Economics: The User's Guide

Quotes

1. ECONOMICS COCKTAILS. Ingredients: Austrian, Behaviouralist, Classical, Developmentalist, Institutionalist, Keynesian, Marxist, Neoclassical and Schumpeterian. [...] Health warning: On no account drink only one ingredient – liable to lead to tunnel vision, arrogance and possibly brain death.

2. 

   Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you, or your claim on particular amounts of the society's resources.

   How money and other financial claims... are created, sold and bought is... . ...[C]laims ...a lot of economics is (or should be) about those.

3. 

   [T]he realm of production... has been... neglected since the Neoclassical school... emphasis on exchange and consumption, became dominant in the 1960s. ...[P]roduction is a lot more than combining ...abstract quanta called labour and capital ...how the is physically organized, how to control the workers or deal with trade unions, how to... improve the technologies used through research. ...[P]roduction is the ultimate foundation of any economy. ...[Its] changes ...usually have been the most powerful sources of social change.

4. 

   [T]o understand jobs... we need to know about skills, technological innovation and . ...Wages and working conditions are... affected by 'political' decisions... the boundary between economics and politics is blurry...

5. 

   When Becker titled... The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, he was... declaring... economics is about everything.

6. 

   [E]very responsible citizen needs to learn some economics... such... that one becomes aware of the different types of... arguments... and... judge which... makes most sense in a given... circumstance... in light of... moral values and political goals...

7. 

   [J]argons that facilitate communication within the profession makes its communication with outsiders more difficult. ...[A]ll technical professions have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated... so they can justify the high fees... for their services.

8. 

   I... tell... how numbers in economics are defined and put together... not as... objective as... weight or... temperature...

9. 

   The standard Neoclassical definition of economics... is... by Lionel Robbins... 'the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses'... [is] by... theoretical approach rather than... subject matter... a study of rational choice... deliberate, systematic ... The subject of the calculation can be anything...

10. 

    I try to reveal the assumptions underlying... theories so... readers can make... judgements about their realism and plausibility.

11. 

    I try to explain... how to think, rather than what to think.

12. 

    [M]ost economists were caught completely by surprise by the 2008 global financial crisis. ...[T]hey have not been able to come up with solutions to the ongoing aftermaths ...[E]conomics seems to suffer from a serious case of megalomania—how can a subject that cannot... explain its own area... claim to explain (almost) everything?

13. 

    [E]conomics can never be a science in the sense that physics or chemistry is. There are many different types of economic theory, each emphasizing different aspects of a complex reality, making different moral and political value judgments and drawing different conclusions. ...[E]conomic theories constantly fail to predict real-world developments... not least because human beings have... free will, unlike chemical molecules or [other] physical objects.

That’s all the quotes.

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