Economists Quotes · Page 3

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of.

— Oliver Goldsmith

Economists' unanimity that bad business is ahead is the most reassuring news possible. It's very unlikely that this will be the one…

— Malcolm Forbes

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

— Peter Lynch

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Christine Lagarde

If you put two economists xin a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case…

— Winston Churchill

Unlike physics, economists don't settle things. There seems to be plenty of room for different conclusions that are still accepted in the…

— Adam Davidson

In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren't smart enough to write down models of real…

— Richard Thaler

Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through…

— Tyler Cowen

The traditional story of economists has been to say education explains what the returns are to school. I say, 'Okay, that's fine,…

— James Heckman

The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration…

— Kurt Bills

You cannot prove this in real time, but when economists 20 years from now write a book on the recovery, it may…

— Jamie Dimon

“They (economists) must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that…

— Thomas Piketty

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very…

— Kenneth Baker

“In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to…

— Eugene Linden

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of…

— Henry Hazlitt

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their…

— Henry Hazlitt

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced…

— Jane Smiley

One intriguing subplot of the economic crisis is the failure of most economists to predict it. Here we have the most spectacular…

— Robert J. Samuelson

One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification…

— Kenneth E. Boulding

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet…

— James R Newman

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and…

— Thomas Piketty

One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the…

— John Michael Greer

If economists were to wait for careful studies before offering opinions about policy, we would never have anything timely to say.

— Raghuram Rajan

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species

— Garrett Hardin

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

— Edgar Fiedler

What Disneyland was to my kids at age 10, that's kind of what Chicago is for economists.

— Austan Goolsbee

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

— Tim Harford

Leading economists have shown that by shrinking Texas, we can actually create more income for Texas in the long run.

— Ian Frazier

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.

— Adam Davidson

There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?

— Thomas Sowell

When I was a graduate student, estimating and interpreting distributed lags topped the agenda of macroeconomists and other applied economists.

— Thomas J. Sargent

“The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.”

— Richard Davenport-Hines

The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to…

— Richard Thaler

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

— David Autor

The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in…

— Kenneth S. Deffeyes