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Economics is all about consumption. People either spend money now or they use financial instruments - like bonds, stocks and savings accounts - so they can spend more later.

I work with the macro economy, which involves the major variables that measure the health of the whole economy, such as total consumption, investment, income, employment, and inflation.

Economics should be defined in terms of what it is about. It should be about how people produce things, how people exchange them, how people earn income, how they pay taxes, how the government provides infrastructure with tax revenue, and how it conducts monetary policy. The subject has to be defined in terms of the object of inquiry.

The major driver of economics is the equilibrium approach, which has taken various forms over the years. General equilibrium is the statement that all the different parts of the economy influence each other, even if it's remote, like mortgage-backed securities and their demands on automobiles.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

Economics is a strange science. Our subject deals with some of the most important as well as mundane issues that impinge on the human condition.

We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.

In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.