Economic Error Quotes

To try to correct imbalances with trade restrictions is a grave error.

The one big strategic error - which was a political error and an economic error of grand proportions - was the prescription drug bill.

I think stimulus money is an absolute mistake.

The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing ‘money’ with ‘wealth’…Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning.

The cost of pension reforms has been perhaps the biggest error committed in the process of modernizing Bolivia's economy.

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.

To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.

The biggest public fallacy is that the market is always right. The market is nearly always wrong. I can assure you of that.