Policy Recommendations Quotes

We shouldn't limit the idea of 'policy recommendations' to regulators. On the Internet, all of us are, in a sense, policymakers.

The Bush administration, they had two blue ribbon commissions about infrastructure finance that recommended a lot more money, and additionally the gas tax being increased. We couldn't get them to accept being able to move forward. Since President Obama's been in office, there has been, to be charitable, a lack of enthusiasm for raising the gas tax.

The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.

President’s usually do not want to hear an intelligence analyst’s doubts, preferring confidence (even when unwarranted) in one policy option.

I think we can make a contribution to their [Saudi Arabia] thinking as they decide how they should deal with the economic and social challenges that they are facing.

Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.

I think that there's been an unfortunate tendency for right wing think tanks to dominate these discussions. They often produce very shoddy studies and policy recommendations, which are nevertheless taken very seriously.

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

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.

I don't know who all of his advisers are, but I've seen some of the names and some of them are quite far to the right. And sometimes they might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought.

Asking Senator Fulbright's advice on foreign policy is like asking the Boston Strangler to massage your neck.