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Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors. -- James Buchan
Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom. -- Joseph Stiglitz
Economists have much to be humble about. -- Paul Samuelson
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much. -- Paul Krugman
Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them. -- Kenneth E. Boulding
Economists who speak the English tongue are strangely intimidated by mathematical symbols. -- Al Nichol
Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor. -- Peter Drucker
Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology. -- Carl Safina
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do. -- Daniel Kahneman
Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory. -- Ronald Reagan
Economists say the inability to delay gratification is a primary predictor of economic failure in life. -- Brian Tracy
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes! -- Peter Drucker
Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits. -- Kenneth E. Boulding
Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species -- Garrett Hardin
Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one. -- Emily Oster
Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow. -- Rebecca West
Economists must always be prepared for surprises: they find many in trying to find order in the universe of their study. -- Simon Kuznets
Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it. -- William Easterly
Economists can never be free of from difficulties unless they will distinguish between a theory and the application of a theory. -- William Stanley Jevons
Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop. -- Herbert Stein
Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor. -- Edgar Fiedler
Economists largely confine themselves to three key factors - capital, labor and productivity - when explaining how and why a country grows. -- Ben Miles
Economists are behavioural psychologists, but they think more is better; they want to make everyone richer. They should pause. More's not necessarily better -- David Hemenway
Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply. -- Edmund Phelps
Economists are always recommending the elimination of this or that market imperfection ... no astrophysicist recommends the elimination of planets that he does not like. -- Lester Thurow
Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't. -- Robert Orben
Economists' unanimity that bad business is ahead is the most reassuring news possible. It's very unlikely that this will be the one time they're right. -- Malcolm Forbes
Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next). -- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth. -- Robert Heilbroner
Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college. -- Bill Vaughan
Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology. -- Nathan Myhrvold
The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be. -- B. W. Powe
Economists got away from really questioning how the world works, how decisions actually got made. If something doesn't conform to neoclassical models ... people are not somehow behaving themselves properly. -- W. Brian Arthur
Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above. -- Milton Friedman
Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society. -- Rowan Williams
Economists believe there are three reasons why the Russian economy is doing so poorly. One, economic sanctions are working. Number two, low-price oil. And number three, Lindsay Lohan has quit drinking vodka. -- David Letterman
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all. -- John Maynard Keynes
Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism. -- Tyler Cowen
With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue. -- Nassau William Senior
Economists sometimes do try to reduce behavior to law-like predictability. But people respond differently to different primes, to different contexts even from one moment to the next. We possess multiple selves that are aroused by different circumstances. -- David Brooks
Economists agree about economics - and that's a science - and they disagree about economic policy because that's a value judgment... I've had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree. -- Franco Modigliani
"Murphys law of economic policy": Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently. -- Alan Blinder
Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago persuasively argue that one of the biggest reasons for the nation's current obesity epidemic is that food is now so much cheaper and easier to prepare. -- Charles Duhigg
[Economists' advice] is something like patent medicine - people know it is largely manufactured by quacks and that a good percentage of the time it won't work, but they continue to buy the brand whose flavor they like. -- Barbara Bergmann
Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they'll all turn over together. -- Paul Samuelson
People who are rich find it hard to understand the behavior of poor people. Economists are no exception, for they, too, find it difficult to comprehend the preferences and scarcity constraints that determine the choices that poor people make. -- Theodore Schultz
Engineers do engineering, i.e. they build bridges. So engineering needs engineers. The economy does NOT need economists. Economists do not make economy, but they try it and that is why we have so much problems with some financial models. -- Steve Keen
Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost. -- Vivienne Westwood
Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability. -- Derek Bok
Economists typically think that your happiness goes up as you get more money, but the more you have, the less each additional dollar matters. This means that you value money most in times when you have less income and more expenses. -- Emily Oster
Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories. -- Robert J. Shiller
This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc. -- Vladimir Lenin
Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing. -- Thomas Piketty
Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor ... -- Andrew Lo
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again. -- John Maynard Keynes
Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can. You don't expect dentists to be able to forecast how many teeth you'll have when you're 80. You expect them to give good advice and fix problems. -- Tim Harford
Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science. -- Thomas Piketty
Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing. -- Mark Blaug
Everything is possible, from angels to demons to economists and politicians. -- Paulo Coelho
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure. -- Margaret Thatcher
Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard. -- Edgar Fiedler
I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good. -- Rupert Murdoch
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. -- John Maynard Keynes
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. -- Edmund Burke
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists. -- Noam Chomsky
Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become. -- Ha-Joon Chang
With more than 67 percent of the Nation's freight moving on highways, economists believe that our ability to compete internationally is tied to the quality of our infrastructure. -- Dennis Hastert
The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution. -- Jeff Goodell
We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people. -- Cornel West
For me, geopolitical issues are becoming more important, because how can you understand economy if you don't understand geopolitics? People think economists just deal with spreadsheets and charts. That's a narrow-minded caricature. -- Nouriel Roubini
People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them. -- Ha-Joon Chang
The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished. -- James Buchan
Although most Americans apparently loathe inflation, Yale economists have argued that a little inflation may be necessary to grease the wheels of the labor market and enable efficiency-enhancing changes in relative pay to occur without requiring nominal wage cuts by workers. -- Janet Yellen
We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools. -- Alison Gopnik
As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems. -- Atul Gawande
I may be only a fish and chip shop lady, but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping. -- Pauline Hanson
How is it that, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still some who would deny the dangers of climate change? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are not scientific, and it is remarkable how many economists, lawyers, journalists and politicians set themselves up as experts on the science. -- Nicholas Stern
There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.' -- Muhammad Yunus
Some struggle with medical issues - like insomnia - that make sleep hard. But for many of us, the quantity and quality of sleep come down to a matter of choice. Still, only a few enterprising economists have looked closely at this, and generally, those have assumed that we choose our hours of sleep optimally. -- Sendhil Mullainathan
Even as I pursued a doctorate in the history of ideas in my native Denmark, I realized I had neither the encyclopedic training nor the passion for cool logic - not to mention the nerve - to follow in the footsteps of classical liberal philosophers and economists such as Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. -- Anne Fortier
Beware of economists who hide assumptions. -- Anat R. Admati
People confuse economists and economic policy. -- Franco Modigliani
Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches. -- Aldo Leopold
Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments? -- Yasheng Huang
Economics is too important to leave to the economists. -- Steve Keen
English majors understand human nature better than economists do. -- Jane Smiley
When better business decisions are made, economists won't make them. -- Herbert V. Prochnow
The economists will have to revise their theories of value. -- Albert Einstein
I'm not going to put my lot in with economists. -- Hillary Clinton
If economists did not concern themselves with economic efficiency, nobody would. -- Dennis Holme Robertson
People today dont become economists to make the world a better place. -- Tim Harford
People today don't become economists to make the world a better place. -- Tim Harford
If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits. -- John Ralston Saul
Why did God invent economists? To make weathermen feel good about themselves. -- David I. Rozenberg
You know and I know and economists know that trickle-down economics doesn't work. -- Dannel Malloy
Percentages! Those are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your identity. -- Mary E. Pearson
The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists. -- Joan Robinson
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. -- George Bernard Shaw
Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything. -- Edward Abbey
All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. -- George Stigler
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are." -- Nate Silver
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are. -- Nate Silver
Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other. -- Harry S. Truman
There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that. -- Tim Harford
Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.. -- Edgar Fiedler
Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people. -- Richard Thaler
One speaks with great respect of economists, if only because they represent such a variety of opinions. -- Robert Menzies
All economists should be locked up until they admit that they don't know what they're talking about. -- Andy Rooney
Our biggest challenge is to eliminate the popular perception that economists don't have anything useful to say. -- Mark Zandi
If economists were good at business, they would be rich men instead of advisers to rich men. -- Kirk Kerkorian
The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it. -- Andy Hargreaves
In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
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I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together. -- Friedrich Engels
The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. -- Paul Krugman

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