Ben Bernanke Quotes

I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Prior to the early 1960s, economic theorists rarely constructed models customized to capture unique institutions or specific market characteristics.

The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.

The eighteenth century discovery that, in an institutional framework that facilitates voluntary exchanges among individuals, this process generates results that might be evaluated positively, produced 'economics,' as an independent academic discipline or science.

Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.

Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.

The major driver of economics is the equilibrium approach, which has taken various forms over the years. General equilibrium is the statement that all the different parts of the economy influence each other, even if it's remote, like mortgage-backed securities and their demands on automobiles.

I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.

Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level.

The law of diminishing returns is something I really believe in.

For economist the real world is often a special case.

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.

An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

We have learned that the various schools of [economic] thought all have important elements of truth in them. But none of them is by itself a sufficient explanation of what goes on in the economy.

Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace. We must plan civilization or we must perish.

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

The primary role of the economist is to find out the truth about the real world.

Markets can do certain things, but markets cannot do other things