Quotes About Economics

I go to Stanford, and I'm an economics major, not thinking I'm going to do anything with acting. A professor came to the dorm where I lived looking for people to audition for an August Wilson play, 'Joe Turner's Come And Gone.' I gave it a shot, got one of the lead roles in the play.

We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction.

Since entering the new century, China and Africa have seized the historic opportunities presented by the deepening of globalization, worked together and helped each other to achieve a win-win outcome.

I support the view that free trade in goods and services is a win-win situation. I'm not so convinced that free flows of capital without restriction is a win-win situation.

Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.

The value of solar and wind decline in economic value as they become larger shares of the electricity grid for physical reasons. They produce too much energy when societies don't need it and not enough energy when they do.

If we're willing to accept unlimited immigration in order to keep wages low and corporate profits high, we should just say so and stop paying for all the immigration enforcement window dressing.

You don't know the impact of Windows XP. You don't know what the economic impact is going to be.

Big ideas, big ambitious projects need to be embedded within culture at a level deeper than the political winds. It needs to be deeper than the economic fluctuations that could turn people against an expensive project because they're on an unemployment line and can't feed their families.

One of the most important things liberals don't understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism's various 'wings,' is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where 'traditional morality' serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa.

The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'

There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.

I think it is true to say that I am not the first Nobel Prize winner in economics to have little formal training in economics.

I call crony capitalism, where you take money from successful small businesses, spend it in Washington on favored industries, on favored individuals, picking winners and losers in the economy, that's not pro-growth economics. That's not entrepreneurial economics. That's not helping small businesses. That's cronyism, that's corporate welfare.

Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers - not governments - to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.

The Nobel Prize is not very important for the winners - they are usually pretty successful people already. But it is valuable as a way of drawing the public's attention to important work in economics.

Free-market capitalism doesn't pick economic winners and losers based on the president's economic nostalgia, and limited-government conservatism isn't marked a top-down ideological conformity strictly enforced by state media organs.

The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.

One thinks that one is winning when we slap tariffs or introduce barriers to imports from another country, and we think we win. But you lose when you export because the other countries are going to raise tariffs as well. They're going to introduce barriers as well. So you win with one hand and you lose with the other.

We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

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

Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Princeton University, I took my first economics course; our textbook was the first edition of Samuelson's 'Economics: An Introductory Analysis.'

Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship.