Quotes by Economists - Page 3

John Kenneth Galbraith

[T]he source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being namely, that his errors are corrigible.

John Stuart Mill

Intellect is not wisdom.

Thomas Sowell

Most economic histories of the "world" not only omit most extra-European production and exchange (even most of that outside West Europe or even northwest Europe); they neglect the participation of the productive and exchange activities of extra-European countries in the European, not to say world, process of accumulation and development. Moreover, they disregard the part that these productive and exchange relations played in the developing world system.

André Gunder Frank

Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.

Charles Fourier

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

John Stuart Mill

No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.

Richard Layard

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

John Maynard Keynes

The state it cannot too often be repeated does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody.

Henry George

To me, patriotism means dedication to the principles on which the country was founded and a willingness to stand firm and fight for these principles regardless of what the government says or does

Richard J. Maybury

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

Frédéric Bastiat

Measurement aside, there are two reasons aggregate growth might matter. The first is to create jobs to assimilate the unemployed and anticipate increases in population. The second is to improve living standards. Economic logic does not require overall expansion to achieve either of these objectives. An expanding labour force can be accommodated if hours of work fall. And it's productivity growth, rather than the overall size of the economy, that drives improvements in living standards. Getting bigger doesn't necessarily yield wealth; improving productivity does.

Juliet Schor

Pride of opinion has been responsible for the downfall of more men on Wall Street than any other factor.

Charles Henry Dow

All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.

Karl Marx

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.

Friedrich A. Hayek

You see, the thing about working with pirates is that they know what they are doing. They already know more than you do because they are sailing and raiding. They are the experts in your organization, and you need to get them on your side, not turn them against you. Here is how to deal with a pirate ship model in ten simple steps: 1. Respect the pirates. (They know how to execute.) 2. Invite the pirates to the table. Recognize their wins. 3. Ask the pirates to report on what they see and hear. 4. Ask the pirates to report on their wins and losses. 5. Ask the pirates how you can help them win more....

Olivier J. Blanchard

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think…

John Stuart Mill

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.

Walter E. Williams

The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to contribute.

Dani Rodrik

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people: it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Walter Bagehot

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts.

Friedrich A. Hayek

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.

Robin Hanson

If a man wishes to ensure the bad opinion of others, his best course probably is to be honest about himself.

William Hurrell Mallock

The man who gives me employment which I must have or suffer that man is my master let me call him what I will.

Henry George

The oldest and most popular instrument of etatistic monetary policy is the official fixing of maximum prices. High prices, thinks the etatist, are not a consequence of an increase in the quantity of money, but a consequence of reprehensible activity on the part of 'bulls' and 'profiteers'; it will suffice to suppress their machinations in order to ensure the cessation of the rise of prices. Thus it is made a punishable offence to demand, or even to pay, 'excessive' prices.

Ludwig von Mises

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Herbert Stein

His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.

John Stuart Mill

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.

B.R. Ambedkar

It is essential that justice be done, it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.

Oscar Arias

But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their enemy, as it is for everyone else.

Jeffrey Tucker

I sometimes refer to economics as a woman. To me the subject was always a she. People would ask me why. Easy. She's obviously a woman: all the men are trying to do her, and mostly they're failing.

Frances Weetman

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.

Ludwig von Mises

Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small part of the increasing note-expansion was recovered by the banks through the sale of foreign bills, would necessarily be unsuccessful. Led by the idea of opposing speculation, inflationistic governments have allowed themselves to become involved in measures whose meaning is hardly intelligible. Thus at one time the importation of notes, then their exportation, then again both their exportation and importation, have been prohibited. Exporters have been forbidden to sell for their own country's notes, importers to buy with them.

Ludwig von Mises

When individuals are exchanging present goods against future goods they do not take account in their valuations of Variations in the objective exchange-value of money. Lenders and borrowers are not in the habit of allowing for possible future fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money.

Ludwig von Mises

Oscar Wilde may have quipped that one can “never be overdressed or overeducated,” but Wilde did not live in our era of overeducated baristas.

Usman W. Chohan

God is triune, and all reality is structured in terms of Him. A brief definition of the Trinity might be this: One God without division in a plurality of Persons, and three Persons without confusion in a unity of essence. God is not 'basically' One, with the individual Persons being derived from the oneness; nor is God 'basically' Three, with the unity of the Persons being secondary. God is One, and God is Three. There are not three Gods; there is only one God. Yet each of the Persons is Himself God — and They are distinct, individual Persons. But there is only one God. "To put it in more philosophical language, God’s unity (oneness) and diversity (threeness, individuality) are equally ultimate. God is 'basically' One and 'basically' Three at the same time. And the same goes for all of creation. Both unity and diversity are important – equally important. Neither aspect of reality has priority over the other.

David H. Chilton

People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis.

Jean Monnet

The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public

Adam Smith

...the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.

Daniel Kahneman

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

John Maynard Keynes

Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

Thomas Sowell

Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of that composure and tranquillity of mind which is so necessary to happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of gratitude and love.

Adam Smith

Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Howard Scott

The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them!

Muhammad Yunus

There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system...

Milton Friedman

The surest way to damage society is to call for a "great man" to lead it. The surest way to improve society is to become a great man to lead oneself and convince others to do likewise.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Daniel Kahneman

Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that the same individual cannot secure the same degree of satisfaction from the same stock of goods in different places.

Ludwig von Mises

All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage.

Thorstein Veblen

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

Thomas Piketty

Because the bulk of a platform's value is created by its community of users, the platform business must shift its focus from internal activities to external activities. In the process the firm inverts-it turns inside out, with functions from marketing to information technology to operations to strategy all increasingly centering on people, resources, and functions that exist outside the business, complementing or replacing those that exists inside a traditional business.

Geoffrey G. Parker

With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.

Thomas Chalmers

Never stop learning, and always be ready to teach yourself things you don’t know. The only things you will remember are things you care about.

Jonathan Tepper

a variation in the objective exchange-value of money can arise only when a force is exerted in one direction that is not cancelled by a counteracting force in the opposite direction. If the causes that alter the ratio between the stock of money and the demand for it from the point of view of an individual consist merely in accidental and personal factors that concern that particular individual only, then, according to the law of large numbers, it is likely that the forces arising from this cause, and acting in both directions in the market, will counterbalance each other.

Ludwig von Mises

He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.

William Graham Sumner

No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow.

Ludwig von Mises

Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

If socialism failed, it was for political, more than economic, reasons; and if capitalism is to succeed it will be because it finds the political will and means to tame its economic forces.

Robert L. Heilbroner

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.

Karl Marx

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the "selfish" interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realisation of the ends the community pursues.

Friedrich A. Hayek

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