Tyler Cowen Quotes

Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

Because economics is all about optimising, doing the best you can with what you have - it's usually the first place you should look for answers if you want to maximise your happiness.

Economics is not about goods and services; it is about human choice and action.

Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.

About the only useful thing my economics degree taught me was that, in all decisions in life, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis.

Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.

The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize.

Economics is built on the assumption of scarcity. Therefore, it deals with values and calculations. It cannot seek the good that fits a specific person within a given human condition. Where scarcity rules, ethics is reduced to numbers and utility. Further, the person engaged in the manipulation of mathematical formulas loses his or her ear for ethical nuance; one becomes morally deaf.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

I read. It affects every decision that I make. Every dollar that I spend, every dollar that I make.

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful

Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.

Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.

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

Whatever it is, people have issues and that affects you deeply. So you have to get to the bottom of it and not let that affect your life decisions and really understand why you're making the decisions you make so that way you can understand how to not do that, so I always encourage people to ask why and then to really understand you, because that's the only way to be your most successful and your most happy.

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

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

The general principles of political economy teach us to buy all our commodities where we can have them the cheapest; and perhaps there is no general rule in the whole compass of the science to which fewer justifiable exceptions can be found in practice

I made a cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle.