Best 72 quotes in «economist quotes» category

During my three years as chief economist of the World Bank, labor market issues were looked at through the lens of neoclassical economics. A standard message was to increase labor market flexibility. The not-so-subtle subtext was to lower wages and lay off unneeded workers.

Computers show up everywhere except the growth statistics.

Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits.

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

Economists say the inability to delay gratification is a primary predictor of economic failure in life.

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

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.

I am an educationist. I'm an economist. I am a politician. I am also now a good storyteller, you know?

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

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).

Economists can never be free of from difficulties unless they will distinguish between a theory and the application of a theory.

Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.

Economists have much to be humble about.

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

Every company that has an economist working for him has one employee too many.

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

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.

If economists did not concern themselves with economic efficiency, nobody would.

If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, "what would I do if I were a horse?

If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

If your employer pays your health insurance, that's not counted as income to you. And any economist would say that's your income, because they'd pay a higher wage if they didn't take it. That's a huge loss to the Treasury.

I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

I'm an economist by training. I don't really work as an economist. I only worked briefly as an economist.

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

I'm an economist by training. And I know that what works is a permanent increase in buying power.

It's easier to make a reporter into an economist than an economist into a reporter.

I'm not an economist, and I'm not a proponent of shock therapy.

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

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people.

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.

Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.

One speaks with great respect of economists, if only because they represent such a variety of opinions.

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

My ma is an economist. My dad is a software engineer.

Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather than the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

Please find me a one-armed economist so we will not always hear, "On the other hand...

[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems.

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization

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

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.

The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.