Quotes

[Economics is ] sad, desolate and, indeed, rather abject and distressing; what we might call, by way of eminence, the sad science Thomas Carlyle (1849)

He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing Oscar Wilde (Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1890)

[Banker Saccard] doesn’t love money like a miser, doesn’t want to hoard it, but wants to make it flow like a spring, from everywhere. Emile Zola (The Money, 1891)

Behind every great fortune is a great crime Honorè de Balzac (Le Perè Goriot, 1834)

Schifissima cosa è il topo; but in the siege of Casilino one was sold two hundred florins for lo gran caro; and it was not dear, for he, who sold it, died of hunger, and the other escaped Bernardo Davanzati, quoted by Abbot Ferdinando Galiani in his treatise “Della Moneta”, Book I, Chapter II, 1751

Teach a parrot to say “It’s the law of supply and demand” and you will have a very good economist Irving Fisher, The Rate of Interest (1907). also cited by S.Latouche in the incipit of For a frugal degrowth (2012): It is said that the great Yale economist Irving Fischer (1867-1947) had a parrot that he trained to answer all students’ questions by repeating: “It is the law of supply and demand”

A country is not a company Paul Krugman (2020)

The invisible hand of the free market is invisible simply because it does not exist Joseph Stiglitz

The long term is a fallacious guide to current affairs: in the long term we will all be dead. John Maynard Keynes (Essay on Monetary Reform, ch. 3, 1923)

Practical men, who think of themselves as completely free from all intellectual influence, are generally slaves to some defunct economist. Fools in power, who hear voices in the air, distill their frenzies from some academic scribbler of a few years back. John Maynard Keynes (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936)

The object of studying economics is not to acquire a set of prepackaged answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

To make good use of an economic theory, we must first make the sorting between the propagandistic elements and the scientific elements; then checking with experience, see how convincing the scientific part appears, and ultimately combine it with our own political ideas. Joan Robinson, Contributions to modern economics (1978)

There are no universal recipes or policies that are always superior to others; economists should stop selling this dangerous illusion to public opinions and policy makers. Francesco Saraceno, The Useless Science (2019)

the microbiologist studies microbes, but he is not a microbe; the economist studies the economic life of societies, and he himself is a member of one of these societies. He is thus influenced by his own personal evaluations, which enter, if nothing else, into the very choice of the problems studied and which can affect, by distorting them, the results of the analysis Paolo Sylos Labini (Lectures on Economics, 1979, p.8).

I realized that often, not always, the application of mathematics to economics is to make it difficult to the easy by means of the useless Bruno De Finetti , quoted by Paolo Sylos Labini in “The profession of the economist between theoretical analysis and social commitment”, 2002, p.11.

The economy is not our destiny; there is no system of autonomous economic laws, that is to say: the economy does not constitute a natural process, but has always been a cultural creation arising from the free choice of men. Therefore, even the future of the economy, or of a given economic system, is left to the free will of men Werner Sombart (“Modern Capitalism,” 1902)

Some “social scientists” accuse economists of imagining, extending it to all other human activities, an analysis that is appropriate only for the market: that the tail can wag the dog Albert Hirschman (Shifting involvements, Private happiness and public happiness, 1982)

Economists suffer from Freudian physics envy, that is, the impulse to describe the social and economic world through a sober and transparent system of equations. Given the importance of iron-a symbol of industry and power-in the nineteenth century, for early economists it was not enough to come up with a law: it had to be an “iron law” of Newton’s imitation and especially of his mechanics Albert Hirschman (A propensity to self-subversion, transl. Self-subversion, 1995)

Much of academic economics has in the past fallen prey to so-called “physics envy,” by analogy with the Freudian concept of penis envy Timothy Garton Ash (“If economics resembles medicine,” The Republic, Friday, Feb. 5, 2016,)

Economics must remain a subject for specialists–like dentistry. It would be really great if economists could think of themselves as a category of useful and competent people: like dentists, in fact. John Maynard Keynes, Economic possibilities for our grandchildren, Adelphi, Milan 2009

The importance of currency comes essentially from being a link between the present and the future. John Maynard Keynes (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936)

When you save five shillings, you leave a man out of work for a day. John Maynard Keynes (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936)

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will trace themselves in the days to come, it can only be taken as the result of animal spirits - a spontaneous impulse to action rather than inaction, and not as the result of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities John Maynard Keynes (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936)

“The economics are very simple.I’ve got 10 pounds in my pocket.If I go to buy three pints of beer in Cambridge I probably have to borrow money.If I keep doing that I’ll run out of money and go bankrupt.It’s not difficult.” One of the great mysteries of life, at least of my own life, is the ease with which good people allow themselves to be beguiled by this puerile logic. In fact, the individual dimension of finance is a very bad basis for understanding the public dimension of finance, as I had to explain in my reply, “The economics that govern our private lives are characterized by a splendid independence between our expenditures and our incomes. So when expenditures are reduced, incomes are not reduced. But if an entire country engages in a severe campaign of expenditure restraint, that country’s incomes will be reduced.” This is because on the national scale total expenditures and total revenues are equal, in fact everything that is earned has been spent by someone else. So if every person and every business in the country reduces its expenditures the only thing the state can do is to reduce its own expenditures in turn. That is why the fall in total expenditures in a country leads to an equal fall in revenues at the national level, and with this follows a reduction in taxable income and a reduction in tax revenues for the state. That is the spectacular own goal of austerity: a continuous reduction in state revenues that makes it impossible to pay off the public debt. This is the reason why austerity is, by far, the wrong solution. Yanis Varoufakis. adults in the room

The biggest mistake that can be made in economic policy today is to claim that the national public debt crisis is due to to waste, tax evasion, populism of political parties, and carelessness of public authorities. All this is true, but it is irrelevant and serves to cover up the impotence of those who govern: you end waste, evasion, to carelessness if there is recovery and the initiation of a process for full employment. Otherwise, all public spending is wasteful: from education, to health care, to welfare, to research, to the environment, to culture, to unemployment benefits, to public works. Paolo Leon, The Origins of the Crisis

On Nov. 5, 2008, the Queen of England visited the prestigious London School of Economics, and during the ceremony she asked a question that has gone down in history as “the Queen’s question.” There are differing versions of the exact words she used, but the gist is this: “How come the majority of economists did not predict the financial crisis of 2008?” Indeed, recall that the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 gave rise to the biggest financial crisis since 1929 and the recession of so many countries that still lasts, and that world-renowned economists were neither able to predict the crisis nor to interpret what was happening._ Saying that economics is a hard science on a par with physics allows political choices to be passed off as scientific and therefore neutral results… I think economics deals with issues that affect everyone directly, that are influenced by our behaviors and therefore affect politics. Physics, on the other hand, deals with natural phenomena that in most cases happen independently of our choices. To put economics and physics on the same level is basically a fraud. Stefano Zapperi