Joseph Rago Quotes

Supply creates its own demand

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.

We are all Keynesians now.

Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

The opinions that the price of commodities depends solely on the proportion of supply and demand, or demand to supply, has become almost an axiom in political economy, and has been the source of much error.

If strong economic conditions can partially reverse supply-side damage after it has occurred, then policymakers may want to aim at being more accommodative during recoveries than would be called for under the traditional view that supply is largely independent of demand.

The human capital of most macroeconomists, heavily invested in demand management, was wiped out by the policy failures of the 1970s.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

I'm happy to say I am a Harrison-Kreps-Keynesian.

Recent research suggests that New Deal programs may actually have had their primary impact on the economy by influencing consumer and business expectations of future growth and inflation.

I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.

Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.

We have learned that the various schools of [economic] thought all have important elements of truth in them. But none of them is by itself a sufficient explanation of what goes on in the economy.

Supply and demand don’t work on a legislative schedule.

Until Keynes, politicians had not needed economists for help in running the country any more than they had needed astronomers. But Keynes made them indispensible.

What a surprise. Economists disagree.

Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.

Weirdly enough, I'm a macroeconomics enthusiast.

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

I had never taken any economics. I literally didn't know what it was. I thought it was just about the study of money.

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.

In general it may be said that demand is quite as necessary to the increase of capital as the increase of capital is to demand.