Quotes About Economists

As should be clear by now, businesses make adjustments when the minimum wage is increased. Cato Institute scholar Mark Wilson explains that "all economists agree that businesses will make changes to adapt to the higher labor costs after a minimum wage increase." "The higher costs will be passed on to someone in the long run; the only question is who."40

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

We have so many economists in Africa who are idealists rather than materialists. They are full of ideas, but lack the wisdom to make better use of nature. Only industrialization is the remedy for the African problem.

The press would indeed take the "conservative" position. A New York Times reporter put it this way: "The Academy found that since there is no politically or economically realistic way of heading off the greenhouse effect, strategies must be prepared to adapt to a 'high temperature world.'"50 But the Academy hadn't found that; the committee had asserted it. And it wasn't the Academy; it was Bill Nierenberg and a handful of economists.

The joint committee invited economists of many economic stripes to model what would happen if America switched from the current code to a unified income tax or a consumption tax. Every economist who modeled reported that the consumption tax would increase long-term economic growth.

America ranks number 41 in child mortality, according to the Social Progress Index, which is based on research by three Nobel Prize–winning economists and covers 146 countries for which there is reliable data. We rank number 46 in internet access, number 44 in access to clean drinking water, number 57 in personal safety and number 30 in high-school enrollment.

2019, a team of economists from Notre Dame, Boston University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research published a dense research paper on the timing of the "rapid rise in the heroin death rate" in the years since 2010. The title of the paper was "How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic.

Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you're tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we've seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

Very recently, economists have gained a better understanding of the structure of taboos. Their purpose is to protect a sense of identity by shielding people from evidence that might challenge it.2 Taboos save you from the need to cover your ears by constraining what is said.