Quotes About Economics

Economists get very uncomfortable when you talk about virtue and vice. It doesn't lend itself to a lot of columns with numbers. But I would argue that there are big virtue effects in economics. I would say that the spreading of double-entry bookkeeping by the Monk, Fra Luce de Pacioli, was a big virtue effect in economics. It made business more controllable, and it made it more honest.

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.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.

There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

We do not need to understand economics in order to experience the benefits of freedom of exchange and production. But we may very well need to understand economics in order to sustain and maintain the institutional framework that enables us to realize the benefits that flow from freedom of exchange and production.

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.

The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa.

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.

A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

I don't want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth and licentious, usurious economics.

Obama liberals, in their incalculable arrogance, believe they are smart enough to defy everything we know about human nature, economics and history by insisting on separating financial efforts from rewards and pretending this can bring prosperity.

I have concluded that most PhD economists under appraise the power of the common-stock-based "wealth effect," under current extreme conditions... "Wealth effects" involve mathematical puzzles that are not nearly so well worked out as physics theories and never can be... What has happened in Japan over roughly the last ten years has shaken up academic economics, as it obviously should, creating strong worries about recession from "wealth effects" in reverse.

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.

Economics is (now) about emotion and psychology.

In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.

The greatest decisions I've made in my life are by instinct. I remember when I hired Bill I had a lot of people telling me it was a mistake. But he and I had established a rapport in '96 when he coached the secondary. You need a coach that understands economics, that understands the impact of the salary cap and how to make those difficult decisions that allow you to sustain success over the long term. I don't think there's anyone better than Bill at doing that.

Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

Economics, as it has emerged, can be made more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behaviour and judgment.

The economics of baseball are the big problem. The big clubs make a lot of money and the little clubs don't.

Everyone in the United States is so intense about maintaining a separation between Church and State when the real concern should be about keeping a separation between Corporations and State--because in America (and most of the rest of the Western World, for that matter) economics is the real religion.

Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.

You can't just read the Koran to understand Muslim life. You have to look at history, at personalities, at economics, and so on.

The American people are growing extremely unhappy with establishment politics, with establishment economics, and you know what else? Even with establishment media.

I don't have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn't because I fear the competition or anything like that - Warrenhas always been very open about what he's learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn't want to turn it into a total obsession.

I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house, when you've got two kids, to start a coffee shop.

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."

People used to ask me for advice, and I'd say, 'Please, don't ask me!' Yes, I did economics at Oxford, but that's not the same as having a broad knowledge of personal finance

Well, I think first of all, probably the most fundamental thing is that we are a mixed-signal analog semiconductor company, which, along with some of the other well-known names in the industry, enjoys very good economics.

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.

I'll be a president that will turn our inner cities around and will give strength to people and will give economics to people and will bring jobs back.

...even professors of economics, to say nothing of the public, do not generally have scientific minds.

Economics is important because it's possible to buy the places that are necessary to live in relative inaccessibility and seclusion, or to move with a bit of style and chicness into the middle of civilization.

By the way on economics, South Carolina is an example to the country of what we should be doing as Americans. This country has a vast manufacturing base. It is growing in manufacturing where America is shrinking and it's because they have reduced taxes and lower regulatory burdens and been pro-business.

Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misbehaving.

The kind of plan that Donald [Tramp] has put forth would be trickle-down economics all over again. In fact, it would be the most extreme version, the biggest tax cuts for the top percent of the people in this country than we've ever had.

The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent

There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture.

We've had trickle down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren't even damp yet.

I think there are two areas where new ideas are terribly dangerous: economics and sex. By and large, it's all been tried, and if it's really new, it's probably illegal or dangerous or unhealthy.

While Argentina, Brazil, and Chile - what in textbooks used to be called the ABC countries - seem settled into democratic politics and free market economics, the Andean countries are in disarray.

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward.

What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy.

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.