Economics Quotes

Microeconomists are wrong about specific things and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general!

~ Yoram Bauman

In my experience, economists rarely believe passionately in, or care passionately for, the free market. They are generally more concerned to reveal the market's imperfections, to further their own professional importance.

~ Terence Kealey

Theory of public goods. Theory that if I take you euro (as an elected state government) and give fifty cents back... you will be happier and I will be satisfied.

~ Radovan Kavický

Now, in the modern money economy everything in the nature of a social-economic occurrence consists in human actions and behaviour.

~ Oskar Morgenstern

...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics.

~ Oskar Morgenstern

Our knowledge of dynamic processes is necessarily inferior to our ability to describe stationary conditions.

~ Oskar Morgenstern

Too many economists excuse their practical failure by saying the politicians (or bureaucrats) didn't do exactly what I recommended. Just as medical practitioners must allow for the fact that their patients may not take all the pills they prescribe, or follow all the advice they are given, so economics practitioners need to foresee political and administrative pressures and make their plans robust to changes that politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists are likely to impose.

~ Paul Klemperer

Anything which is physically possible can be made financially possible, if the people of a state desire it.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

... it will appear that there is no such thing as fixed capital; there is nothing useful that is very old except the precious metals, and all life consists in the conversion of forms. The only capital which is of permanent value is immaterial--the experience of generations and the development of science.

~ David Ames Wells

He wants to focus on what he calls 'cultural issues.' That makes sense, because when you're going to rob people blind you don't want to have them focus their attention on economic issues.

~ Noam Chomsky

lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they can be learned also makes them easy to dismissed as simplistic by those who do not want to accept analyses which contradict their cherished beliefs. Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. Nor is it automatically true that complex effects must have complex causes. The ramifications of something very simple can become enormously complex.

~ Thomas Sowell

Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.

~ Nate Silver

Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth

~ Anwar Shaikh

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

~ Richard Davenport-Hines

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

~ Richard Davenport-Hines

Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people.

~ Tom Robbins

The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.

~ Richard Davenport-Hines

In boom times companies have high profits. They increase production to satisfy demand for goods. This leads to excess supply. Companies cut prices to compete for customers. leading to lower profits, lay-offs, and economic depression. Eventually lower prices lead to an increase in demand and profits go back up. The economy is a yo-yo.

~ Niall Kishtainy

Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone’s interest

~ Thomas Piketty

Chinese commentaries stress the opportunity that the investments and aid they offer presents to developing countries to avoid the hazards of reliance on Western dominated financial institutions: austerity programs that call for severe cuts in state-subsidized social welfare, deregulation of state-owned facilities, trade liberalization, and an open door for multinational corporation investment.

~ Melvin Gurtov

I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy. They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about. It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.

~ Thomas Sowell

Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.

~ George Eliot

There was nothing so special about First Class, apart from the amount of uncalled for, almost disturbing, attention I got from the various six-feet tall heavily made up air hostesses, that I would come back for more given the steep price tag.

~ Vann Chow

By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.

~ Noam Chomsky

Today, reports of the day’s events are conveyed to the viewing public by way of alternate universes, The Fox News cable channel conveys its version of reality, while at the other end of the ideological spectrum MSNBC presents its version. They and their many counterparts on radio are more the result of an economic dynamic than a political one. Dispatching journalists into the field to gather information costs money; hiring a glib bloviator is relatively cheap, and inviting opinionated guests to vent on the air is entirely cost-free. It wouldn’t work if it weren’t popular, and audiences, it turns out, are endlessly absorbed by hearing amplified echoes of their own biases. It’s divisive and damaging to the healthy functioning of our political system, but it’s also indisputably inexpensive and, therefore, good business.

~ Ted Koppel

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the winner as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the winner as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

...an' there never yet was speculation but in the long run, it meant smash. Ye run so hard that ye fall ower yoursel

~ Neil M. Gunn

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

~ Steven D. Levitt

They all had a thousand good economic and political reasons why they couldn’t stop. I’m not a politician or a businessman; how am I supposed to persuade them about these things. What are we supposed to do; quite likely the world will collapse and disappear under water; but at least that will happen for political and economic reasons we can all understand, at least it will happen with the help of science, technology and public opinion, with human ingenuity of all sorts! Not some cosmic catastrophe but just the same old reasons to do with the struggle for power and money and so on. There’s nothing we can do about that.

~ Karel Čapek

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the selfish interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realisation of the ends the community pursues.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.

~ James C. Scott

when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravestthreat to it.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

So what’s your alternative?” people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor.

~ China Miéville

In the first instance, it is probably true that in general the higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and common instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes -it will be those who form the mass in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is in the hands of private individuals never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralised as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in atotally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

~ Peter Ludlow

It's easy to make money when you have a lot of it.

~ Max Tegmark

Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations

~ Miguel Reynolds Brandao