Economic Theory Quotes

• Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

  Abraham Maslow

  Motivation, Reality, Self

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• The modern history of economic theory is a tale of evasions of reality.

  Thomas Balogh, Baron Balogh

  Reality, Modern, Economic

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• The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Powerful, Freedom, Ideas

  General Theory of Employment (1936; 1947 ed.) ch. 24

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• Imagination is more important than knowledge.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Positive, Leadership

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.32, St. Martin's Press

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• The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Ideas, Two

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Human Action”, p.1075, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Slumps, Credit, Way

  Ludwig Von Mises (1990). “Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays”

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• [No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Numbers, Political, Pay

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• Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Marketing, Fields, Study

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.154, Princeton University Press

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• In economic theory the conclusions are sometimes less interesting than the route by which they are reached.

  Piero Sraffa

  Interesting, Sometimes, Economic

  Letter to C.P. Blitch (October 1975), as cited in "Towards a New Understanding of Sraffa" by Riccardo Bellofiore and ‎Scott Carter, 2014.

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• Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

  George Monbiot

  Business, Reality, Ideas

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• I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Thinking, Years, Law

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• We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Ideas, Assuming, Problem

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• You were probably educated in the conventional economic theories of your period which were magnificent and most ingenious, but--if you will pardon my saying so--all wrong.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Economic, Pardon, Theory

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• It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or forms of government or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the psalmist described as a little lower than the angels ... or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man's destiny.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Military, Struggle, Fall

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• Certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain... Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.

  George Orwell

  Loyalty, Pain, Struggle

  George Orwell's review of the book "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler in "New English Weekly", March 21, 1940.

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• It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

  Douglass North

  Jobs, Playing Chess, Firsts

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• We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

  B. W. Powe

  Party, Reality, White

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• There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.
  I think the same thing is true of idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

  Austin Kleon

  Thinking, Numbers, Average

  Austin Kleon (2012). “Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative”, p.13, Workman Publishing

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• The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Generations, Lists, Hayek

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• It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

  Paul Zane Pilzer

  Fate, Keys, Heaven

  Paul Zane Pilzer (1990). “Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy”, Crown

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• Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price.

  George Stigler

  Yield, Chicago, Economic

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• We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

  Dan Ariely

  Mistake, Decision, Brain

  "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions". Book by Dan Ariely, February 19, 2008.

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• Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.

  Robert Higgs

  Exercise, Done, Obsession

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• The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist. Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question.

  John Bates Clark

  Philosophy, Hype, Issues

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• Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history-born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man-has made tremendous advances in the last generation.

  Robert Fogel

  Science, Past, Men

  Robert William Fogel, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1983). “Which Road to the Past?: Two Views of History”, p.2, Yale University Press

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