“I return to economics and to economists, and to the question of why the profession’s directions have evolved in the manners evident from this book. A major conservative economist once explained that a source of his antipathy to government traced back to the defeat of his southern ancestors by a larger north economy. Here is a similar factoid. Joan Robinson once wrote that her opposition to having the U. K. enter the European Market was due to the fact that she “had more friends in [Nehru’s] India than on the continent.””

— Paul A. Samuelson

Coeditor's Forword in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007)
New millennium

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Paul A. Samuelson 47

American economist 1915–2009

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 3

“Even today — in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman than most New Deal economists.”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter III, Adam Smith, p. 62

“It takes some audacity for a non-economist to write a book about economics, especially if the book deals with one of the yardsticks of the profession, i. e., money.”

Margrit Kennedy (1939–2013) German architect

Introduction, p. 13
Interest and Inflation Free Money (1995)

“I used to joke to Bob Solow that the distance between me and Joan Robinson is less than the distance between Joan Robinson and me. His reply was, “You’ll never convince her of that.””

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Still one lives in hope.
On April 14, 1972, quoted in Marjorie Shepherd Turner, Joan Robinson and the Americans (1989)
1950s–1970s

“Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down to us more than a century ago by a handful of European economists — Alfred Marshall in England and a few of his contemporaries on the continent. It is an understanding based squarely upon the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations, so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was roughly valid for the bulk-processing, smokestack economy of Marshall’s day. And it still thrives in today’s economics textbooks. But steadily and continuously in this century, Western economies have undergone a transformation from bulk - material manufacturing to design and use of technology — from processing of resources to processing of information, from application of raw energy to application of ideas. As this shift has occurred, the underlying mechanisms that determine economic behavior have shifted from ones of diminishing to ones of increasing returns.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Arthur, W. Brian. "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business." Harvard business review 74.4 (1996): p. 100

“So far, twenty-two people have received the Nobel award in economics. Not one of them has been female—so, to judge only from the past, the most important thing to do if you want to be a Nobel laureate is to be male. I hasten to add that the absence of females is not, I believe, attributable to male chauvinist bias on the part of the Swedish Nobel Committee. I believe that the economics profession as a whole would have been nearly unanimous that, during the period in question, only one female candidate met the relevant standards—the English economist Joan Robinson, who has since died. The failure of the Nobel Committee to award her a prize may well have reflected bias but not sex bias. The economists here will understand what I am talking about. … A second requirement is to be a U. S. citizen. Twelve of the twenty-two recipients of the Nobel Prize were from the United States, four from the United Kingdom, two from Sweden, and one each from four other countries. … Of the twelve Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in economics, nine either studied or taught at the University of Chicago. So the next lesson is to go to the University of Chicago.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

"Milton Friedman" in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates

“Following the financial crisis of September 2008 when the American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, threatening to engulf the entire banking system, the British economist John Maynard Keynes returned to center stage. In the popular press and in the writings of many economists, Keynes featured prominently as governments around the world urgently sought ways to avoid economic collapse. (…) After only a brief delay, critics of Keynes’s ideas also began to appear; but the emergence of such critics only served to emphasize the fact of his return, for only a few years earlier Keynes’s name would not even have appeared in public debate about economic policy: his ideas were seen as having so little relevance that it did not even seem necessary to mention his name when discussing the performance of the economy.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman, ch.1 "Keynes Returns, but Which Keynes?" Capitalist revolutionary : John Maynard Keynes (2011).

“Where do ideas about economics come from? They come, of course from economists—where by an "economist" I mean someone who thinks and writes regularly about economic issues. But not all economists are alike, and in fact the genus includes two radically distinct species: The professors and the policy entrepreneurs.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Introduction: Looking for Magicians
Peddling Prosperity (1994)

“The economic policy issues that we debate today—trade policy, inflation, the proper role of government, the eradication of poverty, and the means of raising the rate of economic growth—have been discussed by economists for more than two centuries. Many of today’s economic policies—both the good ones and the bad—are the result of the ideas of those past economists. And many of today’s debates about economic policy can be understood only by those who have at least some familiarity with the ideas of earlier economists.
The giants of economic science during the past two hundred years have been men concerned with the critical policy issues of their time. They studied the working of the economy in order to advocate better economic policies. But despite their concern with policy, they were not polemicists or politicians but men who sought to persuade their contemporaries in government and in the broader public by analysis and evidence that would meet the standards of professional debate.”

Martin Feldstein (1939–2019) American economist

Martin Feldstein (1989), Foreword to New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz.

“An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport’s coal cellar) once said: “There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries.” All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 76

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