"Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed because they are consistent with a widely held vision of the world— and this vision is accepted as a substitute for facts. Subjecting beliefs to the test of hard facts is especially important when it comes to economic beliefs because economic realities are inescapable limitations on millions of people's lives, so that policies based on fallacies can be devastating in their impacts. Conversely, seeing through those fallacies can open up many unsuspected opportunities for a better life for millions of people." 

― Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

"Macroeconomists have done much research for years on policy rules versus discretionary policy. Discretionary policy with continuous replanning has been shown sometimes to be time inconsistent. The same issues arise in career planning. At one time, most people committed to a career trajectory at an early age, and stuck to it until retirement. Despite the risk of time inconsistency, resulting in a nonoptimal solution path, discretionary policies, with possible frequent replanning, are becoming increasingly relevant to career choices, as the world becomes a smaller place and change becomes more rapid."

― William Barnett

"Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development."

― Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom 

"In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

― Eric Hoffer

"Errors and exaggerations matter not. The courage to voice one’s thoughts, to express things as they are felt at the time they are said —that is what counts. To make so bold as to proclaim what one considers to be the truth... If one waited until one possessed the absolute truth, one would either be a fool or remain silent forever."

― José Clemente Orozco

"Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."

― Plato

"Theories are commonly outpourings of an impatient mind that would like to get rid of the phenomena and therefore replaces them by images, notions and often merely words. One senses and even sees that this is only a poor substitute; but does not passion and faction spirit always love substitutes? And rightly so, because they are so much in need of them."

― Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe 

"When a man sets out upon any course of inquiry, the object of his search may be either light or fruit – either knowledge for its own sake or knowledge for the sake of the good things to which it leads. … In the sciences of human society, be their appeal as bearers of light ever so high, it is the promise of fruit and not of light that chiefly merits our regard."

― Arthur Pigou

"Political Economy you think is an enquiry into the nature and causes of wealth – I think it should rather be called an enquiry into the laws which determine the division of the produce of industry amongst the classes who concur in its formation."

― David Ricardo

"The problem with it, I think, is rather that it's too late for economists to ask themselves seriously, "Will the data bear the conclusions that I want to push upon them? Am I asking questions so subtle that the statistical methods will give answers which depend on the trivial characteristics of the data?" They don't ask, "Is the period of time from which I have taken the data really homogeneous? Might the relationship I am estimating have changed its form somewhere during this period?" They don't ask whether the assumption that this function is linear so I may do standard statistical estimation on it is a reasonable estimate. They don't ask themselves - and I think this is the worst sin of them all - whether there doesn't exist a different model that would fit the data equally well, and what does that tell me? So I think that the problem with economists is that they do too much uncritical empirical work, and that they deceive themselves with the refinements of their methods [Swedberg, 1990, p. 273]."

― Robert Solow

"Macroeconomics is not an exact science but an applied one where ideas, theories, and models are constantly evaluated against the facts, and often modified or rejected … Macroeconomics is thus the result of a sustained process of construction, of an interaction between ideas and events. What macroeconomists believe today is the result of an evolutionary process in which they have eliminated those ideas that failed and kept those that appear to explain reality well."

― Blanchard (1997) 

‘‘In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.’’ 

― Benjamin Brewster (1882) 

"In the choice of subject to-day [scope and method of economics], I fear that I have exposed myself to two serious charges: that of tedium and that of presumption. Speculations upon methodology are famous for platitude and prolixity. They offer the greatest opportunity for internecine strife; the claims of the contending factions are subject to no agreed check, and a victory, even if it could be established, is thought to yield no manifest benefit to the science itself. The barrenness of methodological conclusions is often a fitting complement to the weariness entailed by the process of reaching them. 

Exposed as a bore, the methodologist cannot take refuge behind a cloak of modesty. On the contrary, he stands forward ready by his own claim to give advice to all and sundry, to criticise the works of others, which, whether valuable or not, at least attempts to be constructive; he sets himself up as the final interpreter of the past and dictator of future efforts."

― Roy F Harrod, Economic Journal, 1938

"Continued preoccupation with imaginary, hypothetic, rather than with observable reality has gradually led to a distortion of the informal valuation scale used in our academic community to assess and to rank the scientific performance of its members. Empirical analysis, according to this scale, gets a lower rating than formal mathematical reasoning"

― Wassily Leontief (1971, p. 3) 

"[S]ociety performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government... So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is the dissolution of society, that it acts by a contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together.

 All that part of its organisation which it had committed to its government, devolves again upon itself, and acts through its medium. When men, as well from natural instinct as from reciprocal benefits, have habituated themselves to social and civilised life, there is always enough of its principles in practice to carry them through any changes they may find necessary or convenient to make in their government.

In short, man is so naturally a creature of society that it is almost impossible to put him out of it... The more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself; but so contrary is the practice of old governments to the reason of the case, that the expenses of them increase in the proportion they ought to diminish.

It is but few general laws that civilised life requires, and those of such common usefulness, that whether they are enforced by the forms of government or not, the effect will be nearly the same.

If we consider what the principles are that first condense men into society,and what are the motives that regulate their mutual intercourse afterwards, we shall find, by the time we arrive at what is called government, that nearly the whole of the business is performed by the natural operation of the parts upon each other."

― Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1984, 193-195) 

Economics is a scientific discipline that offers analytical explanations about how the world works, whereas moral theory offers normative suggestions about how the world ought to be. 

Usually problems are hard not because our technique is deficient but because our understanding is deficient 

― Fisher Black

Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta," catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. It is producing not the known, but the unknown. 

― Jean-Frangois Lyotard (1984, p. 60) 

"Keynesian economics, in spite of all that it has done for our understanding of business fluctuations, has beyond all doubt left at least one major thing quite unexplained; and that thing is nothing less than the business cycle itself....For Keynes did not show us, and did not attempt to show us, save by a few hints, why it is that in the past the level of activity has fluctuated according to so definite a pattern."

―(John Hicks, Contribution to the Theory of the Trade Cycle, 1950: p.1)

Go study what’s not said, find the silences because that will reveal the contours of misaligned incentives and where power is that is deterring expression.

― Gillian Tett

The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a depression (bust following an investment boom) but not how to get out of one (liquidation). Keynesians could explain how a country might get out of a depression (government spending on public works) but not how it got into one (animal spirits). By contrast, the monetary approach of economists such as Gustav Cassel has been ignored. As early as 1920, Cassel warned that mismanagement of the gold standard could lead to a severe depression.

― Douglas A Irwin