Economics Academic Quotes & Sayings

As I talk about strengths and weaknesses in academic economics, one interesting fact you are entitled to know is that I never took a course in economics. And with this striking lack of credentials, you may wonder why I have the chutzpah to be up here giving this talk. The answer is I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. — Charlie Munger

Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The field of 'economics and organization' is still young and needs support. I have been a chaired professor much of my academic life and know that such chairs are important for recruiting and retaining faculty. — Oliver E. Williamson

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Much of the story we have told falls outside the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and their respective histories. Contemporary economics focuses on issues of efficiency in allocation, political science on institutions of governmental power, political theory on questions of justice, sociology on social groups as defined by interactions outside the market. Some division of intellectual labor is of course productive, and the conceptual lenses that each discipline brings to bear may genuinely help us see an aspect of reality that would otherwise remain undetected. Yet those concerned with the moral implications and ramifications of the market
as any self-critical person in modern society ought to be
get a very skewed picture when they view it through only one of these lenses. Seeing the market with the added perspectives offered by the thinkers treated here provides us with a richer and more rounded view. — Jerry Z. Muller

I have concluded that most PhD economists under appraise the power of the common-stock-based "wealth effect", under current extreme conditions.. "wealth effects" involve mathematical puzzles that are not nearly so well worked out as physics theories and never can be ... what has happened inJapan ... has shaken up academic economics, as it obviously should, creating strong worries about recession from "wealth effects" in reverse. — Charlie Munger

Trust is fine, but control is better. — Elfriede Jelinek

I've always loved doing research. I remember doing a research project on the Babylonian numeral system in the eighth grade and thinking, 'This is pretty awesome - is this really a job you can have?' This led me toward a career as an academic, although it took me until college to realise that economics was the right field. — Emily Oster

Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx. — Joan Robinson

A lot of guys in New York will only play with an edge. They find their groove and that's their groove. to me, once I do that, there's no point in playing anymore because it should always be a mystery. Depending on who you are playing with, there are hundreds of ways of playing. I think that a master can play all those different kinds of time. — Fred Hersch

You know what I like? I like classic stuff. I like 'The Andy Griffith Show' - the variety of characters was so amazing to me. — J. B. Smoove

And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The opposite of a glance ... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second. — James Elkins

academic literature. Major influences on my thinking include Douglass North, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on institutions; the pre-eminent economist of modern Africa, Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Plundered Planet; Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital; Andrei Shleifer and his numerous co-authors, who have pioneered an economic approach to the comparative study of legal systems; and Jim Robinson and Daron Acemoglu, whose book Why Nations Fail asks similar questions to the ones that interest me. — Niall Ferguson

To believe everything is to be an imbecile.
To deny everything is to be a fool. — Charles Nodier

Economists like to strike the pose of a scientist. I know, because I often do it myself. When I teach undergraduates, I very consciously describe the field of economics as a science, so no student would start the course thinking he was embarking on some squishy academic endeavor.'1 — Ha-Joon Chang

To look around at what you have accomplished in a day gives a man a good feeling. Too many men work on parts of things. Doing a job to completeness satisfies a man. — Richard Proenneke

Berkshire's whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form. And not one ounce of attention to the descendants of that idea, which came out of academic economics and went into corporate finance and morphed into such obscenities as the capital asset pricing model, which we also paid no attention to. I think you'd have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe that you could easily outperform the market by seven-percentage points per annum just by investing in high volatility stocks. — Charlie Munger

As far as rap goes, I grew up in Hollis, Queens, so early influences were people like Run DMC and LL Cool J. — Ja Rule

The eighteenth century discovery that, in an institutional framework that facilitates voluntary exchanges among individuals, this process generates results that might be evaluated positively, produced 'economics,' as an independent academic discipline or science. — James M. Buchanan

Friedmans influence reaches far beyond the academic community and the world of economics. Rather than lock himself in an ivory tower, he has joined the fray to fight for the survival of this great country of ours. — William E. Simon

I think I'm just really in love with women, and I love to see them looking incredibly, truly beautiful. I think every time a woman wears one of my dresses, you know, in a matter of speaking, I'm having a little love affair with her! — Prabal Gurung

Are you going to do it?" he asked. "Maybe," I said.
Don't 'maybe' me, baby. It's written all over you. I'd almost be willing to go along, you know. Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least."
I lit a cigarette, while I considered. — Roger Zelazny