“Murphys law of economic policy’: Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed.”

Life is not a multiple choice test, it’s an open-book essay exam.

And there would be an inventory pileup. And then – bam – businesses would react, sometimes violently, by cutting production.

His stellar record suggests that the only right answer to the age-old question of whether it is better to be lucky or good may be: both.

If you try to give an on-the-one-hand-or-the-other- hand answer, only one of the hands tends to get quoted.

In the classic old business cycle, there would be a diminution in sales; it would take a little while for this information to reach corporate headquarters.

Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth.

They have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

And the maestro surely wielded the chairman’s baton with extraordinary skill.

There is a kind of a cascading chain, … If one can’t sell, then that business doesn’t buy and that means the next business doesn’t sell, and the previous business doesn’t sell, and so on.

And no matter what’s happening in the Middle East – the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment – the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.

The environmentalist’s dream is an egalitarian society based on: rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.

I am an economic person; I judge the amount of work involved with the amount of worth attained.

There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

Globalisation is not something that we can hold off or turn off. It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.

In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.