Geoff Mulgan Quotes

Economics is not a discipline that comes to correct answers - economies are too complex.

An economy is not a complicated thing; it just has a lot of moving parts.

You simply can’t run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone.

Traditionally in capitalism, when you have more cash, you can fund more activity, which produces more jobs and creates more wealth. That's basic economic theory.

Economics is not brain surgery.

We need to have a strong economy that can create employment opportunities and that can also produce the revenue that we need to defend our country at home and abroad.

Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.

I think the market driven economic system is the most productive system, but to have that work in the world, you've got to also have social investments to go along with that.

A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.

Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on what they do best and trade with others who specialize in other things.

Government is not the generator of economic growth; working people are.

I'm just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

Fundamentally, the basis of all modern progress is the efficiency of labor. And the only sure road to restored prosperity is through the thrift and hard work of our people as a whole.

We need the private sector to create jobs. If the government could create jobs Communism would have worked, but it didn't.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Economists largely confine themselves to three key factors - capital, labor and productivity - when explaining how and why a country grows.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

America's growth historically has been fueled mostly by investment, education, productivity, innovation and immigration. The one thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with America's growth rate is a brutal work schedule.

Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.

The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

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

We hear of the wealth of nations, of the powers of production, of the demand and supply of markets, and we forget that these words mean no more, if they mean any thing, then the happiness, and the labor, and the necessities of men.