Neoclassical Economics Quotes

The modern history of economic theory is a tale of evasions of reality.

Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism.

Prior to the early 1960s, economic theorists rarely constructed models customized to capture unique institutions or specific market characteristics.

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

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

During my three years as chief economist of the World Bank, labor market issues were looked at through the lens of neoclassical economics. A standard message was to increase labor market flexibility. The not-so-subtle subtext was to lower wages and lay off unneeded workers.

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models.

Critics of 'economic sciences' sometimes refer to the development of a 'pseudoscience' of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show.

Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.

Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.

If people are teaching economics, they need to teach all the different disciplines, all the different schools in economics. They can't just teach one because then the person isn't equipped to deal with the economics profession.

Pirates are the very essence of profit maximising entrepreneurs described in neoclassical economics. Yet, whilst films such as 'The Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' have gone a long way to popularise both pirates and outlaw behaviour, the truth of the matter is that piracy is illegal, and it kills.

In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.

Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather than the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy.

So many of the great thought leaders that have shaped economics - Gary Becker, Milton Friedman - what an unbelievable success story they've had in their field.

Liberal economists conceive of societies as black boxes connected by exchange rates; as long as exchange rates are correct, what goes on inside the black box is regarded as not very important.

Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets.

The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level.