Economists Quotes

People today don't become economists to make the world a better place.

— Tim Harford

The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.

— Joan Robinson

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

— Aldo Leopold

“As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data.”

— Robert Lane Greene

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

— Abhijit Banerjee

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

— James Buchan

Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?

— Yasheng Huang

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

When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done.

— Paul Romer

Most economists use 'fixed' and 'pegged' as interchangeable or nearly interchangeable terms for exchange rates.

— Steve Hanke

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

— David Autor

...the institutional arrangement whereby most professional economists are heavily burdened with teaching and administrative duties may militate against a sufficient admixture of…

— Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod

It is particularly odd that economists who profess to be champions of a free-market economy, should go to such twists and turns…

— Murray Rothbard

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the…

— Christina Romer

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements…

— Stephen J. Dubner

Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps…

— Milton Friedman

As economists bandy about terms like 'recapitalization,' 'credit lines,' and 'liquidity,' families are facing brutal cuts to their social services and welfare…

— Sharan Burrow

Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is…

— Ha-Joon Chang

Question: Why does anyone bother to listen to economists anymore? The profession has become an embarrassment, and the most respected economists have…

— Stephen Moore

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

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

— Thomas Piketty

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options…

— Douglass North

I once read about a meeting of economists who agreed that if their forecasts were 33 1/3 % correct, that was considered…

— Gerald M. Loeb

Economists who studied in the '80s tend to have a pretty crude neoclassical view that's just about freeing up prices and markets,…

— Duncan Green

“It is actually a rather sorry tale. In the late nineteenth century most English economists thought that economics was about happiness. They…

— Richard Layard

“Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy…

— Anonymous

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

— Jane Smiley

“and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd…

— Anonymous

“The protest has won the backing of prominent economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia University academic, and Andy Haldane, chief economist at…

— Anonymous

“Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money…

— Charles Duhigg

“Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from…

— Aditya Chakrabortty

“Economists who simply advised leaving the economy alone, governments whose first instincts, apart from protecting the gold standard by deflationary policies, was…

— Eric J. Hobsbawm

“The economists exploded the old tenets: that it is unfair and unjust to outdo a competitor by producing better and cheaper goods;…

— Ludwig von Mises

“I want economists to quit concerning themselves with allocation problems, per se, with the problem, as it has been traditionally defined. The…

— James M. Buchanan

“Since the 1970s, analyses of the public debt have suffered from the fact that economists have probably relied too much on so-called…

— Anonymous