James Thurber Quotes

Whoever claims that economic competition represents 'survival of the fittest' in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics.

Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.

You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

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

It is in his knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness, the high superiority which he holds over the other animals who inhabit the earth with him, and consequently no ignorance is probably without loss to him, no error without evil.

Those who claim they are the prisoners of the laws of economics, only testify that they are prisoners of the idol.

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street.

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.

It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.

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

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

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.

This is a guy [Steven Lerner] who believes, for example, that Reaganomics or trickle-down economics means, "The rich got rich by stealing from the poor," or stealing from the middle class and making them poor via debt. He has worked with unions in Europe.

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.

Economics is not a morality play.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.

Economics is a form of brain damage.

Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.

Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.

Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community.

We are not like dogs who are kind of "What am I going to eat today? Oh, there is a rabbit; I am going to go chase it."

The sobbing of the weak today is the sobbing of the victims of neoliberal policies. They consist of billions of people all over the world.

If trading is like chess, then macro is like three-dimensional chess.