Behavior Quote by David Brooks

Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by…

— Andrew Lo

Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the…

— Tyler Cowen

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

— Daniel Kahneman

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set…

— Gary Becker

“The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. Its ideal is rather to understand…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Ha-Joon Chang

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

— Joseph Stiglitz

Economists must always be prepared for surprises: they find many in trying to find order in the universe of their study.

— Simon Kuznets

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont…

— Thomas Piketty

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“Choices whose outcomes matter even though they are neither deterministic nor completely random surround us all the time. So it is not surprising that…

— David Christian

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

— Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr