Joel Bakan Quotes

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

Where combination is possible, competition is impossible.

I do understand the free market, having my economics degree, and if someone on the right had some good ideas, I'm not so dogmatic that I wouldn't listen to them.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.

I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour

One speaks with great respect of economists, if only because they represent such a variety of opinions.

I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.

Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that economics cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. Economics deals with society's fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.

In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

The economists will have to revise their theories of value.

I'm not currently into economic textbooks, but my grandchildren tell me that the book by Gregory Mankiw, former head of the white house council of economic advisers is a model of intelligence and clarity. Why not try that one.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.

The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.

Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.