Thomas J. Sargent quotes

I think you've got to watch out for anybody in high school who says he wants to become an economist. (Thomas J. Sargent)
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
My recollection is that Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott were initially very enthusiastic about rational expectations econometrics. After all, it simply involved imposing on ourselves the same high standards we had criticized the Keynesians for failing to live up to. But after about five years of doing likelihood ratio tests on rational expectations models, I recall Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott both telling me that those tests were rejecting too many good models. (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