Economic Misconceptions Quotes

People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.

Our discussions of the economy may sometimes ring in the ears of the public with more certainty than is appropriate.

To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.

People who think a tax boost will cure inflation are the same ones who believe another drink will cure a hangover.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated.

In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.

Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to "prove" that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.

The public hasn't learned that businesses don't pay taxes: only people do. They're confused, and this makes an adviser's job all the harder.

It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.

Though the poorest Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, many relatively wealthy people voted for Trump and generally it's a mistake to think that economics explains Trump. The US is doing relatively well, the economy has significantly recovered since 2008, unemployment rates are low. I would say rather that his appeal to the working class was cultural: "I'll bring back the kinds of jobs your fathers had," and, by implication, the whiter, simpler post-war world when America had no real economic competition.

New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez relies on a lot of economic ignorance to get you to believe what's not true could be true.

Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity.

You were probably educated in the conventional economic theories of your period which were magnificent and most ingenious, but--if you will pardon my saying so--all wrong.

It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.