Quotes About Economic theory

For economist the real world is often a special case.

Lawrence Summers, now the U.S. Treasury secretary , told The Wall Street Journal after the crash, "The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory.

Smith suggested that in an economy of many small buyers and sellers, each trying to increase his own profit, our collective benefit would be maximized as though guided by an "invisible hand." The notion is of limited use, because most markets are not as Smith assumed. Take computer chips: 99.8 percent of them, worldwide, are made by just two US companies, and the smaller one is fighting to survive.

Unlike some hedge fund managers who also had a waiting list, we could have increased our fees by raising our share of the profits or adding more capital, thereby driving down the return to limited partners. Such tactics by the general partner to capture nearly all the excess risk-adjusted return, or "alpha," rather than share it with the other investors are what economic theory predicts. Instead, I preferred to treat limited partners as I would wish to be treated in their place.

If you've taken Econ 101, you know that the quantity of money rises only when the banking system makes a net loan.

The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question.

There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Economics is a good degree to have but the subject is very theoretical at Cambridge and I found it frustrating that you can't apply a lot of the models to particular circumstances.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.

To put it bluntly, there isn't one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore's success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.

In order to conquer the world of economics with his new theory, it was critical for Keynes to destroy his rivals within Cambridge itself. In his mind, he who controlled Cambridge controlled the world.

Isn't it interesting that markets are not just perfect? In business school and economic theory, you learn all about those perfect markets, and there's no such thing as a perfect market.

One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.

In the mid-'60s in Berkeley, the theory of measure spaces of economic agents became one of my main interests.

As 'Austrian' business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices actually to rise.

Going into 2010, we didn't expect the consumer pullback that happened. We all thought that the theory that concerts are recession-proof was true.

We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.

The whole intention of empirical economics is to force theory down to Earth.

We should qualify this observation to say that a constitution is more likely to last if it does not embody a misfit economic theory.

Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.