Gunnar Myrdal Quotes

Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals.

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.

I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or - the worst of all abuses among economists - a 'sociologist.'

Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.

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.

Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor.

Some people in D.C. talk about me like a dog.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.

Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late 'seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

I'm sure people are badmouthing me. I think one of the interesting parts about the criticism has been the tenor of "how dare he." How dare an insider speak critically about other insiders?

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

Friedrich Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992 at age 92, was arguably the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. By the time of his death, his fundamental way of thought had supplanted the system of John Maynard Keynes - his chief intellectual rival of the century - in the battle since the 1930s for the minds of economists and the policies of governments.

It is very important for me to be taken seriously for my science and not for my looks or other personal accomplishments.

I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It's one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren't designed to think about these emergent entities. We're not good at it.

The only thing socialists produce is debt and self-esteem

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

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

I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.

Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.

Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.