Thomas J. Sargent Quotes

Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level.

On the way from Chicago, I spent the summer of 1947 in Ottawa, helping to build the first of a series of econometric models for the Canadian government.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

There are many types of economic data, but the type considered by Rob Engle and myself is know as time series.

For economist the real world is often a special case.

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.

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

We have professional economists who can defend any viewpoint with statistics and they do that everywhere in the world.

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.

Economists create their own worlds. We're like little gods with our artificial economics, wanting to see what happens.

Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.

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.

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

I have never considered myself an economist.

Studying economics is not a good preparation for dealing with it.

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.

There is no such thing as quantitative economics.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

The CBO is the only group that makes the weatherman's ten-day forecast look like exact science. They seem to miss their projections with extreme regularity.

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.

We're not very good at forecasting, and we don't know how to measure the impact of economic policy.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

If we're going to forecast the business cycle, surely it is a good idea to know the business cycle. Sounds reasonable, but it's not that easy.

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.

In a sense, there are as many forecasting methods as there are forecasters. But I would argue that most projections are derived from two major methods: macro-econometric models and eclectic judgment.