Quotes About Economic theory

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.

A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments.

Capital is kind of a banking concept.

From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.

The distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen famously called people who always give nothing in this game rational fools for blindly following only material self-interest: "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

I began to have deviant thoughts about economic theory while I was a graduate student

Economic theory textbooks would stop on the first page if the assumption of well-ordered preferences had to be abandoned, because without stable preferences there is nothing to be optimized.

the 2008 crisis is a textbook case for the theory of information

But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.

The first, or theoretic branch, that which explains the nature, production, and distribution of wealth, will be found to rest on a very few general propositions, which are the result of observation, or consciousness.

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic law to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis.

most economists are still working within the empty-world model of economics.

The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

Social Marxism is just as godless as classical Marxism, if not more so.

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."3

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes predicted the 'euthanasia of the rentier' before the end of the 20th century. It did not happen.

I have never believed that central banks should have rigid inflation targeting. That is not a good thing to stabilize. There is nothing in economic theory to back this.

You know, you cut taxes for the rich sometimes and it sits in a bank account. You cut taxes for the middle class, they will spend the money.

The laws of normal economics dictate that lower taxes combined with increased spending will lead to bigger deficits.

Smith's doctrine of self-interest did more than just turn avarice into a virtue; it turned classical virtue into a vice.

As I said, the passage of taxes was only possible because the masses believed in the Robin Hood theory of economics: Take from the rich, and give to everyone else. The problem was that the government's appetite for money was so great that taxes soon needed to be levied on the middle class, and from there it kept trickling down.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.