“We must move toward a soundly based and widely distributed economic well-being. This is the 'theory of plenty' as distinguished from the 'theory of scarcity' which has dominated our recent economic thinking and politics. Our yardstick, according to my thinking, I consists of the most effective balance between the following: First, the reduction in the real costs and selling! prices of goods and services; second, a more economic balance of national income through policies affecting wages, hours, prices and profits.”

— Alfred P. Sloan

Cited in: Charles Cullen Chapman (1936), The development of American business and banking thought, 1913-1936. p. 265
New York Times interview, 1935

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Alfred P. Sloan47

American businessman 1875–1966

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“I have already remarked that the 'theory of scarcity has been a dominating influence in many of our economic policies. In the case of taxation, however, there is involved the 'theory of plenty' and there must now be involved the 'theory of plenty more.' Every dollar of the billions that are being indiscriminately spent without accountability is a mortgage on the income, the savings, as well as the security of the people. There must be brought home to the consciousness of all that the more the government takes, the less each one has no one can possibly escape.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

New York Times interview, 1935

“We have defined the main task of economic analysis as the explanation of the magnitudes of economic quantities. The student will find also that the main part of this, as of most other works on the subject, is concerned with the theory of the determination of prices, wages, interest rates, incomes, and the like. He may well inquire, therefore, in the midst of so much mathematics, whether the first task of economics is not the investigation of wealth, or welfare. Some economists have endeavored to restrict the boundaries of the science to the investigation of those quantities which are numerically measurable. Well-being, under such a restriction, would not be part of economics at all.”

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

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 7-8

“A long decade ago economic growth was the reigning fashion of political economy. It was simultaneously the hottest subject of economic theory and research, a slogan eagerly claimed by politicians of all stripes, and a serious objective of the policies of governments. The climate of opinion has changed dramatically. Disillusioned critics indict both economic science and economic policy for blind obeisance to aggregate material "progress," and for neglect of its costly side effects. Growth, it is charged, distorts national priorities, worsens the distribution of income, and irreparably damages the environment. Paul Erlich speaks for a multitude when he says, "We must acquire a life style which has as its goal maximum freedom and happiness for the individual, not a maximum Gross National Product."”

James Tobin (1918–2002) American economist

Nordhaus, William D., and James Tobin. " Is growth obsolete? http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7620.pdf." Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80. <br class="br">1970s and later

“Real economic efficiency implies including all resources that affect sustainable human well-being in the allocation system, not just marketed goods and services. Our current market allocation system excludes most non-marketed natural and social capital assets and services that are critical contributors to human well-being. The current economic model ignores this and therefore does not achieve real economic efficiency. A new, sustainable ecological economic model would measure and include the contributions of natural and social capital and could better approximate real economic efficiency.”

Robert Costanza (1950) American economist

Source: Toward a New Sustainable Economy, 2008, p. 46

“This branch of economics has suffered from several intellectual mistakes. The major mistake has been the presumption that standard economic theory is inadequate for understanding low income countries and that a separate economic theory is needed. Models developed for this purpose were widely acclaimed until it became evident that they were at best intellectual curiosities.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

"The Economics of Being Poor," (1979)

“What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

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Context: What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today.

“The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 51.

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
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After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

“Though he died in 1946, Keynes still dominated economics at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. It wasn't just that all the leading figures among the faculty, Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson, Brian Reddaway, David Champernowne, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Meade, had been his pupils and/or collaborators. It was the tone of the place. The study of economics, theoretical or empirical, was driven by the desire to improve the conduct of economic policy. This did not mean that pure theory was neglected. Indeed, in those years Robinson was fighting a stirring battle in the realms of high theory with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nor was Cambridge innocent of the cutting edge of econometric technique. Richard Stone, who, following Keynes's suggestions, had created the first modern national income accounts, was still director of the Department of Applied Economics where much of modern econometrics was pioneered. Nonetheless, we were taught that theory and technique should serve the higher cause of rational economic policies, and to use our newly learned econometric expertise to write essays on unemployment, or inflation, or the balance of trade, or some other topic at the top of the current political agenda.”

John Eatwell, Baron Eatwell (1945) British economist

"Citizen Keynes", 1994

“First and foremost, Keynesian economics is a theory of aggregate demand and of the effects of aggregate demand on real output and inflation.”

Alan Blinder (1945) economist

"The fall and rise of Keynesian economics", (1988)

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Alfred P. Sloan47

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