finality. Always at the end there is a mystery; it will always be there.

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.

[Functionalism is a] dividing up of activities as to kinds.

Not even the most subtle and skilled analysis can overcome completely the unreliability of basic data.

Any one country can be in any of four possible disequilibrium situations. It can be (1) a surplus country with a domestic slump, (2) a surplus country with a domestic boom, (3) a deficit country with a domestic slump, or (4) a deficit country with a domestic boom.

The construction of an economic model, or of any model or theory for that matter (or the writing of a novel, a short story, or a play) consists of snatching from the enormous and complex mass of facts called reality, a few simple, easily-managed key points which, when put together in some cunning way, become for certain purposes a substitute for reality itself.

"Oh, I hate astronomy," she says, perhaps glad enough to get away to this new subject. "There is no plan in astronomy, no regularity; everything is different from everything else, and that is what makes it difficult to understand. Now, for example, why shouldn't there be a crescent sun as well as a crescent moon?"

William K. Black

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

Henry Chesbrough

Man, the molecule of society, is the subject of social science.

Henry Charles Carey

Humanity, having learned to perform miracles of production, must at last learn to use its miraculous powers not to degrade itself and destroy its home but to make the world a better place to live in for itself and its progeny for millennia to come.

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

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

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.