Economic Research Quotes

The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers.

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.

After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.

For centuries, economic thinkers, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, have tried to identify the elusive formula that makes some countries more prosperous and successful than others. My curiosity about this topic spurred me, as a young professor of economics in the late 1970s, to research new ways of measuring national competitiveness.

The Nobel Prize is not very important for the winners - they are usually pretty successful people already. But it is valuable as a way of drawing the public's attention to important work in economics.

An economist is someone who knows all the answers to last years' questions.

Careful economic research has shown public-sector workers receive a level of compensation, pension benefits, and retiree health coverage in excess of what comparable workers in the private sector enjoy. In some instances, the total premium can be 30 percent or higher.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

Becoming an economist was not a childhood dream of mine.

In my early days, I wrote my dissertation for MIT at the London School of Economics, really under James Meade, but my dissertation was five chapters on the theory of capital movement, but it didn't mention money.

The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.

There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.

The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do.

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

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

With the variety of fields within economics, broadly conceived and the increasing specialization of scholarly world, the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize honors not only the individual scholar but, implicitly, also a special field or a distinctive method.

Sometimes the statistics themselves, the means by which we perceive the economic universe, are unreliable.

The whole intention of empirical economics is to force theory down to Earth.

I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

No one has developed a magic formula for how to make countries grow, though economic researchers have identified a number of poisons. Corruption, overweening government intervention, and mountains of debt are contraindicated for countries attempting to develop.

With 5% of the world’s population, the United States employs about a third of all the research and development workers in the world.

It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.