Quotes About Economics

I both love inequality and am terrified of it.

The E.U. is terrified that we might become a competitor on its doorstep and that is exactly what we should be.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.

Scotland is the only case in the world where the poor part of a territory wants to separate from the rich part. If independence came, one option is to keep the pound as its currency, so that all economic decisions will continue to be taken by the Bank of England.

It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Economics, he told Roy Harrod in 1938, is 'a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world… Good economists are scarce because the gift of using "vigilant observation" to choose good models… appears to be a very rare one'.

His favoured objects of contemplation were economic facts, usually in statistical form. He used to say that his best ideas came to him from 'messing about with figures and seeing what they must mean'. Yet he was famously sceptical about econometrics – the use of statistical methods for forecasting purposes. He championed the cause of better statistics, not to provide material for the regression coefficient, but for the intuition of the economist to play on.

The academic economist never really knows what makes a businessman tick, why he wants sometimes to gamble on an investment project and why he sometimes prefers liquidity and cash. Maynard understood because he was a gambler himself and felt the gambling or liquidity instincts of the business man. He once said to me, 'Remember, Nicholas, that business life is always a bet.

Shortly before his death, he gave a toast to economics and economists -'trustees, not of civilisation, but of the possibilities of civilisation'. Only someone with a fine sense of language, and an Edwardian sense of life's purpose, would have chosen exactly those words.

Economics could not be an exact science, because the number of variables was too great, and stability of variables over time could not be guaranteed. As he was to put it later, it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

under modern conditions of trade-union-led wage bargaining, a reduction in the quantity of money led directly to a reduction in the quantity of employment.

Keynes's economics – unlike Keynesian economics – was philosophically driven. It was informed by his vision of the 'good life'; it was permeated by his theory of probability. These philosophical foundations were laid early in his life. Philosophy came before economics; and the philosophy of ends came before the philosophy of means.

The revolutionary thought, brought out more clearly in The General Theory, was that there was no automatic mechanism in a modern economic system to keep intended saving in equilibrium with intended investment.

Another student, Lorie Tarshis, wrote: 'And finally what Keynes supplied was hope: hope that prosperity could be restored and maintained without the support of prison camps, executions and bestial interrogations….

It was the income-determination model, based on the multiplier, together with the consequent development of national income statistics, which made Keynesian economics acceptable to policy-makers, since it offered them a seemingly secure method of forecasting and controlling the movement of such 'real' variables as investment, consumption, and employment.

These discussions are not just of historic interest. Keynes was the first economist to put uncertainty at the heart of the economic problem, and thus raise the issue of the scope and meaning of rationality in economics. Is rationality possible in an uncertain world, and how is it to be specified?

In three articles to The Times, published in October 1939, and reproduced as a pamphlet, How to Pay for the War, Keynes put forward a scheme for compulsory saving or 'deferred pay', in which excess purchasing power would be mopped up by a progressive surcharge on all incomes (with offsets to the poor in the form of family allowances), part of which would be given back in instalments after the war in order to counteract the anticipated post-war slump.

ACT and SAT each have their own parts of the country. The GRE has its lock on graduate admissions. And so, one could blame the companies, but really, economically, they have no incentive to change things very much because they're getting the business.

Look at the declining television coverage. Look at the declining voting rate. Economics and economic news is what moves the country now, not politics.

I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.

Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears.

Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.