Quotes About Economics

“[Home Economics Textbook from 1950]: "Prepare yourself. Take fifteen minutes to rest so you'll look refreshed when hubby comes home from work. Touch up makeup and put a ribbon in your hair. He's just been with work-weary people. Be a little gay. His boring day needs a lift."
Mama Celia: "Get knee-walking drunk. You've earned it. You've been with four kids under the age of seven all day. Put a ribbon in your nose and try to pull it out of your mouth. You're wasted, after all. Announce you're gay. The look on his face will give you a lift.”

— Celia Rivenbark

“If economics were only about profit maximization, it would be just another name for business administration. It is a social discipline, and society has other means of cost accounting besides market prices.”

— Dani Rodrik

“The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to contribute.”

— Dani Rodrik

“In the past few years, genetics have confirmed that the hunter-gatherers were not overwhelmed by the new wave of sedentary farmers, and that the first agricultural revolution spread well in advance of its first users, by contact and trade in ideas. Nice to see science catching up with economics and military history. Any economist could tell you technology spreads beyond its first adopters, even if they stay at home. And any military historian could tell you that, in a contest between people who hunt and kill aurochs and farmers armed with hoes, the smart money is on the hunters.”

— Markham Shaw Pyle

“How can ya think 'bout economics feelin' like . . . this?" "Not many people can," Ron said. "That's the Lll's protection.”

— Nalo Hopkinson

“I like Mitt Romney as a person. I think he's a dignified person. But I have no common ground on economics. He doesn't worry about the Federal Reserve. He doesn't worry about foreign policy. He doesn't talk about civil liberties, so I would have a hard time to expect him to ever invite me to campaign with him.”

— Ron Paul

“Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.”

— Eugene Fama

“The whole industry is so screwed up by economics. It's disgusting to me.”

— Armand Assante

“Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.”

— Kurt Bills

“In a paper called 'The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives,' I showed that there were not any mechanisms that would always both produce a stable matching and make it completely safe for all firms and workers to reveal their true preferences.”

— Alvin E. Roth

“But what I really believe is education is a key to pretty much everything - prosperity, economics, peace, stability.”

— Greg Mortenson

“My folks are economists and have taught economics and social science so I grew up with those kind of conversations around the dinner table.”

— Seth Gordon

“As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?”

— Michael Porter

“I have a dream, there will be critical point in the future,
where economics and technology will negate each other.”

— Toba Beta

“Home economics - kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn't happen anymore.”

— Michael Moss

“The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people's taxes that stimulates the economy and lowers the unemployment rate, is a very widely accepted idea. It's in every economics textbook, that's what we teach our undergraduates, and I certainly try to teach them the truth.”

— Christina Romer

“Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.”

— Thomas Piketty

“Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical "evidence" (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.”

— Dave Hickey

“The world expects India to be one of the leaders in solving the problems of politics and economics. India sits at the high table in most major multilateral deliberations. What India says is heard with attention and seriousness.”

— N. R. Narayana Murthy

“Don't let anybody tell you it's corporations and businesses create jobs. You know that old theory, 'trickle-down economics.' That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”

— Hillary Clinton

“Obama is a fine, very impressive person. He really is. Unfortunately, everything that he is doing in economics is exactly wrong. He is a crappy president.”

— Arthur Laffer

“Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity.”

— Paul Ryan

“I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. Tom Hazlett, a good friend who is an esteemed and highly regarded professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.”

— Dennis Prager

“When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it - for the challenge of its mysteries.”

— Edmund Phelps

“I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.”

— Eric Maskin

“The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out ... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.”

— Frances O'Grady

“The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film - whether it's history, psychology, economics, or architecture - so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn't going to help you unless you have something to say.”

— George Lucas

“One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption-rational utility maximization-that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists.”

— Lester Thurow

“Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn't written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn't in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised ... Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.”

— Lincoln Steffens

“She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the economists by their distraught look and slightly glazed-looking eyes.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Politics don't exist, actually. It's just a cheap business. Economics is what makes politics.”

— Eugene Hutz

“The truth is that climate alarmism has become the most expensive, and the most wasteful, project in the history of the world. It is junk economics built on junk science. It amounts to no more than hot air, yet it looks set to beggar our grandchildren.”

— Roger Helmer

“In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.”

— Ronald Coase

“I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public and private spheres connect. I wanted to show readers that the larger politics of war and economics and U.S. foreign policy are inextricably bound to the supposedly trivial details of our everyday lives.”

— Annia Ciezadlo

“The realizations of anarchist ideas and practices are like sociopolitical ecosystems. Local versions resemble each other, but they are endlessly adaptive and everywhere different to meet their needs in their environments. Anarchism can be adapted to meet the culture, economics, ecology, and politics of various people or communities. That's the beauty of it.”

— Scott Crow

“It's great to be with you gun-toting, 10ther, pro-life, Austrian-economics, home-schooling, redoubt-living, Constitutionalist patriots this evening. I think that covers the SPLC's list.”

— Matt Shea

“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.”

— Hazel Henderson

“At its heart, this book touches on a mystery of economics: what exactly is happening in our world, and why does it often work so well? As the authors show, apparently messy systems - such as untidy desks - actually exhibit a high degree of order: the piles of paper are close to hand, and the most important documents tend to make their way to the top while un-needed ones sink to the bottom. If the mess works, why mess with it?”

— Nicholas Blincoe

“We do not need to understand economics in order to experience the benefits of freedom of exchange and production. But we may very well need to understand economics in order to sustain and maintain the institutional framework that enables us to realize the benefits that flow from freedom of exchange and production.”

— Peter Boettke

“If I could direct it [films] I would be very happy. But the economics of business don't always allow you to do what you want.”

— Lee Van Cleef

“We can't build a safer world with honorable intentions and good will alone. Achieving the fundamental goals our nation seeks in world affairs - peace, human rights, economics progress national independence and international stability - means supporting our friends and defending our interests.”

— Ronald Reagan

“The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more - ever more.
The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the Earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops.”

— Donella Meadows

“If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.”

— Gregory Bateson

“You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines, and use them routinely - all of them, not just a few. Most people are trained in one model - economics, for example - and try to solve all problems in one way. You know the old saying: to the man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. This is a dumb way of handling problems.”

— Charlie Munger

“As the science of economics ... exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“Steps toward a rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states create a process that turns economics into the moving force that shapes the regional relations instead of nationalist interests that were dominant in the past.”

— Yitzhak Rabin

“Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness ... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding