Quotes About Economists

In terms of the Green New Deal, I support the urgency and the end goal of the Green New Deal. I would look to work with our climatologists, economists to propose my own plan and how we would meet those goals.

Our biggest challenge is to eliminate the popular perception that economists don't have anything useful to say.

The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.

Some economists seem to think that only a credentialed economist has the right to be utterly wrong about an issue of economics. Their contempt for amateurs - columnists with broad audiences, for example - would sear the lungs if inhaled.

The good news is that economists are intelligent, engaging and often charming folks. The bad news is their work is often of little use to investors.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they don't even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds

Tal vez no necesitaríamos la Seguridad Social si la gente corriente fuese de verdad tan perfectamente racional y tuviese tanta visión de futuro como a los economistas les gusta suponer en sus modelos (y a la gente de derechas en su propaganda).

This kind of machine-based learning is driven by a hunger for knowledge, not by a desire to show off your talent or to "signal" as we economists say.

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

More than any other issue, economists have kind of been boosters for trade.

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.

An economists' consensus is perhaps more a rarity than a regularity. But when it happens, we need to pause and take stock.

In sum, economists (and those who listened to them) became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation improves the risk-return trade-off, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot about the other models. There was too much Fama, too little Shiller. The economics of the profession may have been fine, but evidently there was trouble with its psychology and sociology.

Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we'll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don't believe that anymore. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don't. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0.

After the introduction of the fine we observed a steady increase in the number of parents coming late," the economists wrote. "The rate finally settled, at a level that was higher, and almost twice as large as the initial one."19

It has been subsequently theorized that our species' seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization.

Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.

Credit expansion results in the recurrence of economic crisis and periods of depression. Inflation makes the prices of all commodities and services soar. The attempts to enforce wage rates higher than those the unhampered market would have determined produce mass unemployment prolonged year after year. Price ceilings result in a drop in the supply of commodities affected. The economists have proved these theorems in an irrefutable way. No

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

All economists should be locked up until they admit that they don't know what they're talking about.

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