A Quote by Murray Rothbard
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
Related Quotes
Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.
Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.
The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect.
I learned that economics was not an exact science and that the most erudite men would analyze the economic ills of the world and derive a totally different conclusion.
My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.
Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.
There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed.
It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.
Truly environmentalism has displaced economics as the dismal science.
We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.
I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).
When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that "real wealth." It exposes what's wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science…
Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy
I have nothing to fear from serious social studies of science, and I hope that my philosophy will help progressive science policies while showing that the most modern views of science are ignorant and regressive, even if they are accompanied by a leftist-sounding rhetoric.
Children are prepared for democracy by being led to discuss current events without first learning the systematic subjects (politics, economics, history) which are necessary in order to discuss them. The Mole effect is to substitute slogans and superficial opinion for considered individual thought. And the opinion is that of the lowest common denominator of the group.
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