Quotes About Economists

How is it that, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still some who would deny the dangers of climate change? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are not scientific, and it is remarkable how many economists, lawyers, journalists and politicians set themselves up as experts on the science.

I have been pitiless in my criticism of the economists: for them I confess that, in general, I have no liking. The arrogance and the emptiness of their writings, their impertinent pride and their unwarranted blunders, have disgusted me. Whoever, knowing them, pardons them, may read them.

Economists argue about the relative impact of immigrants versus robots on wage stagnation - voters don't care much. They blame immigrants. It's easier to get mad at a person from Macedonia or Mexico, taking your job than it is to get mad at a piece of technology from Silicon Valley.

In my long life, I have known some great economists, but I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company.

For economists, Argentina is a perplexing country. To illustrate how difficult it was to understand Argentina, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets once famously remarked that there were four sorts of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence.

You're crazy, Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.

A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.

Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

Markets aren't real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaged in the same self-interested calculating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon.

Marx is engaged in a critique of classical liberal political economy. He therefore finds it necessary to accept the theses of liberalism (and, by extension to our own times, neoliberalism) in order to show that the classical political economists were profoundly wrong even in their own terms.

Why did God invent economists? To make weathermen feel good about themselves.

The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.

Fundamental analysis often works, but it often fails. Technical analysis often works, and then it does not work. Economists speak of economic cycles, but none can be found analytically. Traders speak of market cycles; they too cannot be proven. To top it off, the critics of the EMH have been unable to offer an alternative that takes all the discrepancies into account. In few other areas are theory and practical experience in such little agreement.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence.

Talking with economists, climate scientists, and psychologists convinced me that depersonalizing climate change, such that the only answers are systemic, is a mistake of its own. It misses how social change is built on a foundation of individual practice.

Historians and economists are very good at creating and perpetuating myths that justify increasing the power placed in the hands of government.

The central argument, which seemed revolutionary to classical economists, was that the economy had no natural tendency towards full employment.