I'm not going to put my lot in with economists.

 

I'm not going to put my lot in with economists.
--
on her dismissal of economists' universal opposition to her gas tax holiday proposal

 

Hillary Clinton

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The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientific authority and precision to economists' musings.

 

Paul Ormerod

 

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

 

Karl Marx

 

On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

 

John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

 

Kenneth Boulding

 

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

 

Frans de Waal