Quotes About Economists

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.

If economists were to wait for careful studies before offering opinions about policy, we would never have anything timely to say.

Economists' unanimity that bad business is ahead is the most reassuring news possible. It's very unlikely that this will be the one time they're right.

A few economists weighed in against our decision as well.

The media and politicians rarely pay attention to statements by economists, but unfortunately they do if the statements are sufficiently controversial (in the case of the media) or support preconceived views (in the case of politicians).

There is a rich vein of jokes about economists and their assumptions. Take the old one about the engineer, the physicist, and the economist. They find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing to eat but a sealed can of beans. How to get at them? The engineer proposes breaking the can open with a rock. The physicist suggests heating the can in the sun, until it bursts. The economist's approach: "First, assume we have a can opener....

Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they'll all turn over together.

Engineers do engineering, i.e. they build bridges. So engineering needs engineers. The economy does NOT need economists. Economists do not make economy, but they try it and that is why we have so much problems with some financial models.

Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.

We both approach the world as economists, and as economists resigned to - and sometimes even reveling in - the character defect that diverts us from pure science to policy analysis. An economist who has abandoned his resistance to policy analysis is liable to fall prey to even more seductive and dangerous vice of policy formulation.

Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature.

When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.

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

I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion-and-growing trading loss, there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits, and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.

Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?

Researchers may like to think that, given all the facts, we make rational choices. Ask economists how that assumption works out for them. No, we are emotional creatures who use value-based reasoning in conjunction with our rationality.

How can government reduce the frequency and the severity of future catastrophes? Companies that have the potential to create significant harm must be required to pay for the costs they inflict, either before or after the fact. Economists agree on this general approach. The problem is in putting such a policy into effect.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.

Here was one of the predictions that economists made that Edwards thought psychologists might test: Are actual human beings transitive? If at any given moment they preferred coffee to tea and tea to hot chocolate, did they prefer coffee to hot chocolate? A few people had recently looked into the matter, Edwards noted, among them a mathematician named Kenneth May. Writing in a leading economics journal, Econometrica

The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.

The human capital of most macroeconomists, heavily invested in demand management, was wiped out by the policy failures of the 1970s.