Economic Thinking Quotes

Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota?

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

Money is very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? Now, you would expect people to have an answer. But people were kind of shocked by the question. They never thought about it before. So, the most we got was people said, "Well, if I can't buy this Toyota, if I buy this Toyota, I can't buy a Honda." What is this thing? What is this value of price? Very hard to think about it.

The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggests that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: Si monumentum requires, circumspice.

It's important for market participants to have a sense of how we think about the economy and the appropriate path of policy, to look at incoming data, and to form their own judgments as to whether or not changes in policy would be appropriate.

I think it is just stupid economics for a government to approach economic management from a strand of thinking regarding unions as enemies.

The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math.

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.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

I'm an activist and I come from a very socialist background. For me, my thinking was formed by great thought leaders. And wealth preserving wasn't part of my thinking.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.

Poor decision making in government; the tragedy of short-term economic thinking; our national housing crisis: these are real 21st Century problems for our country. They are problems that can only be solved by genuinely fearless thinking about our natural environment.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economists sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups

I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.

I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.

We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good.

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

To start with, anybody who would like the world to be a better place should be able to think like an economist.

Now, part of the problem with the climate debate is that so much gas board language like that [the IPCC's language] has been used and there's been too little plain, scientific, and economic thinking. And so, the entire political class has been captured by an idea, which as always with the best bad ideas has a grain of truth in it, which is then exaggerated beyond all reason. This has happened before - one thinks of the Dreyfus case, for instance.

That's the kind of thinking that our country needs. When we have a country that's doing so badly, that's being ripped off by every single country in the world, it's the kind of thinking that our country needs, because everybody, we have a trade deficit with all of the countries that we do business with, of almost $800 billion a year.

It's interesting to look at all the aspects where everyday Americans, many of whom are not college educated, are thinking deeply now about our economic structure.