Robert C. Merton Quotes

It is no longer a matter of serious controversy whether the government should play a positive role in helping to maintain a high level of economic activity. What we debate nowadays is not the need for controlling business cycles, but rather the nature of governmental action, its timing and its extent.

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

The human capital of most macroeconomists, heavily invested in demand management, was wiped out by the policy failures of the 1970s.

[U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.

The stagflation of the 1970s blessed us with damaging wage and price controls and the utterly counterintuitive supply-side notion - famously drawn on a napkin - that cutting taxes would lead to higher tax revenues.

Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.

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.

Recent research suggests that New Deal programs may actually have had their primary impact on the economy by influencing consumer and business expectations of future growth and inflation.

People forget how difficult it is to stop inflation or get it under control… I worry about it all the time.

You have to change people’s minds to stop inflation.

I reject the advice of those who think the only way to fight inflation is to throw millions of people out of work .... I guarantee you that I will not fight inflation with your jobs.

We simply cannot check inflation by keeping people out of work.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

Modern conservatism was forged in the crucible of the 1970s inflation crisis, and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash many conservatives were convinced that there was nothing the Federal Reserve could do about the vast army of the unemployed without touching off a similar inflationary spiral.

If strong economic conditions can partially reverse supply-side damage after it has occurred, then policymakers may want to aim at being more accommodative during recoveries than would be called for under the traditional view that supply is largely independent of demand.

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.

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

The president has very little effect on the economy. If you want to put blame or credit, the main person who influences the business cycle is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

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 president's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars.

There is no left or right in economic management today.

The bottom line of a successful economic policy is jobs.