Quotes by Women Economists

Elinor Ostrom

Janet Yellen

Emily Greene Balch

Joan Robinson

Dambisa Moyo

Anna Schwartz

Carmen Reinhart

Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business.

To start with, anybody who would like the world to be a better place should be able to think like an economist.

There is one class of men who from time to time have taken a keen and practical interest in the constitution of the Family, and they are the Statesmen. They have realized how intimately the welfare of the State depends upon the influence and nature of the Families from which it is constituted; and they have endeavoured that the State in turn should mould and influence the Family to its own purposes.

Helen Bosanquet

If there is one common theme to the vast range of crises...it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be by the government, banks, corporations, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom.

Carmen Reinhart

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

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

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

Biographies are like anthologies, especially anthologies of poetry. One's eyes are magnetically directed to what ought to be there but isn't, as well as to what oughtn't to be there but is.

Mary Stocks, Baroness Stocks

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.

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

Management tries to make the best use of the resources available.

In some settings, however, rampant opportunistic behavior severely limits what can be done jointly without major investments in monitoring and sanctioning arrangements.

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.

A dark and terrible side of this sense of community of interests is the fear of a horrible common destiny which in these days of atomic weapons darkens men's minds all around the globe.

Emily Greene Balch

What being among the 'right people' entails is the possession of human capital, rather than organizational capital: an individual reputation, portable skills, and network connections. Career responsibility is squarely in the hands of individuals, a function of their knowledge and networks. Transferable knowledge is more important to a career than firm-specific knowledge.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

How did language develop? In much the same way an economic order develops through the market—out of the voluntary interaction of individuals, in this case seeking to trade ideas or information or gossip rather than goods and services with one another.

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

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.