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.

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

An economist is a scoundrel who tells you the way things are rather than the way you want them to be.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.

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.

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

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

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

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

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

There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.

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

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

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

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.