QuoteProject
At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.
Edmund Phelps
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Economics helps us understand the outcomes of our actions, although predicting complex issues like climate change remains challenging.

In this quote, Edmund Phelps emphasizes the role of economics in revealing the effects of human actions. While economics can often provide insights into straightforward scenarios, the complexities surrounding issues like global warming highlight the limits of our knowledge and the difficulty in accurately forecasting the broad impacts of our decisions.

Themes

EconomicsConsequencesClimate ChangeGlobal WarmingKnowledge

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a lecture about the importance of economics in environmental policy.

More from Edmund Phelps

If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.
Edmund PhelpsRead
The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.'
Edmund PhelpsRead
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
Edmund PhelpsRead
Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.
Edmund PhelpsRead
When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses?
Edmund PhelpsRead
A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
Edmund PhelpsRead

Similar quotes

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.
Sendhil MullainathanRead
Emissions of greenhouse gases warm the planet, altering the carbon and water cycles. A warmer ocean stores more heat, providing more fuel for hurricanes. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, bringing dangerous deluges. Rising sea levels threaten coastal zones.
Johan RockstromRead
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. ClarkeRead
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.
Pierre-Simon LaplaceRead
I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
Carl SaganRead
Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
Joseph FourierRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.