James Tobin Quotes

Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

I don't think money itself has any causal relationship to nominal GNP. The dominating causal force is interest rates.

I may be a dreamer, but I think monetary economics should be a hot topic.

First, I think the science of monetary economics has clearly gotten better.

I'm happy to say I am a Harrison-Kreps-Keynesian.

I've always been a macroeconomist. That's what I teach. And I guess that's what I've been concerned with ever since I've been very young.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.

I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.

We are all Keynesians now.

Supply creates its own demand

The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a bit like the difference between biology and medicine. Knowing that certain genes increase the risk of cancer is relatively easy. Figuring out exactly which people will get sick, or how to cure them, is a lot more complicated.

I understand how the economy actually works.

Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.

I didn't wake up one day and say, you know, 'Supply-side economics doesn't make sense.'

Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth.

Spending time at the Federal Reserve was a good learning opportunity for me. It helped me to understand economic philosophies and polices that I had not previously known about.

Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates.

My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.