A Quote by Adam Curtis

A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios, and together they built a fortress around Mrs. Thatcher's memory that was rooted in theories about economics. They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand.
People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.
I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence.
If economics wants to understand the new economy, it not only has to understand increasing returns and the dynamics of instability. It also has to look at cognition itself, something we have never done before in economics.
My mother and my father taught me to look at the actual problem, not the face of it, not the veneer of it. So for me, I was never - I was impressed that it - racially, I was impressed, right, but now in America it's about economics, and it's been about economics, and honestly, everything's been about economics since I don't want to say the beginning of time, but it's been about economics for a long while.
I don't think Obama understands basic economics. Not economics that work. He may understand some theory that someone in Princeton sat and dreamed up, but it's not working.
I studied economics with some teachers from ESADE. It's a really good school here in Spain. They helped me to understand a little about numbers, stats, economics, etc.
My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics - the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.
I started in the law; and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.
As I talk about strengths and weaknesses in academic economics, one interesting fact you are entitled to know is that I never took a course in economics. And with this striking lack of credentials, you may wonder why I have the chutzpah to be up here giving this talk. The answer is I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it.
How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.
Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.
If people are teaching economics, they need to teach all the different disciplines, all the different schools in economics. They can't just teach one because then the person isn't equipped to deal with the economics profession.
Experimental economics is about conducting experiments: bringing economics into the laboratory or creating controlled conditions in the field that allow us to understand better what we are seeing in less controlled circumstances.
It is one of history's great ironies that capitalists built decent and humane societies on the basis of an amoral approach to the economics of pricing, whereas socialists built exploitative and inhumane societies on the basis of a morally inflamed approach to economics.
I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.
Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.
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