Economist Quotes - Page 4

• With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.

  Nassau William Senior

  Happiness, Political, Attention

  Nassau William Senior (1836). “An Outline of the Science of Political Economy”, p.130

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• Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist.

  David Attenborough

  Thinking, Mad, Growth

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• The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Party, Believe, Ideas

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• Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Facts, Needs, Computer

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• Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.

  Paul Krugman

  Giving, Advice, Sometimes

  "The Beatings Must Continue" by Paul Krugman, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com. April 30, 2013.

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• Economists are behavioural psychologists, but they think more is better; they want to make everyone richer. They should pause. More's not necessarily better

  David Hemenway

  Thinking, Want, Psychologist

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• One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.

  Gilbert F. White

  Wise, Mean, Government

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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 the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Matter, Assumption, Courses

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.60, Princeton University Press

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• Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.

  George Bernard Shaw

  God, Jesus, Power

  George Bernard Shaw (1978). “Androcles and the lion: an old fable renovated : definitive text”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• In 1977, when I started my first job at the Federal Reserve Board as a staff economist in the Division of International Finance, it was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy: Central banks, as a rule, did not discuss these decisions, let alone their future policy intentions.

  Janet Yellen

  Jobs, Decision, Boards

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• If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist. But since our greatest need was forgiveness, God sent us a Saviour.

  Roy Lessin

  Technology, Needs, Information

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• Economists use the word consume to mean "utilize economic goods," but the Shorter Oxford Dictionary's definition is more appropriate to ecologists: "To make away with or destroy; to waste or to squander; to use up." The economies that cater to the global consumer society are responsible for the lion's share of the damage that humans have inflicted on common global resources.

  Alan Thein Durning

  Mean, Oxford, Use

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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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• We Americans commercialize everything. Look at what we did to Christmas. Christmas is Jesus' birthday. Now, I don't know Jesus, but from what I read he was the least materialistic person who ever walked the earth. No bling on Jesus. He kept a low profile and we turned his birthday into the most commercial day of the year. In fact we have a whole Jesus birthday season. And then at the end of it, we have the nerve to have an economist come on TV and say what a horrible Jesus birthday season we had.

  Chris Rock

  Jesus, Years, Nerves

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• What makes a terrorist? Are the drivers primarily political or economic? Princeton economist Alan Krueger has made a great study of this question...What Makes a Terrorist lacks a question mark. That's because Krueger, marshaling persuasive statistics and analysis, comes down firmly on the side of politics, noting most terrorists are middle-class and well-educated.

  Thomas P.M. Barnett

  Class, Political, Statistics

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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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• My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.

  Jennifer Gilmore

  Mother, Father, World

  Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. March 8, 2011.

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• It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

  Robert Heilbroner

  Past, Faces, Scope

  Robert L. Heilbroner (1955). “The Great Economists: Their Lives and Their Conceptions of the World”

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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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• My folks are economists and have taught economics and social science so I grew up with those kind of conversations around the dinner table.

  Seth Gordon

  Tables, Dinner, Taught

  Interview with Evan Narcisse, www.ifc.com. September 30, 2010.

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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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• Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.

  Thomas J. Sargent

  Brilliant, Inspired, Wonderful

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• Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.

  Vladimir Lenin

  People, Saws, Commodity

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• Government spending? I don't know what it's all about. I don't know any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he doesn't know much.

  Will Rogers

  Government, Doe, Politics

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