“We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.”
“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.”
“First rule of Economics 101: our desires are insatiable. Second rule: we can stomach only three Big Macs at a time.”
“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”
“It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.”
“Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.”
“If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.”
“The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.”
“Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.”
“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.”
“But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”
“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.”
“Commerce is one of the daughters of Fortune, inconsistent and deceitful as her mother. she chooses her residence where she is least expected, and shifts her home when in appearance she seems firmly settled.”
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
“There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of mathematics.”
“For the past 15 years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are...businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but -- ominously -- fewer and fewer people laugh at it.”
“The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.”
“Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?”
“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems -- the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.”
“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ''uneconomic'' you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.”
“The notion that big business and big labor and big government can sit down around a table somewhere and work out the direction of the American economy is at complete variance with the reality of where the American economy is headed. I mean, it's like dinosaurs gathering to talk about the evolution of a new generation of mammals.”
“Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.”
“Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in , say, physics, mathematics, or medicine -- the special pleading of selfish interests.”
“In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.”
“According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.”