Quotes on Economics

Over the long-term, big companies of America behave more like biology than they do anything else. In biology, all the individuals die and so do all the species. It’s just a question of time. And that’s pretty well what happens in the economy too.

One of the major differences between behavioral economics and standard economics is that, in standard economics, the individual agent is supposed to be driven or motivated by the utility of future wealth and discounted future wealth and present wealth. In behavioral economics, agents are supposed to be motivated by something else: gains and losses.

Deregulation only works when everybody is virtuous and flexible.

I've always said if you spend 13 minutes a year on economics, you've wasted 10 minutes.

The fabric of civilization today is woven of millions of threads. No spot in it is so strong that it will not feel some effect from a weakening at any point.

There are economic facts and there's economic predictions and economic predictions are a total waste.

Extrapolation is usually right, but not valuable, and predictions of deviation from trends are potentially profitable but rarely right. So far, macro-economic forecasting doesn't represent the path to superior investments.

I've listened to a lot of economic briefings, and I've had a lot of visits from economists, and I've never encountered one who was right consistently.

If you totally divorce economics from psychology, you've gone a long way toward divorcing it from reality.

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it’s going to kill you.