Robert Reich Quotes

Religion is a way to make order from chaos, and I think economics is not dissimilar. In religion and in economics, you're trying to figure out the way we perceive the world and move through it, and that's what I like to learn.

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

There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

I understand how the economy actually works.

I'm curious about people. That's what I've always done since I've been a small boy. I'm curious about others.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.

I'm still passionately interested in what my fellow humans are up to. For me, a day spent monitoring the passing parade is a day well-spent.

I'm just incredibly interested in people.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it.

Economic theory does not work with human beings. We are far too messy.

I learned a lot about the law at Harvard Law School, but no one taught me about why a 20-year old black male in a tough neighborhood feels like he needs to be armed. Nobody taught me about what attracts kids to join gangs.... It is difficult to stand in judgment of other human beings without understanding human beings.

People are nicer than economists give us credit for. The economists cannot understand why people would work long and hard to clean up a community after a hurricane. … Most economists don’t have any interest in or understanding of psychology.

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.

Watch people and how they handle other people. You have to stay open and keep your eyes open to them.

I studied economics with some teachers from ESADE. It's a really good school here in Spain. They helped me to understand a little about numbers, stats, economics, etc.

Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.

Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations.

I was very interested in politics in college and was heading to be a lawyer. I have a degree in economics and I was interested in it. I hadn't really gotten super serious about it and I'd done a lot of student politics in high school. I really think it would be interesting and fun and challenging to go into politics.

I knew the people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings.

If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.

Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.

Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.