The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
Thus, the isolated interference with one or a few prices of consumer goods always bring about effects-and this is important to realize-which are even less satisfactory than the conditions that prevailed before.
Much theoretical work, of course, focuses on existing economic institutions. The theorist wants to explain or forecast the economic or social outcomes that these institutions generate.
They have to have some dividends out of democracy.
I think that over the last few decades, we have seen better economic outcomes than in the past.
Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.
All varieties of interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which - from the point of view of their authors and advocates valuations - is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter.
If someone is cynical and doesn't vote and ends up with a crummy job in a crummy country with a decimated environment, they only have themselves to blame.
If you take the same child and put them in two different places, it will dramatically shape the way in which their economic outcomes are realized later in life.
Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.
Experimental economics is about conducting experiments: bringing economics into the laboratory or creating controlled conditions in the field that allow us to understand better what we are seeing in less controlled circumstances.
Communication has become a fulcrum of policy [of the Federal Reserve]. Policy makers shape expectations and, thus, economic behavior.
See {639156} and {639153}.
IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.
Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank... need to consider not only the most likely future path for the economy but also the distribution of possible outcomes about that path. They then need to reach a judgment about the probabilities, costs, and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.
Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not. Do policy makers have the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than make matters worse? Yes.
All economic forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty. There is always a wide range of plausible outcomes for important economic variables, including the federal funds rate.
