Economist Quotes - Page 17

• Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Mistake, Wonderful, Ends

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• Many respected economists and statesmen believe our national debt is neither unwieldy nor a dangerous burden on the country. The trouble is that a vast majority of the American people think otherwise.... It violates basic American ideas of thrift and money management. These strong public feelings cannot be ignored forever.

  Mo Udall

  Country, Strong, Believe

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• Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtuesare economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Husband, Humility, Pride

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson (2003). “The Conduct of Life”, p.61, Harvard University Press

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• But there is no equality of opportunity under existing laws and customs. In the race for wealth, which the economist seems as unable to define as to guide, the toiler is most heavily handicapped in the very start.

  Joshua K. Ingalls

  Opportunity, Race, Law

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• I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Two, Vision, Different

  "Stephen Covey Interviews Grameen Bank Founder Muhammad Yunus". Interview with Stephen Covey, socialbusinesspedia.com. November 1, 2016.

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• ...the institutional arrangement whereby most professional economists are heavily burdened with teaching and administrative duties may militate against a sufficient admixture of the more laborious forms of statistical and field work.

  Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod

  Teaching, May, Fields

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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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• A colleague saw the same model-calibrating the elasticity of demand facing a Cournot oligopolist as a function of the number of firms in the industry--described at the University of Chicago and at M.I.T. A Chicago economist derived the formula and said, "Look at how few firms you need to get close to infinite elasticities and perfect competition." An M.I.T. economist derived the same formula and said, "Look at how large n has to be before you get anywhere close to an infinite elasticity and perfect competition."

  Matthew Rabin

  Numbers, Perfect, Competition

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• In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Real, People, Debate

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• There is a history of mathematical models of oligopolistic competition dating from Cournot to the theory of games. There is also a literature generated by institutional economists, lawyers, and administrators interested in formulating and implementing public policy. It has been the tendency of these groups to work almost as though the other did not exist.

  Martin Shubik

  Games, Dating, Competition

  Martin Shubik, Richard Levitan (1980). “Market structure and behavior”, Harvard Univ Pr

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• Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

  Milton Friedman

  Economics, Monetary Policy, Phenomenon

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.272, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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, Economics, Hard

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

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• Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

  Paul Samuelson

  Years, Economics, Years Ago

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• Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish. Consequences of this pressure are incentives to deviate from the truth

  Bruno Frey

  Incentives, Today, Pressure

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• Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre.

  Harold Innis

  Democracy, Defeat, Economics

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• If economists were good at business, they would be rich men instead of advisers to rich men.

  Kirk Kerkorian

  Men, Would Be, Rich

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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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• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Is Not An Economist, She Is A Demographer

  Tam David-West

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• I'm an economist by training. And I know that what works is a permanent increase in buying power.

  Sarah Steelman

  Training, Buying, Increase

  "2012 Showdown in Missouri". "Your World" with Neil Cavuto, www.foxnews.com. November 29, 2011.

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• Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist

  David Attenborough

  Believe, Mad, Growth

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• The eurozone status quo is neither tolerable nor stable. Mainstream economists would call it an inferior equilibrium; I call it a nightmare - one that is inflicting tremendous pain and suffering that could be easily avoided if the misconceptions and taboos that sustain it were dispelled.

  George Soros

  Pain, Suffering, Nightmare

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• We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism.

  Paul Ormerod

  Thinking, Needs, Machines

  "The Death of Economics". Book by Paul Ormerod, 1994.

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• Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.

  Warren Buffett

  Investing, Ears, Tvs

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• I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Errors, Intellectual, Environmental

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

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• I was trained to become an economist and I finished my work and I was teaching and did my PhD so I thought I did that. I prepared myself for that kind of road. But then I realized that I had not learned enough to solve the problem of poverty. So I distanced myself from the things that I learned and tried to learn anew about people.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Teaching, People, Poverty

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