Economic policy

Alphonse Allais - Il faut demander plus à l'impôt et moins au contribuable.

Peter Thomas Bauer - Aid is the process by which the poor in rich countries subsidize the rich in poor countries.

Ben S. Bernanke (May 2013) - Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

Ben S. Bernanke - Monetary policy is 98% talk and 2% action.

Alan Blinder (in Hard Heads, Soft Hearts) - Murphy's Law of economic policy: economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most.

Kenneth Boulding - There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

Jean-Louis Bourlanges - La guerre est la façon la plus bête de dépenser de l’argent.

Bill Clinton (21/9/2010) - Do you know how many political and economic decisions are made in this world by people who don't know what in the living daylights they are talking about?

Paul Collier (in The Bottom Billion) - The key obstacle to reforming aid is public opinion. The constituency for aid is suspicious of growth, and the constituency for growth is suspicious of aid.

Angus Deaton - If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries...is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it.

John Gall (in Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, 1975) - A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. ("Gall's Law")

Charles Goodhardt (1975) - Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. ("Goodhardt's Law")

Garrett Hardin (interviewed in The New York Times, 1987) - There’s nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking compassionate person.

Tim Harford - In a complex economy, omniscience is the scarcest resource of all.

Joseph Heath - Inflation provides an elegant solution to a number of economic problems caused by our irrational aversion to losses.

David Hume - Either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation.

William McChesney Martin (speech given on October 19, 1955) - The Federal Reserve (...) is in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau - La dette publique fut le germe de la liberté. Elle a détruit le roi et l'absolutisme. Prenons garde qu'en continuant à vivre, elle ne détruise la Nation et nous reprenne la liberté qu'elle nous a donnée.

Ronald Reagan - The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it; and if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Gregory Mankiw - Charles L. Schultze, chief economist for former President Jimmy Carter, once proposed a simple test for telling a conservative economist from a liberal one. Ask each to fill in the blanks in this sentence with the words “long” and “short”: “Take care of the ____ run and the ____ run will take care of itself.”

George Bernard Shaw - Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

Lawrence Summers (1988) - Liberals think [VAT] is regressive and conservatives think it’s a money machine.

Alex Tabarrok - The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.

Traditional - If giving people spades to dig up roads is a desirable form of job-creation, it would be even better to give them spoons.

Traditional (attested 1937) - Politicians use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts, for support rather than for illumination.

Harry Truman - What this country needs is a bunch of one-armed economists.