Quotes on Economics

Like the basic laws of physics, where action creates reaction, economic and political trends tend to develop their own countervailing pressures.

The important question is not whether conditions are good or bad, but whether they are changing for better or worse.

As all of us were taught, but most of us have long since forgotten, economic change occurs at the margin, where the action takes place.

Economic development or growth occurs in three different processes: in the increase of population, in the accumulation of capital, and in the technological progress which enables us to produce more things, better things, different things, or the same things more cheaply.

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.