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Economists in sentence

2720 examples of Economists in a sentence

Before the financial crisis, when so many private interests and profitable opportunities were at stake, many economists defended a growth model that was based more on “irrational exuberance” than on sound fundamentals.
Similarly, with respect to Brexit, many economists confused the referendum’s long-term impact with its short-term effects, because they were rushing their predictions to fit the political debate.
Owing to these and other mistakes, economists – and economics – have suffered a spectacular fall from grace.
Once seen as modern witch doctors with access to exclusive knowledge, economists are now the most despised of all “experts.”
Economists, especially those involved in policy debates, need to be held explicitly accountable for their professional behavior.
Economists should pay closer attention to when and where they offer their views, and to the possible implications of doing so.
But fishing for ideas in such a small and shallow pond leads to a circular and complacent debate, and it may encourage lesser-known economists to tailor their research to fit in.
But a fairer, more pluralistic discussion of economic ideas may be just what economists need as well.
Egypt’s public debt is around 80% of GDP, very close to the 90% level that economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart identify as a harbinger of slower growth and heightened vulnerability to financial and fiscal crises.
Economists like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen argue that the technological breakthroughs of the past, including piped water, air conditioning, and commercial air travel, had a greater social impact – giving rise to the suburban lifestyle of cars and shopping malls, for example – than many of today’s advances.
The fact that so much innovation is given away for free does not only create a measurement problem for economists; it is also a real problem for those trying to find investment opportunities.
The Perils of Economic ConsensusPRINCETON – The Initiative on Global Markets, based at the University of Chicago, periodically surveys a group of leading academic economists, of varying political persuasions, on the issues of the day.
The economists were virtually unanimous.
Thirty-six of the 37 top economists who responded to the survey said that the plan had been successful in its avowed objective of reducing unemployment.
In fact, economists agree on many things, a number of which are politically controversial.
The following propositions garnered support from at least 90% of economists: import tariffs and quotas reduce general economic welfare; rent controls reduce the supply of housing; floating exchange rates provide an effective international monetary system; the US should not restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries; and fiscal policy stimulates the economy when there is less than full employment.
This consensus about so many important issues contrasts rather starkly with the general perception that economists rarely agree on anything.
“If all the economists were laid end to end,” George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, “they would not reach a conclusion.”
No doubt, there are many public-policy questions that economists debate vigorously.
On these and many other issues, economists tend to be good at seeing both sides of the issue, and I suspect that a survey on such questions would reveal little consensus.
A consensus among economists can arise for both good and bad reasons.
Sometimes a consensus is innocuous enough, as when you hear economists argue that one ignores the role of incentives at one’s peril.
Moreover, it requires that economists make value judgments on distributional effects, which are better left to the electorate itself.
Perhaps economists tend to agree that certain assumptions are more prevalent in the real world.
The problem is that economists often confuse a model for the model.
First, there are errors of omission – cases in which blind spots in the consensus prevent economists from being able to see troubles looming ahead.
A recent example is the failure of economists to grasp the dangerous confluence of circumstances that produced the global financial crisis.
Then there are the errors of commission – cases in which economists’ fixation on one particular model of the world makes them complicit in the administration of policies whose failure could have been predicted ahead of time.
Economists’ advocacy of neoliberal “Washington Consensus” policies and of financial globalization falls into this category.
What happened in both cases is that economists overlooked serious second-best complications, such as learning externalities and weak institutions, which blunted the reforms and, in some cases, caused them to backfire.
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