A Quote by Robert J. Shiller
That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.
Related Quotes
So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.
The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain.
My A-levels were physics, chemistry and maths. Science is fascinating but I wouldn't say I have used it since then. I decided to do economics.
I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.
In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.
And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.
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.
Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better.
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.
Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.
You don't see black people winning Nobel prizes for physics or economics or any of the industries or institutions that shape the way the world operates.
The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium.
Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.
We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics: more practical than spiritual.
Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.
Related Authors
Adam Smith Quotes
Scottish
Economist
Alan Greenspan Quotes
American
Economist
Benjamin Graham Quotes
American
Economist
Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes
Austrian
Economist
John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
American
Economist
John Maynard Keynes Quotes
English
Economist
Joseph Stiglitz Quotes
American
Economist
Ludwig von Mises Quotes
Austrian
Economist
Milton Friedman Quotes
American
Economist
Muhammad Yunus Quotes
Bangladeshi
Economist
Murray Rothbard Quotes
American
Economist
Paul Krugman Quotes
American
Economist
Richard Thaler Quotes
American
Economist
Robert Reich Quotes
American
Economist
Thomas Sowell Quotes
American
Economist
Walter E. Williams Quotes
American
Economist