Economist Quotes - Page 5

• This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Political, Criticism, Majority

  Vladimir Il'ich Lenin (1975). “Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh”

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• Economists typically think that your happiness goes up as you get more money, but the more you have, the less each additional dollar matters. This means that you value money most in times when you have less income and more expenses.

  Emily Oster

  Mean, Thinking, Dollars

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• The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.

  Jeff Goodell

  Air, Water, Fossils

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• How is it that, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still some who would deny the dangers of climate change? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are not scientific, and it is remarkable how many economists, lawyers, journalists and politicians set themselves up as experts on the science.

  Nicholas Stern

  Voice, Faces, Climate

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• We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

  Nicholas Stern

  Winning, Battle, Together

  "'We're the first generation that has had the power to destroy the planet. Ignoring that risk can only be described as reckless'". Interview with Decca Aitkenhead, www.theguardian.com. March 29, 2009.

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• Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the worlds resources will be negotiated.

  Ottmar Edenhofer

  Environmental, World, Next

  "IPCC Official: 'Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth'". Interview with Bernard Potter, wattsupwiththat.com. November 18, 2010.

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• I think you've got to watch out for anybody in high school who says he wants to become an economist.

  Thomas J. Sargent

  School, Thinking, Watches

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• In 1925, when Britain went back to the gold standard, that was supported by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Bank of England, the civil service, the CBI, the TUC, the Times, the Economist; that consensus was very strong.

  Ed Balls

  Strong, Party, Gold

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• I can't resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school- including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, "would not have been possible without the contribution of these men." They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They'd all left the country in the 1930s.

  James K. Galbraith

  Country, War, Father

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• No one knows anything about economics. It's the great lie of the economists. By contrast in football people might have contrasting opinions, each of which has some validity. But the economists always speak in conditionals - what a mess.

  Vicente del Bosque

  Football, Lying, People

  "Vicente del Bosque: Putting regional tensions aside has united Spain" by Jimmy Burns, www.theguardian.com. September 7, 2012.

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• So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

  Charles Kingsley

  Creating, Giving, Miracle

  Charles Kingsley (1881). “The Works of Charles Kingsley: Yeast”

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• With various people complaining about "price gouging?... economist Walter Williams has coined a new term: "Tax gouging." But government is never accused of either "greed" or "gouging" ? not even when they bulldoze people's homes in order to turn.

  Thomas Sowell

  Home, Government, Order

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• A different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That's what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound - an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn't much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments.

  Charlie Munger

  Animal, Different, Purpose

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• Economists get very uncomfortable when you talk about virtue and vice. It doesn't lend itself to a lot of columns with numbers. But I would argue that there are big virtue effects in economics. I would say that the spreading of double-entry bookkeeping by the Monk, Fra Luce de Pacioli, was a big virtue effect in economics. It made business more controllable, and it made it more honest.

  Charlie Munger

  Numbers, Vices, Arguing

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• The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize.

  Kurt Bills

  Reality, Choices, Scarcity

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• Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.

  Kurt Bills

  Reading, Eye, Order

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• I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Imagination, Lag, Ruthlessness

  "Capitalism has learned to create host organisms". www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2011.

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• If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

  John Ralston Saul

  Money, Doctors, Today

  John Ralston Saul (2012). “The Unconscious Civilization”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the Government should never interfere with business or go into business itself, is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has broken down so completely in practice that it is now discredited; but it was all the fashion in politics a hundred years ago, and is still influentially advocated by men of business and their backers who naturally would like to be allowed to make money as they please without regard to the interest of the public.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Fashion, Money, Men

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• There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.

  Glenn T. Seaborg

  Men, Discovery, Discipline

  "Biographical Memoirs" edited by Darleane C. Hoffman, (p. 252), 2000.

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• Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.

  Paul Krugman

  Running, Silly, Book

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• The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution.

  Douglass North

  Character, Government, Vision

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• How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.

  Charlie Munger

  Thinking, Psychology, Mind

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• The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

  Joseph Sobran

  People, Support, Expansion

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• I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

  Richard Thaler

  Thinking, Giving, Risk

  Source: bigthink.com

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