“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.”

"The Economics of Being Poor," (1979)

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Theodore Schultz15

American economist 1902–1998

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“Cultural and behavioral scholars are uneasy about this use of their studies. Fortunately, the intellectual tide has begun to turn. Increasing numbers of economists have come to realize that standard economic theory is just as applicable to the scarcity problems that confront low income countries as to the corresponding problems of high income countries.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

"The Economics of Being Poor," (1979)

“Intellectual capital is the main determining factor and the base for economic and social development to any country.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

Meeting the Challenges of Electronic Business” in Muscat, Oman, October 9, 2000.

“There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of pure mathematics.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

John Hicks (1979), quoted in: Nitasha Kaul (2007) Imagining Economics Otherwise. p. 76

“For Marx, ‘pure’ economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

“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 (1875–1966) American businessman

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

“Economists have traditionally been leery at mentalités as a factor in long-term economic development. In the budding literature on the economic rise of the West, such factors have been ignored or curtly dismissed. In the past, economists’ hostility to religious factors stems from the incompleteness of such theories. Attitudes were a matter of degree, not of absolutes.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 171

“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…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

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

“I think the Services can be rightly very upset at the continuous series of defence reviews which the Government has been forced by economic circumstances—and maybe economic mistakes too—to carry out…”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

On BBC Television's Panorama programme (22 January, 1968).
1960s

“The time component of economic production became vital in Hayek’s work in economic theory. Essentially, his economic work could be said to rest on the idea that the price system is a method for coordinating economic activity through time.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“I do not overlook the important contributions to economic theory in the past whether orthodox or heterodox I correlate them with institutional economics. The classical and communistic economists used as their measure of value the man hour of labor. This is evidently since the incoming of scientific management the engineering economics of efficiency. The Austrian and hedonistic economists deriving from Bentham used as the measure of value the diminishing marginal utility of consumption goods. This is evidently the home economics recently introduced in the college curriculum.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional economics," 1936, p. 242

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