The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
As economists have long noted, the puzzle is not that so few people vote, it's that so many do. After all, no individual's vote has ever tipped the balance in a presidential election.
Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Controlling for all the things that sociologists, economists, and political scientists say you should control for, we find that what drives one's views [most significantly] is race.
Percentages! Those are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your identity.
Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.
The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it.
Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college.
Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an "externality. " This absurd label means, in essence: we don't to keep track of this stuff so let's pretend it doesn't exist.
Economists have much to be humble about.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons. . . . Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous.
Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?
Economists who speak the English tongue are strangely intimidated by mathematical symbols.
Economists who studied in the '80s tend to have a pretty crude neoclassical view that's just about freeing up prices and markets, and then you'll get the growth and everybody benefits. And they'll just repeat that, because if you're a minister or a senior civil servant, you don't have time to read anything anymore. You get very fixed in your views.
Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.
As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is, so economists have long been mathematicians without being aware of the fact.
Economists typically think that your happiness goes up as you get more money, but the more you have, the less each additional dollar matters. This means that you value money most in times when you have less income and more expenses.
If you put two economists xin a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.
Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.