What is it that the scientist finds useful in being able to relate a positive description of behavior to the solution of a maximizing problem? That is what a good deal of my own early work was about.
The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.
Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.
The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.
The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don't waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that.
One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter 'H' that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling.
Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.
Keynes's contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.
The Malthusian Theory - that mankind, for biological and sociological reasons, is so fertile, so fecund, that if you started out with the new continent and plenty of land for everybody, in several generations we would multiply our numbers.
What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.
You're not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no 'it' to take. It's one or the other.
'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.
I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.
When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?
People had J.F.K. all wrong. They thought of him as a dashing, deciding type. He was an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.