Quotes on Economic Theory

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises”. Here is an article he wrote in 1951, some two years after his magnum opus Human Action appeared, where is lays out his case in a more popular form. The money sentences are “Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. It has happened again and again in the past, and it will happen in the future, too.

As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist

Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis.

I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems.

Conventional economic theory... counts the depletion of resources as the accumulation of wealth.

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

You were probably educated in the conventional economic theories of your period which were magnificent and most ingenious, but--if you will pardon my saying so--all wrong.

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.