Economics Quotes - Page 19

• The average American family head will be forced to do twenty years' labor to pay taxes in his or her lifetime.

  James Bovard

  Average, Years, Liberty

  James Bovard (1995). “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty”, p.289, Palgrave Macmillan

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• Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Facts, Needs, Computer

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• The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

  Thomas Piketty

  Passion, Discipline, Historical

  "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". Book by Thomas Piketty, March 10, 2014.

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• We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.

  Wassily Leontief

  Moving, Arbitrary, Assumption

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• Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.

  Ronald Coase

  Real, Air, World

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• The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

  Paul Krugman

  Groups, Mathematics, Impressive

  "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?". www.nytimes.com. September 2, 2009.

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• Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.

  Milton Friedman

  Real, Branches, Problem

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• For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

  Thomas Piketty

  Long, Use, Scientific Method

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• In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

  Ronald Coase

  Silly, May, Youth

  "The Firm, the Market, and the Law (Note on the problem of social costs)". Book by Ronald Coase (p. 185), 1988.

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• Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Men, Unlikely, Economist

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• We see community organizations as major service providers and economic drivers rather than as recipients or distributors of charity, and coordinators of volunteers. Today they constitute what's referred to as 'the social economy'.

  Julia Gillard

  Organization, Volunteer, Community

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• It's an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock's tail was thus formed but ... most people just don't get it - I must be a very bad explainer

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, People, Tails

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• In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.

  Daniel Dennett

  Beautiful, Order, Perfect

  "Cute, sexy, sweet, funny". TED conference, www.ted.com. 2009.

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• Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind

  Richard Dawkins

  Survival, Evolution, Blind

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• The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Essentials, Creative Destruction, Process

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.82, Routledge

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• Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences

  Ilya Prigogine

  Environmental, Trends, Chemistry

  Ilya Prigogine (2003). “Is Future Given?”, p.22, World Scientific

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• Our aim must be to make our successive mistakes as quickly as possible. To speed up evolution.

  Karl Popper

  Mistake, Evolution, Speed

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• Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

  Douglass North

  Mean, Errors, Keys

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• What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations

  Richard Dawkins

  Cost, Benefits, Body

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• The perennial gale of creative destruction

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Creative, Gale, Destruction

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2011). “The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle”, p.37, Transaction Publishers

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• Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over time, the richer the cultural context in terms of providing multiple experimentation and creative competition, the more likely the successful survival of the society

  Douglass North

  Successful, Creative, Competition

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• A diversity of approaches is necessary if there is to be a good chance of hitting on one that works. Progress is a social undertaking & achievement, because people see things differently

  Richard Posner

  Diversity, People, Achievement

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• I am convinced that both markets and free trade are good, but the traditional answer that we give to students to explain why they are good, the one based on perfect competition and Pareto optimality, is becoming untenable. Something much more interesting and more complicated is going on here

  Paul Romer

  Perfect, Interesting, Giving

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• Some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world about them and act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce so their pattern of behaviour and thought will become dominant

  Stephen Hawking

  Patterns, Able, Behaviour

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• There was never anything so well devised by men which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted

  Thomas Cranmer

  Men, Wells, Continuance

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