Thomas J. Sargent's Quotes

I think you've got to watch out for anybody in high school who says he wants to become an economist.

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.

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

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

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

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.

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

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.