Thomas J. Sargent quotes

Thomas J. Sargent is an American economist recognized for his pioneering work in macroeconomics, particularly in rational expectations theory. His research has deeply influenced modern economic thought and policy-making. He is a Nobel laureate and continues to be a leading figure in economic science. Here are 19 of his quotes:

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

Thomas J. Sargent

The first and most optimistic response was complete rational expectations econometrics. A rational expectations equilibrium is a likelihood function. Maximize it.

Thomas J. Sargent

Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.

Thomas J. Sargent

My published work is just a record of my learning. I'm sharing it with people so they won't make the same mistakes that I did. It's been a painful and slow process. My work is like a journey, a journey of discovery.

Thomas J. Sargent

Lucas attended a conference on rational expectations at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1973. The day after the conference, I received a call from Pittsburgh.

Thomas J. Sargent

Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.

Thomas J. Sargent

For policy, the central fact is that Keynesian policy recommendations have no sounder basis, in a scientific sense, than recommendations of non-Keynesian economists or, for that matter, non-economists.

Thomas J. Sargent

Q: "Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years?”.

Thomas J. Sargent

What policymakers (and econometricians) should recognize, then, is that societies face a meaningful set of choices about alternative economic policy regimes.

Thomas J. Sargent

Cagan's adaptive mechanism for explaining expectations of inflation has sometimes been criticized as an ad hoc formulation that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that expectations are rational. In this paper, we have showed that conditions exist under which adaptive expectations are fully rational.

Thomas J. Sargent

It is paradoxical that an administration that came to office rejecting the whole apparatus of Keynesian economics finds itself presiding over a stream of what threaten to be permanent deficits.

Thomas J. Sargent

An alternative "rational expectations” view denies that there is any inherent momentum in the present process of inflation. This view maintains that firms and workers have now come to expect high rates of inflation in the future and that they strike inflationary bargains in light of these expectations.

Thomas J. Sargent

These ideas have implications not only for theoretical and econometric practices but also for the ways in which policymakers and their advisers think about the choices confronting them. In particular, the rational expectations approach directs attention away from particular isolated actions and toward choices among feasible rules of the game, or repeated strategies for choosing policy variables. While Keynesian and monetarists macroeconomic models have been used to try to analyze what the effects of isolated actions would be, it is now clear that the answers they have given have necessarily been bad, if only because such questions are ill-posed.

Thomas J. Sargent

There was a danger that skeptics and opponents would misread those likelihood ratio tests as rejections of an entire class of models, which of course they were not.

Thomas J. Sargent

I'm happy to say I am a Harrison-Kreps-Keynesian.

Thomas J. Sargent

In the 1980s, there were occasions when it made sense to say, 'it is too difficult to maximize the likelihood function, and besides if we do, it will blow our model out of the water.'

Thomas J. Sargent

I wasn't the brightest kid, not by a long shot. I was interested in football, in girls, in getting my work done with the least amount of effort.

Thomas J. Sargent