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Thomas J. Sargent Quotes

Thomas John "Tom" Sargent is an American economist, who is currently the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics and time series econometrics. As of 2014, he ranks fourteenth among the most cited economists in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy". Wikipedia  

✵ 19. July 1943
Thomas J. Sargent photo
Thomas J. Sargent: 10 quotes10 likes

Famous Thomas J. Sargent Quotes

“My recollection is that Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott were initially very enthusiastic about rational expectations econometrics. After all, it simply involved imposing on ourselves the same high standards we had criticized the Keynesians for failing to live up to. But after about five years of doing likelihood ratio tests on rational expectations models, I recall Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott both telling me that those tests were rejecting too many good models.”

Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent interviewed by George W. Evans & Seppo Honkapohja, Macroeconomic Dynamics, 9, 2005, 561–583.

“Cagan’s adaptive mechanism for explaining expectations of inflation has sometimes been criticized as an ad hoc formulation that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that expectations are rational. In this paper, we have showed that conditions exist under which adaptive expectations are fully rational.”

Thomas J. Sargent

"Rational expectations and the dynamics of hyperinflation." 1973

“My published work is just a record of my learning. I'm sharing it with people so they won't make the same mistakes that I did. It's been a painful and slow process. My work is like a journey, a journey of discovery.”

Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent, in Conversations with Economists (1983) by Arjo Klamer

“Q: “Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years?””

Thomas J. Sargent

Sargent: “No.” <br class="br">Thomas J. Sargent in: Ally Bank TV Spot, &#x27;Predictions&#x27; Featuring Thomas Sargent http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Lj9/ally-bank-predictions-featuring-thomas-sargent.

“What policymakers (and econometricians) should recognize, then, is that societies face a meaningful set of choices about alternative economic policy regimes.”

Thomas J. Sargent

"Rational expectations and the dynamics of hyperinflation." 1973

“Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.”

Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent, University of California at Berkeley graduation speech (2007), quoted in David Glasner, &quot; Memo to Tom Sargent: Economics Is More than Just Common Sense https://uneasymoney.com/2014/04/25/memo-to-tom-sargent-economics-is-more-than-just-common-sense/&quot; (2014)

Thomas J. Sargent Quotes

“For policy, the central fact is that Keynesian policy recommendations have no sounder basis, in a scientific sense, than recommendations of non-Keynesian economists or, for that matter, non-economists.”

Thomas J. Sargent

Robert Lucas, Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent, "After Keynesian macroeconomics", After the Phillips Curve: Persistence of High Inflation and High Unemployment (1978).

“It is paradoxical that an administration that came to office rejecting the whole apparatus of Keynesian economics finds itself presiding over a stream of what threaten to be permanent deficits.”

Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent "Back to Basics On Budgets", The New York Times (August 10, 1983).

“An alternative “rational expectations” view denies that there is any inherent momentum in the present process of inflation. This view maintains that firms and workers have now come to expect high rates of inflation in the future and that they strike inflationary bargains in light of these expectations.”

Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent, "The Ends of Four Big Inflations" (1981).

“These ideas have implications not only for theoretical and econometric practices but also for the ways in which policymakers and their advisers think about the choices confronting them. In particular, the rational expectations approach directs attention away from particular isolated actions and toward choices among feasible rules of the game, or repeated strategies for choosing policy variables. While Keynesian and monetarists macroeconomic models have been used to try to analyze what the effects of isolated actions would be, it is now clear that the answers they have given have necessarily been bad, if only because such questions are ill-posed.”

Thomas J. Sargent

"Rational expectations and the dynamics of hyperinflation." 1973

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