Economic Models Quotes & Sayings

Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as 'property' were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models ... have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, ... the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities. — John Carroll

We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth. — Evo Morales

It might sound like I'm a dreamer, but economic models have reached their height of evolution. Technology has evolved. What hasn't evolved is mankind's spirituality; everything is from 3,000 years ago. With spirituality comes morals, a better way of thinking. — Damian Marley

Toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult. — Yanis Varoufakis

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well. — Mitch Kapor

The fight against capitalism has many aspects, particularly the distinctive economic models that concentrate the capital in few hands. — Evo Morales

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be. — B.W. Powe

It doesn't have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: 'Where can I get my next fix?' It doesn't learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible ... and then says: 'I want more'. Unfortunately we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict. — Naomi Klein

I have a lot of trouble understanding all the detail of finance and administration - but if you combine intellectual and professional capacity with a social conscience, you can change things: countries, structures, economic models, colonial states. — Evo Morales

Chevron, for example, has a decision-analysis group whose members facilitate decision-framing workshops; coordinate data gathering for analysis; build and refine economic and analytical models; help project managers and decision makers interpret analyses; point out when additional information and analysis would improve a decision; conduct an assessment of decision quality; and coach decision makers. — Harvard Business School Press

Health care is one-sixth of our economy. If the government can control that, they can control just about everything. We need to understand what is going on, because there are much more economic models that can be used to give us good health care than what we have now. — Ben Carson

As the systems theorist Fritjof Capra points out, humanity's social, political, economic, and environmental plights are all manifestations of a cultural crisis brought about by adherence to outdated conceptual models ... Under the reductionist paradigm, humans' concept of nature devolved from that of living organism to machine, and the predominant value system came to be based on the domination and control of nature rather than respect for and harmony with the natural world. — Alex Gerber Jr.

I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models. — Lars Peter Hansen

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse. — Matthew Specktor

In spite of our poverty and our economic dependence, we do not have to give in, neither because we are sometimes abandoned nor because of the wish of some nations to impose their economic or political models. — Omar Bongo

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In Craig Blomberg's survey of the Mosaic laws of gleaning, releasing, tithing, and the Jubilee, he concludes that the Biblical attitude toward wealth and possessions does not fit into any of the normal categories of democratic capitalism, or of traditional monarchial feudalism, or of state socialism. The rules for the use of land in the Biblical laws challenge all major contemporary economic models. They "suggest a sharp critique of 1) the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community."38 — Timothy Keller

This figuring-out step is crucial, since overly optimistic economic models have often assumed that demand and incentives are enough to stimulate the production of any product. Incentives work to motivate intermediaries and traders, but makers, who are the ones that provide the substance of what is traded, need more than an incentive to make something. They need to know how to do it. — Cesar Hidalgo

I think the tragedy of Barack Obama's presidency is that although a lot of people around the world really admire Barack Obama a lot, they don't admire the American political and economic model as much as they used to. — Peter Beinart

When economists base their models on their fantasies of an "economic man" motivated only by self-interest, they forget community
the all-important web of meaning we spin around each other
the inescapable context within which anything truly human has taken place. — Cacilda Jetha

Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners' obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models. — Robert Higgs

Capital investment in fixed assets that produce real goods is the actual driver of long term economic growth, and until slick financiers hijacked the country with 'new economy' mumbo-jumbo based on computer models and hype most Americans understood this. — Richard Karn

Unlike Hegel's progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically. — John Carroll

What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very sophisticated mathematic models that distinguish us from sociologists and historians. — Thomas Piketty

I remember Secretary of State [George] Shultz one day saying that America is an economic model for the world. I replied to him that America represents 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 30 percent of the world's energy. What if everyone in the world lives like Americans? Where do we get the energy for this standard of living? — Mikhail Gorbachev

So the need for another economic model is urgent, and if the climate justice movement can show that responding to climate change is the best chance for a more just economic system ... — Naomi Klein

Trans rights formation that mimics the models and strategies of the lesbian and gay rights framework is growing, and there are many significant strategy disagreements between those building that work and those doing racial and economic justice centered trans work. — Dean Spade

The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically. — Bruno Dumont

I could try to incorporate or reflect in my models what it is that an employee, manager, or entrepreneur does: to recognize that most are engaged in their work, form expectations and evolve beliefs, solve problems, and have ideas. Trying to put these people into economic models became my project. — Edmund Phelps

Modern economics is a set of formal models and equations purporting to fully determine human behaviour, at least in the economic realm. And there is no way that uncertainty can be compressed into determinate mathematical models. — Murray Rothbard

Prior to the early 1960s, economic theorists rarely constructed models customized to capture unique institutions or specific market characteristics. — George Akerlof

It is natural that the appearance of pollution should have taken by surprise an economic science which has delighted in playing around with all kinds of mechanistic models. Curiously, even after the event economics gives no signs of acknowledging the role of natural resources in the economic process. Economists still do not seem to realize that, since the product of the economic process is waste, waste is an inevitable result of that process and ceteris paribus increases in greater proportion than the intensity of economic activity. — Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

A place that breaks down national and cultural borders. A place that blurs the boundaries between generating and exchanging ideas. A place that has toppled regimes and created new economic models. A place that has radically changed the way we work, play, shop, socialize and otherwise participate in society. But above all, a place that is for everyone. — Jim Boulton

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models. — George Akerlof

A revolution is to bring on change and we're spiritual people trying to bring on spiritual change. It might sound like I'm a dreamer, but economic models have reached their height of evolution. Technology has evolved. What hasn't evolved is mankind's spirituality; everything is from 3,000 years ago. — Damian Marley

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France. — Robert H. Frank

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation. — Joseph Stiglitz

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon's founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old "gatekeepers" of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. "Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation," Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. "When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say 'that will never work!' And guess what - many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. — Brad Stone

I think ultimately Obama's ability to rebuild America's image in the world will depend less on his personal good will and more his ability to rebuild an American economic model that seems stable and humane and dynamic. — Peter Beinart

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The next industrial revolution is toward decentralized, autonomous, and resilient systems where individuals and communities control their own destinies. This requires a transformation of our economic model from privatized control to co-operative models of ownership, which the social technologies of the Internet can facilitate. — Russell Brand

In restating this basic Christian doctrine, Benedict argues that it is not only for Christians alone. Others may not share the Christian faith in God, but the Christian proclamation that hope comes from within the person- in the realm of faith and conscience - is for them too. It offers an important protection against stifling and occasionally brutal social systems built on false hopes that come from outside the person, founded on political idealogies, economic models and social theories. — Raymond J. De Souza

And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals. — Fredric Jameson

Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn't matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality. — Noam Chomsky

Turns out, people's brains are not nearly as powerful a motivator as our hearts. Facts, data, and economic models don't move people to courageous action the way that powerful stories can. — Annie Leonard

We are at this weird moment where there's an economic model that supports creativity. People are demanding something new and fresh. — Judd Apatow

I grew up with free television. Now, it wasn't free, there was these commercials, and so the economic model was driven through commercials and through advertising. — Nicholas Negroponte

In Stage I, divorces were not allowed, so men's [sexual] affairs did not put women's economic security in jeopardy; in Stage II, affairs could lead to divorce, so men's affairs did place women's economic security in jeopardy. We did not want political leaders who would be role models for behavior that would put women's economic security in jeopardy. — Warren Farrell

Many of the models in the literature are not general equilibrium models in my sense. Of those that are, most are intermediate in scope: broader than examples, but much narrower than the full general equilibrium model. They are narrower, not for carefully spelled out economic reasons, but for reasons of convenience. I don't know what to do with models like that, especially when the designer says he imposed restrictions to simplify the model or to make it more likely that conventional data will lead us to reject it. The full general equilibrium model is about as simple as a model can be: we need only a few equations to describe it, and each is easy to understand. The restrictions usually strike me as extreme. When we reject a restricted version of the general equilibrium model, we are not rejecting the general equilibrium model itself. So why bother "testing" the restricted version? If we reject it, we will just create another version. — Fischer Black

The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.

If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics. — Raymond Aron

Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption. — Anonymous