Economics Quotes - Page 14

• Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe.

  Michael Kinsley

  Curves, Numbers, Tribes

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• The engineer who counts cost as nothing as compared to the result, who holds himself above the consideration of dollars and cents, has missed his vocation.

  Coleman Sellers II

  Dollars, Cost, Consideration

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• The monogram of our national initials, which is the symbol for our monetary unit, the dollar, is almost as frequently conjoined to the figures of an engineer's calculations as are the symbols indicating feet, minutes, pounds, or gallons. ... This statement, while true in regard to the work of all engineers, applies particularly to that of the mechanical engineer.

  Henry R. Towne

  Feet, Dollars, Pounds

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• Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy

  Thomas Carlyle

  Political, Nicknames, Economy

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• Well, gentlemen, life's just one damn thing after another.

  John Dustin Archbold

  Gentleman, Damn, Wells

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• ...quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed.

  Carlo M. Cipolla

  Ideas, Numbers, Quality

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• As the work progresses the careful reader will insert mental interrogation points here and there. He will find that his interest increases as the interrogation points become more frequent, and that it culminates where they are changed to marks of positive dissent. I venture to record the opinion that the value of the work reaches a maximum in a passage that is demonstrably incorrect.

  John Bates Clark

  Progress, Here And There, Records

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• It takes resolution to go forth from the ease and beautiful simplicity of a well-formed hypothesis and struggle with amorphous facts.

  John Maurice Clark

  Beautiful, Struggle, Simplicity

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• We must first note that economic factors are taken into account in a world in which ignorance, prejudice, and mental confusion, encouraged rather than dispelled by the political organization, exert a strong influence on policy making.

  Ronald Coase

  Strong, Taken, Ignorance

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• Everyone knows, or has strongly suspected, that capital theory is difficult.

  Charles Ferguson

  Theory, Difficult, Knows

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• There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Wise, Scope, Should

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family.

  James Goldman

  Knowledgeable, Knows

  "Fictional character: Geoffrey". "The Lion in Winter", www.imdb.com. 2003.

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• Economic controversy is generally a thankless task. You cannot hope to make any impression on your opponent. Yet he is the only reader on whose interest you can count.

  Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

  Tasks, Opponents, Impression

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• Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Example, Littles, Way

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1971). “The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Essays in biography”

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• ...a discontinuity, like a vacuum, is abhorred by nature.

  Harold Hotelling

  Vacuums, Discontinuity

  Harold Hotelling (2012). “The Collected Economics Articles of Harold Hotelling”, p.52, Springer Science & Business Media

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• In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  People, Decision, Foundation

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• The analyses ... often become too competent to be comprehensible.

  Avinash Dixit

  Analysis, Competent

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• There is not some glorious theoretical synthesis of capitalism that you can write down in a book and follow. You have to grope your way

  Robert Solow

  Book, Writing, Ignorance

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• The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.

  Udny Yule

  Science, Opportunity, Data

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• All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

  Walter Wriston

  Law, Judging, Liberty

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• In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

  Walter E. Williams

  Faithful, Ignorant, Liberty

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• Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. First, let's make sure we understand what government spending is. Since government has no resources of its own, and since there's no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person's property to give it to another to whom it does not belong - in effect, legalized theft.

  Walter E. Williams

  Government, Giving, Liberty

  "All it takes is guts". Book by Walter E. Williams, 1987.

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• Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one's fellow man ... that's what competition is all about: "outpleasing" your competitors to win over the consumers.

  Walter E. Williams

  Successful, Winning, Men

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• Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an "independent" agency operated by selfless public servants striving to "fine-tune" the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat.

  Thomas DiLorenzo

  Cat, Independent, Reality

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• The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

  Robert Lucas, Jr.

  Thinking, Economist, Hard

  "On the Mechanics of Economic Development". Journal of Monetary Economics, 22, 1988.

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