Top 1200 Economic Theory Quotes & Sayings

In the mid-'60s in Berkeley, the theory of measure spaces of economic agents became one of my main interests.

As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist

I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems.

In economic theory the conclusions are sometimes less interesting than the route by which they are reached.

None of us are rational economic men as we're supposed to be portrayed in economic theory where mixes of passions, of desires, of moral principles, of self-deception, of altruism, of concern of others, of concerns for ourselves and an interest in our bank accounts. And social policies have to be responsive to the complexity of who we are as people or else, like the war on drugs, they're simply going to fail.

After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.

Creationists have long held that evolutionary theory is atheistic; defenders of the theory do the theory no favor when they agree.

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

I have never believed that central banks should have rigid inflation targeting. That is not a good thing to stabilize. There is nothing in economic theory to back this.

Catastrophe Theory is-quite likely-the first coherent attempt (since Aristotelian logic) to give a theory on analogy. When narrow-minded scientists object to Catastrophe Theory that it gives no more than analogies, or metaphors, they do not realise that they are stating the proper aim of Catastrophe Theory, which is to classify all possible types of analogous situations.

Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.

People didn't sit and watch television and go, oh, my God, we're failing. So what are they doing in China is, they set up the markets as the test of their own economic management and of this whole theory of economic liberalization.

Evidence and economic theory suggests that control of the Internet by the phone and cable companies would lead to blocking of competing technologies.

The purpose of economic theory is to make those who are comfortable FEEL comfortable.

The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.

If you're a physicist, for heaven's sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

Moral theory develops from the divine command theory of medieval Christian philosophy, mixed up with a bit of ancient pagan virtue theory, to the purely secular moral sentiment and interpersonal reaction theories of Smith and Hume, to Kant's attempt to restore command theory but with something supersensible in the individual rather than God as the source of authority.

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

I believe without exception that theory follows practice. Whenever there is a conflict between theory and practice, theory is wrong. As far as I'm concerned, we make theories for what people have done.

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.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.

Mercantilism was an insidious economic theory that held Europe in its thrall in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

In view of the importance of philanthropy in our society, it is surprising that so little attention has been given to it by economic or social theorists. In economic theory, especially, the subject is almost completely ignored. This is not, I think, because economists regard mankind as basically selfish or even because economic man is supposed to act only in his self-interest; it is rather because economics has essentially grown up around the phenomenon of exchange and its theoretical structure rests heavily on this process.

If the theory accurately predicts what they [scientists] see, it confirms that it's a good theory. If they see something that the theory didn't lead them to believe, that's what Thomas Kuhn calls an anomaly. The anomaly requires a revised theory - and you just keep going through the cycle, making a better theory.

It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions... A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.

The modern history of economic theory is a tale of evasions of reality.

The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.

Free market capitalism is far more than economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility-the highway to the American Dream.

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.

If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.

One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.

Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events.

The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.

Evolution ... is really two theories, the vague theory and the precise theory. The vague theory has been abundantly proved.... The precise theory has never been proved at all. However, like relativity, it is accepted on faith.... On getting down to actual details, difficulties begin.

There are two theories. There's one theory that Barack Obama wants to destroy the country and create a socialistic country. There is that theory, and I've read a lot. This isn't necessarily my theory. I personally think they're incompetent.

When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted.

The aim of academic trade theory is to tell students, "Look at the model, not at how nations actually develop." So of all the branches of economic theory, trade theory is the most wrongheaded.

The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.

Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis.

As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.

The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.

For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'

Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results.

There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.

The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.

observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good.

I didn't know so well chess theory, the theory of chess openings. And so, of course I knew the theory, but not on the level of the best players, so this was my... this was always my weakness.

For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.

Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory.

The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.

Conventional economic theory... counts the depletion of resources as the accumulation of wealth.

Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed