Quotes About Economics

Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.

Legal behavior is not incompatible with rational, self-interested behavior.

In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren't smart enough to write down models of real behavior that they started writing down models of highly rational behavior - and they kind of forgot about humans.

Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford... The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

I've never been antiregulation. I've always believed that raw, unregulated capitalism doesn't work.

Costs of manufactured articles importantly depend on the cost of raw materials as well as labour.

The prices of raw materials do not fluctuate directly with the labour cost of producing them.

When a product is market driven, it should be able to pay for all its raw materials at market prices.

My master's was in economics, and my Ph.D. was in philosophy, and I became a professor at USP. But after three years, I was invited to be secretary of finance for Sao Paulo mayor Marta Suplicy. They reached out to be because of my economics background.

The shape and composition of the government is important. We haven't reached a point where politics and economics have been totally divorced from each other.

Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.

If you ever had the misfortune of reading all 2,000 pages of Dodd-Frank, which I have done - and it almost killed me - basically, all it does is create a list of all the things it wants the Fed to fix.

We need to reaffirm that politics is not merely compatible with economic progress and development in the 21st century, but essential to it.

Reagan proved deficits don't matter.

When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'

I've always loved doing research. I remember doing a research project on the Babylonian numeral system in the eighth grade and thinking, 'This is pretty awesome - is this really a job you can have?' This led me toward a career as an academic, although it took me until college to realise that economics was the right field.

I know that things change and markets change. Those are the realities of the business.

I'm not stupid, and the people around me aren't stupid. You can't ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think.

To cure ALS medically is not economical. The realities are that it's difficult to find funding for research for a medical cure. I believe in developing technology as opposed to medical research. Technology can be economical.

I think what's happened to America, in a cultural sense, is we stopped getting richer as a country in the early 1970s, but we haven't adjusted our consumption patterns in any way, shape or form to meet the realities of the new lower income.

There are some who want to move us back to the days when we were protectionists and keep all goods off our shores.

The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.

Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods.