Economists Quotes

“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“...If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money.

How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...”
― Steve Keen

“Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. In the real world, that’s not how things work at all. Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines – habits – that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

“And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, it is also a fundamental way of being in a community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way. This means that a future can be created without having to force or sell it or barter for it. When we believe that barter or subtle coercion is necessary, we are operating out of a context of scarcity and self-interest, the core currencies of the economist.”
― Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

“Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“They (economists) must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century

“The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines

“In my experience, economists rarely believe passionately in, or care passionately for, the free market. They are generally more concerned to reveal the market's imperfections, to further their own professional importance.”
― Terence Kealey

“The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by ‘one-handed’ economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.”
― Dani Rodrik

“Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.”
― Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy

“Le più raffinate, sofisticate e autorevoli previsioni economiche non sono più affidabili degli oroscopi.”
― Giulio Tremonti, Mundus furiosus: Il riscatto degli Stati e la fine della lunga incertezza

“The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God, devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans — it laughs at the idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or socialist bootees. It’s so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its omnipresence makes it familiar and familial.

Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanity’s survival outside of the economy.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally - few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“...some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested?

“Summers just lost it,” said one audience member, a business school student. “he looked at the person and said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?”
― Richard Bradley, Harvard Rules: Lawrence Summers and the Battle for the World's Most Powerful University – Sex, Ambition, and Elite Power at America's Institution

“The economists have us well along the way of the greatest mass extinction event in human history.”
― Steven Magee

“We both approach the world as economists, and as economists resigned to - and sometimes even reveling in - the character defect that diverts us from pure science to policy analysis. An economist who has abandoned his resistance to policy analysis is liable to fall prey to even more seductive and dangerous vice of policy formulation.”
― Steven Landsburg

“You always know economists are in deep shit when they start talking about trust and value. Usually when you say fundamentals to them they’re like interest rates and price of gold.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140

“The same rule of self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the un-appropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“In 1927, Robert Graves published a little book called *Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language*. He noted a recent decline in the use of foul language by the English, and predicted that this decline would continue indefinitely, until foul language had all but disappeared from the average man’s vocabulary. History has not borne him out, to say the least: indeed, I have known economists make more accurate predictions.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“In their quest to reduce all economic values to financial values, economists equated money with wealth, making money with creating wealth, and growth in the market price of an asset with growth in real value. They defined people as financial beings rather than living beings and ignored critical distinctions between the accumulated financial assets of individuals and the health and well-being of living communities. They forgot that the only legitimate purpose of an economy is to support households in making a living—not corporations in making a killing.”
― David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World