Economic Debate Quotes

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

There's always a tension between those who would like to garner wealth, and they contribute a lot to society. There's also those who say, 'I believe in the common good. I want that to be enlarged.' They contribute a lot to society. The tension, the debate, between these two views is extremely important to our progress.

Let there be no mistake, Sen Sanders, his campaign and the vigorous debate that we've had about how to raise incomes, how to reduce inequality, increase upward mobility, has been very good for the Democratic Party and for America.

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.

If all the economists in the world would be laid end to end, they would still point in different directions.

What nobody wants to discuss is whether or not the black-and-white argument about trade - you're either a free trader or you're a protectionist - is the right one. It's the old 19th century argument.

Critics of 'economic sciences' sometimes refer to the development of a 'pseudoscience' of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show.

Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.

These days, however, the main problem comes from the right - from conservatives who, unlike most economists, really do think that the free market is always right - to such an extent that they refuse to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it seems to suggest a justification for government action.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

The arguments for protection are more easily made attractive than those for free trade.

Free trade is opposed by most people who call themselves “free traders”.

I think the free-enterprise system has been great for society. That doesn't mean it's completely perfect. And also, when people say capitalism, I'm not really sure what they mean.

In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a "free" economy.

In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view.

We have professional economists who can defend any viewpoint with statistics and they do that everywhere in the world.

This is the debate we have every time we talk about the minimum wage, that if we raise it even 50 cents, that it means employers are just going to shut down. It's not true.

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it's a period of close to global stagnation.

I want to make it clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that fiat money, once established on the ruins of gold, cannot then continue indefinitely on its own.

The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

I have never said I was against raising the minimum wage.

It is a [disputed] question, whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie [gold and silver coin], is a good or an evil I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin.

If economists were to wait for careful studies before offering opinions about policy, we would never have anything timely to say.

Don't liberal Democrats ever learn economic principles, or does their class warfare trump all else?