Economics Quotes - Page 27

• Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence...we make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then the next year we deliberately introduce something that will make these products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete.

  Brooks Stevens

  Years, People, Next Year

  Quoted in Vance Packard The Waste Makers (1960), ch.6. This is thought to be the first use of the phrase 'planned obsolescence'.

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• Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Professors, Respectable

  1850 Latter-Day Pamphlets, no.1,'The Present Time'.

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• Studying economics is not a good preparation for dealing with it.

  George Soros

  Preparation, Study, Dealing With It

  George Soros (2007). “Open Society Reforming Global Capitalism Reconsidered”, p.57, PublicAffairs

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• The attempt to isolate economics from other disciplines-notably politics, history, philosophy, finance, constitutional theory and sociology-has fatally disabled its power to explain what is happening in the world.

  Will Hutton

  Philosophy, Discipline, World

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• The idea behind Reaganomics is this: a rising tide lifts all yachts.

  Walter F. Mondale

  Ideas, Tides, Rising

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• The National Debt is a very Good Thing and it would be dangerous to pay it off for fear of Political Economy.

  W. C. Sellar

  Political, Debt, Pay

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• The one profession where you can gain great eminence without ever being right.

  George Meany

  Gains, Profession, Eminence

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• You cannot go to sleep with one form of economic system and wake up the next morning with another.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Morning, Sleep, Next

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• A land ethic for tomorrow should...stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

  Stewart Udall

  Stress, Oneness, Land

  Stewart L. Udall (1963). “The Quiet Crisis”

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• Over the long haul of life on the planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.

  Stewart Udall

  Life, Business, Long

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• Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.

  Gary Snyder

  Discovery, Years, Brain

  Gary Snyder (1995). “A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds : New and Selected Prose”, Counterpoint LLC

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• Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Matter, Majority

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2012). “A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings”, p.76, Beacon Press

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• 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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• I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.

  Grover Cleveland

  Indulge In, Liberty, Libertarian

  Grover Cleveland (1968). “Grover Cleveland, 1837-1908: Chronology, Documents, Bibliographical Aids”

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• It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Thinking, Mind, Doctrine

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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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• Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.

  Mark Blaug

  Games, Sick, Understanding

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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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