Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Economists - Page 2

If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That's why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn't want to count government spending.

Those who say that climate change doesn't exist are being understood as the flat-earthers that they are, as the people who deny the link between smoking and cancer, as the people who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

With all the globalisation that has taken place, countries are a lot more interdependent and therefore 'coupled.'

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.

Hold on to your dream. Don't let past failures or dire economic forecasts make you a pessimist. Keep your youthful dreams alive and create your own opportunities.

The last 200 years, we've had an incredible amount of automation. We have tractors that do the work that horses and people used to do on farms. We don't dig ditches by hand anymore. We don't pound tools out of wrought iron. We don't do bookkeeping with books! But this has not, in net, reduced the amount of employment.

I am just a normal human being - I am alive! Why is anyone surprised that I am human? Like many New Yorkers, I have a multifaceted life.

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

Much theoretical work, of course, focuses on existing economic institutions. The theorist wants to explain or forecast the economic or social outcomes that these institutions generate.

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

An owl is traditionally a symbol of wisdom, so we are neither doves nor hawks but owls, and we are vigilant when others are resting.

The proposition is that prices reflect all available information, which in simple terms means since prices reflect all available information, there's no way to beat the market.

The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

Education is the key to the future: You've heard it a million times, and it's not wrong. Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates, and better-educated countries grow faster and innovate more than other countries. But going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects.

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.

For physical goods, there are costs associated with logistics and lead times, owing to inventories and poor forecasts of the market. With digital capital-intensive technology, however, production will inevitably move toward the final market, wherever it is. This re-localization constitutes a major shift in the structure of global supply networks.

The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.

People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

The law of property determines who owns something, but the market determines how it will be used.

The advantage of knowing about risks is that we can change our behavior to avoid them. Of course, it is easily observed that to avoid all risks would be impossible; it might entail no flying, no driving, no walking, eating and drinking only healthy foods, and never being touched by sunshine. Even a bath could be dangerous.

In society, liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for others.

I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.

We have to use cars much more efficiently. We have to look at alternative technologies of cars such as biofuels or, even more importantly, electric cars.

The media does play a vital role in our democracy, and if we cannot depend on journalistic ethics, the nation's in trouble.

The economy is a very sensitive organism.

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

In short, both experience and economic theory imply that the US could now t to a more competitive dollar without experiencing either increased inflation or decreased economic growth.

Our view is that economic isolationism is the wrong way to go. Vibrant, successful growing economies that advance the interests of their citizens engage the global economy. And, we're committed to engaging the global economy.

Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.

We are all, after all, just human beings, and most of us have a lot in common.

No one can fight corruption for Nigerians except Nigerians. Everyone has to be committed from the top to the bottom to fight it.

Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults.

The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.

Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.

We spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to make impressions that don't matter.

Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, 'Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen,' buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.

Another is, if you take money out of your left pocket and put it in your right pocket, you're no richer.

You can't spend your way to prosperity.

Most people are overconfident about their own abilities. That is probably a good thing. But we would be horrified if a physician's aide engaged in heart surgery.

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

Competition-ruthless, unforgiving, to-the-death competition-is a crucial feature of capitalism.

Every side of a coin has another side.

Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege.

Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.

I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves.

The most important thing is not to be dogmatic but flexible and consistent.

We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism.

In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction.

[Donald Trump] is so unpredictable that foreigners are going to look around and say "boy, we've got to head for the safe havens." And one of the safe havens is Treasurys and [another is] the dollar.

All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data.

The only way that we're going to feel secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we've put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that.

Parents don't take a baby's temperature to decide whether the room is too warm; likewise, for global warming, we need a story that spurs us to do what is necessary.

By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.

People's jobs are the biggest asset that they have. The net present value of your job is worth more than your house or your stock portfolio. As people decide whether they're going to buy a car, they're more concerned about whether they have a job and are likely to have a job next year.