Economics
Scott Adams - When one person doesn't understand economics, we call it ignorance. When millions don't, we call it a political movement.
Dan Ariely - An economist is a man with an irrational passion for dispassionate rationality.
Michel Audiard (in Les Tontons flingueurs, 1963) - Le prix s'oublie, la qualité reste.
Yoram Bauman - The only reason we [economists] don’t sell our children is that we think they’ll be worth more later.
"Ben" (comment on Dani Rodrik's blog) - I work in development, and I would encourage teaching your students how to think like economists. To me this mainly consists of four things:
1. Thinking on the margins
2. Always asking what the incentives are
3. Assessing risks rationally
4. Looking for tradeoffs and never expecting $20 bills to be lying on the sidewalk
For students, learning how to think this way is only weakly correlated with learning technical material - you don't get this stuff by learning how to take first order conditions or manipulate matrices. In fact, I've met several PhD economists who aren't very good at thinking like economists. Similarly I've met people with no economics background at all who can think like economists very well.
In terms of how to teach this intuition in a curriculum, my suggestion would be to beat your students over the head with the simple lessons of economic theory, and then have them practice bringing those lessons to bear on real world problems. Learning complicated economic theory is far less important than having a good intuition for applying simple economic theory to complicated situations.
Frank Borman - Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.
Attributed to Warren Buffet - Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
Edmund Burke (1790) - The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Paul Collier - Growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.
James Duesenberry (1960) - Economics is all about how people make choices; sociology is all about how they don't have any choices to make.
Jules Dupuit (in De l'influence des péages sur l'utilité des voies de communication, 1849) - It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage that some company or other has open carriages... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fee from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich. French original: Ce n'est pas à cause de quelques milliers de francs qu'il serait nécessaire de dépenser pour couvrir les wagons de 3e classe ou pour en rembourrer les banquettes, que telle compagnie a des wagons découverts et des banquettes de bois... Son but est d'empêcher le voyageur qui peut payer le wagon de 2e classe d'aller dans celui de troisième. On frappe sur le pauvre, non pas qu'on ait envie de le faire souffrir personnellement, mais pour faire peur au riche.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1860) - The first wealth is health.
Jeffrey Friedman - In a complex world where nobody really knows what will work until it is tried, competition is the only way that people’s endless capacity for error can be checked, and loss is the regrettable but inescapable result.
Nathaniel Friedman - Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
Christopher Giles - Economic orthodoxy is simply the accumulated knowledge and experience of what tends to work best.
Roger Gould (in Collision of wills, 2003) - The default assumption in many natural sciences is that until a potential factor has been shown to be important, it is assumed not to be. In the human sciences, the contrary holds: one must demonstrate that a factor is not relevant before disregarding it.
Zvi Griliches - The cost of computing has dropped exponentially, but the cost of thinking is what it always was. That is why we see so many articles with so many regressions and so little thought.
Tim Hartford - In a complex world, the scarcest resource is omniscience.
Friedrich Hayek - The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
John Hicks - The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life.
Lyndon Johnson - Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It may seem hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.
John Maynard Keynes (letter to Roy Harrod, July 1938) - Economics is the science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.
Paul Krugman - Economics is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good system most of the time, though not always — with no special moral significance. The rich don’t necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don’t deserve their poverty; nonetheless, we accept a system with considerable inequality because systems without any inequality don’t work.
Paul Krugman - Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long-run it’s almost everything.
Paul Krugman (1987) - If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade'.
Latin for economists - Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Latin for economists - Ceteris paribus sic stantibus.
David Leonhardt - Economic truths may not rise to the level of two plus two equals four, but they are not so different from the knowledge that the earth is round or that smoking causes cancer. The earth is not perfectly round, of course. Some smokers will never get cancer, while most cancer is not caused by smoking. Yet in the ways that matter most, the earth is still round, and smoking does cause cancer. Both of these facts are illustrative in another way, too: seemingly smart people spent decades denying them.
Steven Levitt - Morality represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents the way it actually does work.
Assar Lindbeck (in The Political Economy of the New Left : An Outsider's View, 1971) - Next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities.
Deirdre McCloskey - We can boil economic history down to a simple story: “Once upon a time we were all poor, then capitalism flourished, and now as a result we’re rich.”
Steven Radelet (in The Great Surge, 2015) - In 1976, Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.
Raghuram Rajan - Most academics are really reluctant to take part in the public dialog, because the public dialog requires you to have an opinion about things you can’t really be sure about. They fear talking about things where everything is not neatly nailed in a model. They stay away and let the charlatans occupy the high ground.
Naval Ravikant (2020) - Evolution works by mutation and selection. Innovation works by trial and error. Science works by conjecture and criticism. Free markets work by entrepreneurship and risk. All truth-seeking systems work roughly the same way.
Jules Renard (in Journal, 10 septembre 1892) - La peur de l'ennui est la seule excuse du travail.
Lionel Robbins (in An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1932) - Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.
Lionel Robbins (in An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1932) - Value is a relationship, not a measurment. (…) It follows that the addition of prices or incomes to form social aggregates is an operation with a very limited meaning.
Joan Robinson (in Economic Philosophy, 1962) - The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
Joan Robinson on Korea (1977) - Obviously, sooner or later the country must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism.
Joan Robinson (in Contributions to Modern Economics, 1978) - The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists.
Dani Rodrik - Neoclassical economics teaches you how to think, not what to think. So it has always been a bit difficult for me to understand the critique that neoclassical economics is necessarily driven by ideology or leads to foregone conclusions. Just as it puzzles me why so many neoclassical economists are ready to jettison what they teach in the classroom and espouse simplistic rules of thumb on policy.
Hans Rosling - Too much Word, too little Excel.
Murray Rothbard - It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
Russian saying - Free cheese can be found only in mousetraps.
Carl Sagan - If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Paul Samuelson - That [comparative advantage] is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.
William Shakespeare (in The Merchant of Venice, III-5) - In converting Jews to Christians you raise the price of pork.
George Bernard Shaw (in The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906) - All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
Georg Simmel (in Philosophie des Geldes, 1900) - Exchange is one of the purest and most primitive form of human socialization; it creates a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals.
Adam Smith (in The Wealth of Nations, 1776) - Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.
Noah Smith (2016 12) - Unlike “physicist” or “biologist,” all you have to do in order to be considered an “economist” is to declare yourself one.
Thomas Sowell (in Is Reality Optional? and Other Essays, 1993) - The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Thomas Sowell - One of the sure signs of full employment is bad service.
Herbert Stein - If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. ("Stein's Law")
George Stigler (in The Theory of Economic Regulation, 1971) - Regulation may be actively sought by an industry, or it may be thrust upon it. A central thesis of this paper is that, as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.
Traditional - If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion
Traditional - An economist and friends on a golf course get stuck behind a group helping a blind man playing golf. Everyone marvels at this extraordinary feat and at the level of cooperation needed, except the economist who says: “This is so inefficient! He ought to be playing at night.”
Voltaire (in Candide) - Le travail éloigne de nous trois grands maux, l’ennui, le vice, et le besoin.
Voltaire (in Candide) - L’homme n’est pas né pour le repos.
Charles Wheelan - Economics is like gravity: ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.
Oscar Wilde (in Lady Windemere's Fan) - What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Sheikh Yamani (June 2000 interview with The Daily Telegraph) - Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.
Yiddish proverb - When you sow money, you reap fools (original: Az me zait gelt, vaksen naronim).
