Ludwig von Mises Quotes

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

One thing I've noticed about history - you can search on newspapers going back hundreds of years, search for 'economic forecast,' you don't find it. It would be very rare to find it.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

[Discussing economic trends:] You can find a study that says anything.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

Economists must always be prepared for surprises: they find many in trying to find order in the universe of their study.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

while the modern historical school of economists appear to be only exploring the monuments of the past, they are really shaking the foundations of many of our institutions in the present.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

I'm an economist, I do a lot of forecasting, and I'm probably one of the most successful forecasters in terms of very specific kinds of forecasts.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

The good news is that economists are intelligent, engaging and often charming folks. The bad news is their work is often of little use to investors.

It’s very difficult to find out what’s going on in the economy even when its happening.

We have the best mathematical economic models in the world, and just because our models have been wrong for 14 straight quarters does not mean that they will be wrong in the 15th quarter.

The primary role of the economist is to find out the truth about the real world.

Sometimes the statistics themselves, the means by which we perceive the economic universe, are unreliable.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

There is no such thing as quantitative economics.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

History, we now know, is not merely, of even primarily, past politics, it is also past economics, past society, past religion, past civilization, in short—past everything.

Washington office-holders pontificating on markets, taxes, and monetary policy are usually repeating the ideas of some dead economist, often one of whom the orator had no inkling.