Quotes About Economists

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.

Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.

I think we labor economists like to think of ourselves as being closer to the people.

After all their investigations, though, economists typically conclude that the man in the street—and the intellectual without economic training—underestimates how well markets work.12 I maintain that something quite different holds for democracy: it is widely over-rated not only by the public but by most economists too. Thus, while the general public underestimates how well markets work, even economists underestimate markets' virtues relative to the democratic alternative.

My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience.

If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't be a bad thing.

Economists who looked at the real consequences of a centrally planned economy came to a very different conclusion: that there are too many economic relationships, and it is impossible to take them all into account and carefully coordinate them.

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

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

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of entertainers called Wall Street "economists" or "strategists," who make pronouncements on the fate of the markets, but do not engage in any form of risk taking, thus having their success dependent on rhetoric rather than actually testable facts.

Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

Another recent event is the almost-instant bankruptcy, in 1998, of a financial investment company (hedge fund) called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which used the methods and risk expertise of two "Nobel economists," who were called "geniuses" but were in fact using phony, bell curve–style mathematics while managing to convince themselves that it was great science and thus turning the entire financial establishment into suckers.

Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making.

Another case where economists may inspire us but should never tell us what to do

Traders trade ? traders figure out techniques and products ? academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them ? new traders believe academics ? blowups (from theory-induced fragility)

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst—those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians.

The latest I've seen is about how economists should shoot for the role of lowly philosophers rather than that of high priests. Yet, in one ear and out the other.

Los economistas han entendido durante siglos que cuando los precios están altos, las personas tienden a comprar menos que cuando los precios están bajos. Sin embargo, incluso hoy, muchos no entienden las múltiples implicaciones de ese simple hecho.

los economistas que observaron las consecuencias reales de una economía planificada de forma central llegaron a una conclusión muy diferente: que «existen demasiadas relaciones económicas, y resulta imposible tomarlas a todas en cuenta y coordinarlas de manera cuidadosa».

An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists:

Beginning with a handful of outstanding intellectual refugees from interwar Europe, we pass through two generations of academic economists intent on re-configuring their discipline … and arrive at the banking, mortgage, private finance and hedge fund scandals of recent years.

When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.

I think Obama and the economists around him have a very sophisticated understanding of both globalization and the technology revolution and the impact they're having on the world economy and they way they're creating these winner-take-all spirals.