Quotes About Economics

If people are teaching economics, they need to teach all the different disciplines, all the different schools in economics. They can't just teach one because then the person isn't equipped to deal with the economics profession.

All of the problems we're facing with debt are manmade problems. We created them. It's called fantasy economics. Fantasy economics only works in a fantasy world. It doesn't work in reality.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.

I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.

After graduating in engineering I went to the University of Kansas to get an MA in economics as a vehicle for allowing me to decide if I wanted to continue in economics.

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. Tom Hazlett, a good friend who is an esteemed and highly regarded professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism.

So no, I’m not too big on religion...and not very fond of politics or economics either...And why should I be? They are the man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about. What mental turmoil and anxiety does any human face that is not related to one of those three?

As long as women and the "feminine" such as caring and caregiving are devalued, we cannot realistically expect more caring economic policies. Young people have a major role to play in creating a caring economics.

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.

When I first started out in my career, I'd been a lit major in college so I didn't have a lot of choices. The traditional options were management consultant or investment banking, and I hadn't even taken an economics class so those were pretty much out. I didn't want to go into academia. For me, research and instinct were my unique tools that seemed to work best on a marketing and merchandizing path. It's kind of right-brain and left-brain.

Regardless of past aspirations, this is the right time to be focusing on services for two specific reasons The increasing ubiquity of broadband has made it viable, and the proven economics of the advertising model has made it profitable.

You can sort of see elements of Donald trump policy in different walks of life. Brazil and France have a long history in intervening in business decisions to protect local jobs. What I don't think we see is much evidence that in the long run those types of tactics make much difference, when the economics of production are pushing in the other direction.

Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)

I'd like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I'd like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.

Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.

I mean, these good folks are revolutionizing how businesses conduct their business. And, like them, I am very optimistic about our position in the world and about its influence on the United States. We're concerned about the short-term economic news, but long-term I'm optimistic. And so, I hope investors, you know - secondly, I hope investors hold investments for periods of time - that I've always found the best investments are those that you salt away based on economics.

We say we are trying to buy into businesses with excellent economics, run by honest and able people at a decent price. We buy very few securities, so we look at it as "focused" investing.

But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.

[Ruling elie] haven't given up on neoliberal ideology, they use it. And I think they've normalized that ideology, the notion that, for instance, that economics should govern all of social life, to such a degree that it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge it.

We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker's child to miss school in order to earn...just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.

One of the jewels in the crown of Labour's time in office was the rescue of the National Health Service. As the Commonwealth Fund, the London School of Economics and the Nuffield Foundation have all shown, health reforms as well as additional investment were essential to improved outcomes, especially for poorer patients.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man

I went to university for a couple of years and I didn't enjoy university. The studying and the accountancy, economics, I just hated that stuff. Now the irony is here I am lawyer, accountant, I do it all day every day and sit at a desk. So I've never ended up where I wanted to be in many ways. I always wanted to be a farmer.

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

If I could direct it [films] I would be very happy. But the economics of business don't always allow you to do what you want.

If our goal in legislating against carbon releases is not simply punishing the West and its power companies but truly trying to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the main event will be in the developing world. We must use the smartest possible economics, and that means investing in China and India.

With respect to teaching, I couldn't make sense of mainstream economics when I had to teach it to college students. At the same time, I could see at the school that there was a whole lot of hypocrisy. Not much real respect for the "higher learning."

The better the script, the less money there is. That's just the economics of the studio system.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.

People think that this concept of GDP is scientific economics, partly because it has a precise number and can be quantified. But the underlying concept of "the market" makes it appear as if today's poverty is natural. It makes it appear that Goldman Sachs and Donald Trump are job creators instead of job destroyers. That is illogical, when you think about it.

A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it - the element of the sacred.

Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

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

The completion of my undergraduate training at the University of California (Berkeley) provided just the needed touches of rigor at advanced levels in both economics and mathematics.

Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world.

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

"Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool."

To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.

Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.

(Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it is the avoidance of loss