Quotes About Economists

Over the last decade, economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything.

If economists were good at business, they would be rich men instead of advisers to rich men.

For me, geopolitical issues are becoming more important, because how can you understand economy if you don't understand geopolitics? People think economists just deal with spreadsheets and charts. That's a narrow-minded caricature.

Offer argued that "a silent revolution" took place in economics in the 1970s. That was a time when "economists discovered opportunism—a polite term for cheating," he said. "Before that, economics had been a just-world defense of the status quo. But when the status quo became the welfare state, suddenly economics became all about cheating.

The outcome depends on how successful the cheating is. And one of the consequences of this is that economists are not in a strong position to tell society what to do.

Although China is short of the people it really needs—scientists, economists, doctors, teachers, practically everybody, in fact, except Indian chiefs—it employs its best and brightest in thinking how to update its theology. A mind, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste.

That economic decisions are made without certain knowledge of the consequences is pretty self-evident. But, although many economists were aware of this elementary fact, there was no systematic analysis of economic uncertainty until about 1950.

Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.

The economy, unemployment, the future... Politicians, economists, and journalists are constantly debating these key issues for our country but rarely come to an answer. But behind all this, there is a fairly simple truth: no matter what anybody says, jobs are hard to come by.

In 1927, Robert Graves published a little book called *Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language*. He noted a recent decline in the use of foul language by the English, and predicted that this decline would continue indefinitely, until foul language had all but disappeared from the average man's vocabulary. History has not borne him out, to say the least: indeed, I have known economists make more accurate predictions.

If all the economists in this country were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion.

The job of economic theorists is to prove theorems. The job of policy economists is to figure out which theorems to apply.

Economists must always be prepared for surprises: they find many in trying to find order in the universe of their study.

Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.

I guess economists, it's a bit like scientists, you have definitely fewer women in that field.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious.

As a general rule, the United States government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.

I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

Economists like to strike the pose of a scientist. I know, because I often do it myself. When I teach undergraduates, I very consciously describe the field of economics as a science, so no student would start the course thinking he was embarking on some squishy academic endeavor.'1

This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.

When economists talk about income, they talk about the money a household or a person earns in a given year. That's the salary you earned, the rent from a tenant above your garage and the bit of money you made by selling some stocks.

In one of the most remarkable studies of the transmission of ideas over time, the economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth found evidence that animosity endured generation after generation, for as long as six hundred years. Voigtländer