Quotes About Economists

The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population.

People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name "socialism" are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base.

Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers (six if one went to Harvard).

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?

I may be only a fish and chip shop lady, but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.

The executives claim that "market forces" determine their salary. However, as Moshe Adler, in his article "Overthrowing the Overpaid," points out, economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith, writing more than two hundred years ago, "concluded that what a person earns is determined not by what that person has produced but by that person's bargaining power.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!

Most economists use 'fixed' and 'pegged' as interchangeable or nearly interchangeable terms for exchange rates.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. (The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money)

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.

Vagueness about numbers is a curse of the public sector. In the worst cases it borders on the criminal. Challenged to find one reliable number in the Argentine government's books, a group of the most respected economists in Buenos Aires went into a huddle and came back with the answer: "Maybe one of the trade ones, but we are not sure which.

Like other ideologies, that of free trade contains unspoken contempt for the individual citizen. It is a despairing response to the complexities of the real world and the politics of despair always replace choice with inevitability. Indeed despair is the natural tone of economists when they are selling their theories of salvation.

The savings of workers are fairy tales invented by bourgeois economists to lull their weak sentiment of justice.

I don't think quantitative easing is deliberately misleading, but I do think it's suspiciously bland and reassuring. It doesn't sound like anything big, experimental, scary and strange - which is what many economists think it is.

There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will prompt them to investigate its activities more closely.

At the time of the formation of the euro, I would say most American economists said that's not a good idea; that's not a currency area that makes sense. And the answer from Europe was, 'How is Missouri and Mississippi a currency area?' But the flaw in that was not recognizing the importance of mobility.

Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.