Cass Sunstein Quotes

Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

I think what Bob Shiller and I are doing is we're focusing on macroeconomics and the role of psychology in macroeconomics.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

I'm happy to say I am a Harrison-Kreps-Keynesian.

Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

In New Classical theory, periods of declining employment - business cycle downturns - may be caused by an unexpected decline in aggregate demand, which leaves workers mistakenly holding out for nominal wages that exceed the new market-clearing level.

Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.

Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.

Keynesian economics has always been needed.

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.

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

The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level.

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand.

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people's taxes that stimulates the economy and lowers the unemployment rate, is a very widely accepted idea. It's in every economics textbook, that's what we teach our undergraduates, and I certainly try to teach them the truth.

If you believe that markets operate in Alan Greenspan fashion, then you don't inquire into the details.

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.

We are all Keynesians now.

Until Keynes, politicians had not needed economists for help in running the country any more than they had needed astronomers. But Keynes made them indispensible.

Supply creates its own demand

If you think about the amount of critical thinking that has come into the field of economics, two universities have dominated the landscape in my life: Chicago and Harvard.

Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.