A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.
Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?
Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
You cannot prove this in real time, but when economists 20 years from now write a book on the recovery, it may well be entitled, 'It could have been much better.'
Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.
My folks are economists and have taught economics and social science so I grew up with those kind of conversations around the dinner table.
If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.
When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.
My mother died of lung cancer last year. I felt helpless. As an economist, I thought, 'What can I do?'
I'm Harvard-educated; I'm an economist by training. I'm an author, a journalist, as well as being active in community development.
It is obvious that the monetary union among 17 very different European countries does not work. As an economist, I know that the Eurozone is not an optimum currency area, as defined in economic theory.
What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.
As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data.
I think that whether you're on the right or on the left as an economist or as a policy maker, every serious analyst I know agrees that at some point you have to deal with entitlements.
Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.
As many will remember, a respected Army Corps economist filed a whistleblower complaint about the Corps' use of faulty data to justify lock and dam expansion.
My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book ('Saving the World?') on an unlikely topic - he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.
We are all amateur attention economists, hoarding and bartering our moments - or watching them slip away down the cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.
Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.
The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize.
