Dale T. Mortensen Quotes

Hawks usually care about benefits; doves most about costs. Neither benefits or costs however are easily estimated in advance.

About the only useful thing my economics degree taught me was that, in all decisions in life, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

I tell my micro students everything I teach them is important, but the truth is that some things are more useful than others, and opportunity cost is near the top.

If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils.

Because economics is all about optimising, doing the best you can with what you have - it's usually the first place you should look for answers if you want to maximise your happiness.

Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they've also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there's anxiety about making the wrong one.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

There are a couple of projects that are sort of on the plate; I haven't closed any of them yet. I'm trying to figure out which one is going to be the best one for me.

Most of the decisions you make are not black and white, but at the end of the day, you have to make the decision.

... balancing competing goals of simplicity, efficiency and equity.

[Cost-benefit analysis is used:] ... to produce lofty academic-sounding reasons for endless inaction.

The statesman must weigh the rewards of success against the penalties of failure. And he is permitted only one guess.

I made a cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

In markets, there are times when you are looking for what makes sense. At other times, you are looking for what you can do that is sensible versus constraints and uncertainties.

Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.

It stinks to give up a good player. But if you think that way, you'll never make any trades. You have to focus on what you're getting back.

I think that the test for taking on a project is to try and list all the reasons not to do it. When you find yourself running out of reasons, and you still have to do it, it's the right thing to do.

You weigh your pros and cons and what's real. You want to play baseball? Yeah. You want to go to school? If that's the best option, than that is what it is.

Valuations are always much-debated. I try to center on what is the value to us. Is it solving a problems for us? If it is, we find a way to proceed. If the valuation has been overhyped on something and it doesn't make sense, we won't. It's very simple for me. I tend not to worry too much about the valuation. It's really what the value is to us.

Choice is everything. Unfortunately, we do a lot of fluff. There's three boxes - profile, money, heart - and if the project ticks two of those, you do it.

The hardest thing about free agency is sometimes you want it right away but you have to wait and see see what happens.

The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.