James Meade Quotes

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

I am not a politician but I have dedicated the biggest part of my professional life to economic policy both in Greece and Europe.

I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.

In my long life, I have known some great economists, but I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company.

My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book ('Saving the World?') on an unlikely topic - he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.

I'm a Ph.D. in economics, and so you analyze every situation uniquely because every international situation is unique.

My main interest, however, was in economics, not law.

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

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.

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.

In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.

I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.

Will the politicians of all countries one day understand that it is as useless to shake one's fist at economics as it was for Xerxes to flog the sea--that it is far better to set to work to study this new science, born within the last fifty years, which they have been foolish enough to ignore or never to learn?

I am a trained economist.

I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.

I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

First, I think the science of monetary economics has clearly gotten better.

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.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

Education is what you learn after you leave school.

If you have a traditional view of economics, you're probably thinking of Ben Bernanke making Fed policy, or the guys creating financial derivatives at Goldman Sachs.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.

I was initially very interested in public policy, but then after my masters at Harvard, I felt that it was important to get a better handle on the economics of it as well. I did my Ph.D. in macroeconomics, and my thesis - 'Why Is It That Some Countries Save And Others Not?' - was on savings.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.