5,882 quotes found
“Figure 12-6 pulls together in a simplified way the main elements of income determination. Without saving and investment, there would be a circular flow of income between business and the public: ab...”
“I think the acceptance of mathematical expectation of utility or its arithmetic mean was an unthinking carryover from the mathematical theory of the law of large numbers as applied to asymptotic pr...”
“Needless to say, the partial equilibrium assumptions involved in the domestic demand schedules and the neglect of aggregative relations constitute a serious defect of such a model except as a rough...”
“Dynamic process analysis also liberates economists from the necessity of having separate theories of the turning-points in addition to theories of cumulative upward and downward swings. Even a simp...”
“Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.”
“Marx did do original work in analyzing patterns of circular inter-dependency among industries. Such work gains few converts and is not very helpful in promoting revolution or counterreactions. But ...”
“Remember that our goal is not the abolition of all business cycles--even if that were feasible, it might not be desirable. Instead we aim to wopie out persistent slump or unsought inflation. If onl...”
“As old problems are conquered, we expect to turn up new problems. A discipline lives on its unsolvved problems; and so, for better or worse, economics is likely to be a lively subject for as many y...”
“Perhaps all we can expect of a public body, charged with grave responsibilities, is that it should in its public utterances make out cases stronger than it really believes in. Or perhaps, because i...”
“In the absence of perfect certainty, the futures prices needed for making the requisite wealth-like comparisons are simply unavailable. So it would be difficult to make operational the theorist’s d...”
“Economic theory is a mistress of even too tempting grace.”
“In every actuarial situation of mathematical probability, no matter how large the numbers in the sample, we are left with a finite sample: in the appropriate limit law of probability there will nec...”
“I will tell you a secret. Economists are supposed to be dry-as-dust, dismal fellows. This is quite wrong, the reverse of the truth. Scratch a hard-boiled economist of the libertarian persuasion and...”
“And make no mistake about it: Smith was right. Most of the interventions into economic life by the State were then harmful both to prosperity and freedom. What Smith said needed to be said. In fact...”
“Complete freedom is not definable once two wills exist in the same interdependent universe. We can sometimes find two situations in which Choice A is more free than Choice B in apparently every res...”
“Libertarians fail to realize that the price system is, and ought to be, a method of coercion. Nature is not so bountiful as to give each of us all the goods he desires. We have, by the nature of th...”
“Before Rousseau, people made the mistake of treating children as merely adults shrunk small. The Bible and Freud go farther and tell us that an adult is merely a child grown large. Man is imperfect...”
“Carry the notion of the individual to its limit and you get a monstrosity, just as you do if you carry the notion of a group to its limit.”
“The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.”
“For better or worse, the picture album whose pages I have been turning is that of the main stream of international economics. Many of its advances lie in what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn w...”
