A Quote by John R. Platt
Going to the moon is not a matter of physics but of economics.
Related Quotes
So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.
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.
We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics: more practical than spiritual.
There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.
I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding.
When we went to the moon and realized that the Soviet Union had no realistic plans of getting to the moon, then we stopped going to the moon.
Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful
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.
As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.
That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.
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.
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.
It didn't matter if we put out 'The Dark Side Of The Moon,' we weren't going to be liked by everyone.
I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.
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.
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
