Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

Our biggest challenge is to eliminate the popular perception that economists don't have anything useful to say.

This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.

Mitt Romney, you can criticize him for a lot of things, and that's fair, but he knows how the economy works.

The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population.

I believe that we must understand the economy of the situation.

Too many people think that economics is this subject that should wait until the university level. But it can't wait that long.

I've been surrounded by some of the best economic minds in the country, and hopefully I've absorbed some of that.

I don't ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.

Question: Why does anyone bother to listen to economists anymore? The profession has become an embarrassment, and the most respected economists have shown themselves to have as much predictive power as a deck of tarot cards.

It turns out the businessman knows more about how the economy really works than the chattering class. What a shock.

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

It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

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.

You read [Bill ] Maher's book, and he didn't take Econ 101. All his arguments about gasoline, it's not that they're right or wrong - they're just not informed.

In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book.

The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

Economics was the only profession where a person could be considered an expert without having once been right.

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.

I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

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