Economists Quotes

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The economists have us well along the way of the greatest mass extinction event in human history.

~ Steven Magee

...If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money. How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...

~ Steve Keen

Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally - few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by ‘one-handed’ economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.

~ Dani Rodrik

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

~ Laurence J. Peter

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

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

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

~ Richard Davenport-Hines

They (economists) must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

~ Thomas Piketty

Invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, it is also a fundamental way of being in a community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way. This means that a future can be created without having to force or sell it or barter for it. When we believe that barter or subtle coercion is necessary, we are operating out of a context of scarcity and self-interest, the core currencies of the economist.

~ Peter Block

...some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested? “Summers just lost it,” said one audience member, a business school student. “he looked at the person and said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?

~ Richard Bradley

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

~ Edmund Burke

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

~ Joseph Stiglitz