Charlie Munger Quotes

The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

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

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

Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe.

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.

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.

Economics is not a morality play.

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.

Economics is a form of brain damage.

There is no such thing as quantitative economics.

'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.

I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.

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.

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.

The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist - a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.

Economics is like the Dutch language - I'm told it makes sense, but I have my doubts.

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

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

Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.