Economist Quotes - Page 5

• 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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• Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Hero

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 1, p. 27, 1977.

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• In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

  Karl Marx

  Responsibility, Ideas, Competition

  Karl Marx (1975). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works”

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• In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Numbers, Purpose, World

  1971 Economics, Peace, and Laughter.

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• An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport's coal cellar) once said: "There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.

  Paul Samuelson

  Heart, Two, Generations

  Paul A. Samuelson (1972). “The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul Samuelson, Volume 3”, MIT Press

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• Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Writing, Wind, Glory

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

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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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• What I'm asking for is a new economic order. I don't know how to construct that; I'm not an economist.

  Michael Moore

  Order, Asking, Economic

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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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• Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Discipline, Want, Debate

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• It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it makes possible - what we call 'the economy' - is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is.

  David Graeber

  Roots, Evil, Important

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• Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Next, Economics, Predicting The Future

  "A Clinton Report Card, So Far" by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., www.nytimes.com. April 11, 1993.

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• I read 'Time', 'Newsweek' and 'The Economist'.

  Nelson DeMille

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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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• Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

  Vivienne Westwood

  Confusion, Environmental, Cost

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• The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.

  James Buchan

  Political, West, Financial

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• Until the 19th century, the term 'to consume' was used mainly in its negative connotations of  'destruction' and 'waste'.  Tuberculosis was known as 'consumption', that is, a wasting disease.  Then  economists came up with a bizarre theory, which has become widely accepted, according to which the basis of a sound economy is a continual increase in the consumption (that is, waste) of  goods

  Petr Skrabanek

  Tuberculosis, Disease, Waste

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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, Economics, Mathematics

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

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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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• 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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• Over the last decade, - economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything.

  Gavyn Davies

  Years, Two, Events

  "The great economics rift reopens" by Gavyn Davies, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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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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• The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons. ... Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous.

  Garrison Keillor

  Christian, Party, Golf

  "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore", These Times, August 26, 2004.

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• A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.

  Christina Romer

  Thinking, Needs, Way

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• Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

  Christina Romer

  President, Minimum Wage, Unions

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