Top 1200 Economics Quotes & Sayings

There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.

I’m not into the whole Austrian type, strongly libertarian economics. I like more mainstream economics.

Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it's all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free - and, in fact, it isn't. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined.

The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home 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.

Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.

The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

My master's was in economics, and my Ph.D. was in philosophy, and I became a professor at USP. But after three years, I was invited to be secretary of finance for Sao Paulo mayor Marta Suplicy. They reached out to be because of my economics background.

I am opposed to all forms of control; I am for an absolute laissez faire, free, unregulated economy. I am for the separation of the state and economics, just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful coexistence among different religions...so the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and harmony and justice among men.

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Princeton University, I took my first economics course; our textbook was the first edition of Samuelson's 'Economics: An Introductory Analysis.'

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country [Afghanistan] is dominated by drug economy and a mafia; textbook economics does not work in my context.

I think it is true to say that I am not the first Nobel Prize winner in economics to have little formal training in economics.

In my junior year in college, I was getting kind of tired of French. So, I took an economics course, and I loved it. The rest of my two years in college I spent in economics.

My Prime Minister regards the economy as our highest priority and forgets that economics and ecology are derived from the same Greek word, oikos, meaning household or domain. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is its management. Ecologists try to define the conditions and principles that enable a species to survive and flourish. Yet in elevating the economy above those principles, we seem to think we are immune to the laws of nature. We have to put the ‘eco’ back into economics.

We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics: more practical than spiritual.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage. Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world, it is destructive.

Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment...In short, positive economics is or can be an "objective" science.

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.

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

I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.

I am practical by nature, and I'd heard that being a writer or an artist is a good way to starve! So I was an economics major at Oklahoma State, and then received an M.S. from Cornell in Agricultural Resource and Managerial Economics. I knew if I wanted to write I would do it on my own, but I knew I wouldn't make myself study economics on my own.

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.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

If you want to learn real economics instead of neoliberal junk economics, read Michael Hudson's books.

I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics.

Religion is a way to make order from chaos, and I think economics is not dissimilar. In religion and in economics, you're trying to figure out the way we perceive the world and move through it, and that's what I like to learn.

After graduating in engineering I went to the University of Kansas to get an MA in economics as a vehicle for allowing me to decide if I wanted to continue in 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.

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.

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.

I love Richard Thaler's 'Quasi Rational Economics.' A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.

To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.

Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.

The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

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.

One reason that we eat processed foods is the decline of home economics. Restarting home economics classes is one of the key things we could do to get this issue moving.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

We should know that only replacing the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation will guarantee a globalization that takes advantage of potential efficiency gains in ways that also promote environmental protection, international equity, economic democracy, and variety.

Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world's poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.

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.

Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.

I suspected economics was irredeemable as a policy tool for citizens groups. I saw economics lead its practitioners and citizens alike into a form of brain-damaging indoctrination.

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.

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 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.

Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.

I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.

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.

Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.