Quotes About Economics

I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.

Later, she calculated that the dead men's flight alone had cost over sixty-eight thousand dollars. "What if," she asked, "somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?

In my right-wing politics of the time, I held that unemployment was usually the fault of the unemployed.

Sports is all about money.

The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets.

Still another and all-sufficient answer to the argument that the use of spirituous liquors tends to poverty, is that, as a general rule, it puts the effect before the cause. It assumes that it is the use of the liquors that causes the poverty, instead of its being the poverty that causes the use of the liquors.

Theoretical economists use their mathematical prowess the way the great stags of the forest use their antlers: to do battle with one another and to establish dominance.

generally treating free-market capitalism as a kind of state religion.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.

Social self-determination does not and cannot exist in a capitalist society: capital, in all its forms, is the negation of self-determination.

A fascist is anyone who, seeing a man working hard and earning money, says, He's getting more than we are, let's pass

But I also think the doctrine of laissez faire, carried to its extreme, is equally repugnant. Too many capitalists use laissez faire as an excuse to gouge the public and exploit the poor.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

I would now, however, more strongly emphasize, and especially as to the United States, the inequality in income and that it is getting worse—that the poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasing egregiously. So is the political eloquence and power by which that income is defended. This I did not foresee.

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.

None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

There is nothing reliable to be learned about making money. If there were, study would be intense and everyone with a positive IQ would be rich.

the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.

Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved.

One does not fire or sack higher-income personnel; in the interest of greater efficiency, they are only shed.

out of the pecuniary and political pressures and fashions of the time, economics and larger economic and political systems cultivate their own version of the truth. This last has no relation to reality. No one is especially at fault; what is convenient to believe is greatly preferred.