Economist Quotes - Page 20

• Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.

  Emily Oster

  College, Return, Economic

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• When I meet people on airplanes and they find out I'm an economist, they usually ask about stock tips.

  Emily Oster

  Airplane, People, Asks

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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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• Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

  Gary Becker

  Self, Assumption, Behavior

  Gary Stanley Becker, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace (1996). “The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior: The Nobel Lecture”, p.5, Hoover Press

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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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• I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

  Friedrich Engels

  Together, Balzac, I Have Learned

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• You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."

  Thomas Carlyle

  Education, Two, Political

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• We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense.

  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

  Common Sense, Example, Use

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• Leading economists have shown that by shrinking Texas, we can actually create more income for Texas in the long run.

  Ian Frazier

  Running, Texas, Long

  "On Texas" by Ian Frazier, www.newyorker.com. March 24, 2014.

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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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• Combining valuable insights from his experience in China, his time as the World Bank's chief economist, and the 2008 financial crisis, Justin Yifu Lin's recommendations for development policy reflect an impressive and unique personal journey.

  Kemal Dervis

  Journey, Unique, Development

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• An economist is a man that can tell you...what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too.

  Will Rogers

  Wisdom, Men, America

  Will Rogers (1983). “Radio broadcasts of Will Rogers”, Oklahoma State Univ Pr

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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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• As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Work, Men, Bread Of Life

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.369, Penguin

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• There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Lying, Past, Numbers

  "The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics" by Kenneth E. Boulding in "American Economic Review" (pp. 1-13), May 16, 1966.

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• Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  Money, Cheer, School

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• There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Humble, Skills, Recognise

  "The Skills of the Economist". Book by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, p. 4, 1958.

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• Economists operate with this image of the homo economicus, the rational economic agent, and while such agents are rare in the wider world, they are common in economics departments. Exemplifying the homo economicus paradigm, economists typically choose their research projects and hypotheses so as to promote their own careers, to maximize their lifetime income. This explains the astonishing pressures toward conformity in academic economics: how deviant views (except those by a few who have already achieved stardom) get crushed by an army of conformists.

  Thomas Pogge

  Army, Views, Careers

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I have never considered myself an economist.

  Che Guevara

  Source: guevaristas.org

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• The problem is that people really just don't care and they have been "educated" not to care about the monetary system: that it's boring, it's difficult to understand, we need to have high minded people like "Greenscum" and Bernanke to do things like this (and don't forget Volcker, there's the whole cast of them). The thing is that people have been educated or miseducated or brainwashed into believing that this is wayyyy too complicated for regular people to understand and that we need to let PhD economists guide us along in terms of what's right... and that's all bull.

  Bernard von NotHaus

  Believe, People, Needs

  Source: www.lewrockwell.com

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• Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Philosophy, Firsts, Principles

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.

  Alice Rivlin

  Doctors, Body, Economics

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• It gives evolutionary biologists great status if they champion competition and the economists have to consult them. The economists have to consult the evolutionary biologists, because they are the ones who invented the idea of competition. It comes from the field of evolution.

  Greg Graffin

  Ideas, Giving, Competition

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• The oil corporations spend a lot of money to get, say, the tar sands pipeline through, but nobody's - you know, there are definitely environmentalists being paid - but a lot of people are acting for something other than financial compensation. So if the tar sands pipeline doesn't get made, it's because a huge amount of people are doing something that doesn't involve remuneration, money, etc., because we're not actually the self-interested financial instruments that economists like to imagine we are.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Oil, Self, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits by almost $1 trillion in the next two decades. And for good reason: when people come here to fulfill their dreams - to study, invent, and contribute to our culture - they make our country a more attractive place for businesses to locate and create jobs for everyone. So let's get immigration reform done this year.

  Barack Obama

  Dream, Country, Jobs

  Fifth Presidential State of the Union, delivered 28 January 2014

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