Alan Blinder Quotes

United States, Economist
October 14, 1945

Alan Stuart Blinder is an American economist. He serves at Princeton University as the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs in the Economics Department, and vice chairman of The Observatory Group. He founded Princeton's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies in 1990. Since 1978 he has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a co-founder and a vice chairman of the Promontory Interfinancial Network, LLC. He is among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc, and is "considered one of the great economic minds of his generation."

The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth.

Alan Blinder
- Truth
- Duty
- Banker
If you try to give an on-the-one-hand-or-the-other- hand answer, only one of the hands tends to get quoted.

Alan Blinder
- Hand
- Answer
- Quoted

Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam.

Alan Blinder
- Life
- Test
- Exam
Monetary policy decisions tend to regress toward the mean and to be inertial—and hence biased in just the same way that adaptive expectations are biased relative to rational expectations. But errors like that, while systematic, will generally be small and will tend to shrink over time. And, in return, the system builds in natural safeguards against truly horrendous mistakes.

Alan Blinder
Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond to it.

Alan Blinder
- Opinion
- Democracy
- Input
In the classic old business cycle, there would be a diminution in sales; it would take a little while for this information to reach corporate headquarters. And there would be an inventory pileup. And then - bam - businesses would react, sometimes violently, by cutting production.

Alan Blinder
'Murphys law of economic policy': Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

Alan Blinder
There is a kind of a cascading chain, ... If one can't sell, then that business doesn't buy and that means the next business doesn't sell, and the previous business doesn't sell, and so on.

Alan Blinder
- Business
- Buy
- Sell

Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

Alan Blinder
In central banking circles, it is viewed as obvious that the accumulation and destruction of reputational capital more closely resembles adaptive than rational expectations — it lags behind reality. Here, I think, the central bankers are closer to the truth than the economic theorists.

Alan Blinder