Quotes About Policymakers

Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

traditional economic approaches fail to examine the role of public beliefs in major economic events—that is, narrative. By incorporating an understanding of popular narratives into their explanations of economic events, economists will become more sensitive to such influences when they forecast the future. In doing so, they will give policymakers better tools for anticipating and dealing with these developments.

Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.

Washington policymakers have to understand the adverse implications of their actions on job creation, and they must reorder some of their priorities.

Teachers deserve to helm every committee determining school operations rather than policymakers who proclaim what should happen in the classroom despite never having taught in one.

Policymakers have demonstrated a predilection for giving the greatest amount of deference to state and other elite actors, rather than to their users. Increased complexity has led to a greater propensity for inconsistency and error, as the following chapters illustrate. This, combined with ever-increasing scale, has created a crisis of legitimacy and, for many individuals for whom these platforms constitute a vital tool, an untenable situation.

Years of passivity and drift among U.S. policymakers have allowed the U.S. - China trade deficit to grow to the point where is widely recognized as a major threat to our economy.

Fomenting an ongoing political crisis is actually one of ISIS's objectives; it distracts policymakers' attention from terrorists inside Iraq; and it draws critical Iraqi security forces and law enforcement away from the front lines of the battle against ISIS.

Part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.

When Americans support using our military abroad, they want to see a clear plan. They want to know what they need to do and when - and policymakers want to know that there's broad public support for the effort.

Despite the impression created by some economic pundits, the U.S. economy is not a delicate little machine that needs to be fine-tuned with exact precision by benevolent policymakers to keep from breaking down.

No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.

Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his irresponsible claims stood mute.

Policymakers think that if they get the abstractions right, that will drive behavior in the desired direction. But the world happens in real time.

And I argued with that intelligence estimate and I think it is a responsibility of policymakers to use their best judgment on the basis of the intelligence they've received.

We shouldn't limit the idea of 'policy recommendations' to regulators. On the Internet, all of us are, in a sense, policymakers.

The fact that large, solvent, heavily regulated banks would not lend to each other—or would lend to each other only at historically unprecedented interest rate premiums—and not lend to each other even overnight, was persuasive evidence, universally accepted by policymakers, that the crisis was essentially one of illiquidity.

Life is unpredictable," I told them, thinking of both my own career path and the economy and financial system's roller-coaster ride over the past seven and a half years. I also gave them a working definition of my chosen profession: "Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

Nevertheless, announcing an inflation target instills discipline and accountability, because it forces policymakers either to hit their target or to offer a credible explanation for why they missed.

The hawks (shorthand for policymakers who tended to worry more about inflation) did not sit at a different table than the doves (policymakers who tended to worry more about growth and employment).

policymakers had to weigh what might happen if Greece, after a default,

I had seriously considered conducting an unscheduled press conference after the November meeting, but decided that it risked disrupting markets. Instead, I spent several hours telephoning key reporters individually, answering questions on background. I also wrote an op-ed that was published November 4 in the Washington Post. Despite these efforts, I was unprepared for the blowback from policymakers abroad and politicians at home.

If policymakers are serious about avoiding a society of TV 'haves and have-nots,' they should refrain from policies that favor pay-TV operators over the providers of our nation's only free and local communications system: over-the-air broadcasting.