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Tjalling Koopmans Quotes
1910–1985 Netherlands
Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was a Dutch-American mathematician and economist, the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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One is led to conclude that economics as a scientific discipline is still somewhat hanging in the air.
Three Essays (1957)
Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.
We look upon economic theory as a sequence of conceptual models that seek to express in simplified form different aspects of an always more complicated reality.
Three Essays (1957)
Optimizing responses of economic agents are simultaneously feasible only if the proper prices are already known to them. But these prices must somehow themselves be the result of the same responses.
If evolutionary selection is the basis for a belief in profit maximization, 'then we should postulate that basis itself and not the profit maximization which it implies in certain circumstances.
Three Essays (1957)
Decisions and plans made by others... [can be judged to be] quantitatively at least as important as the primary uncertainty arising from random acts of nature and unpredictable changes in consumers' preferences.
Three Essays (1957)
Without recognising indivisibilities — in human person, in residences, plants, equipment, and in transportation — location patterns, down to those of the smallest village, cannot be understood
Three Essays (1957)
The solution of important problems may be delayed because the requisite tools are not perceived. Or the availability of certain tools may lead to an awareness of problems, important or not, that can be solved with their help.
Three Essays (1957)
[This work urges] a clearer separation, in the construction of economic knowledge, between reasoning and recognition of facts, for the better protection of both.
Three Essays (1957)
According to a frequently cited definition, economics is the study of “best use of scarce resources.” The definition is incomplete. “Second best” use of resources, and outright wasteful uses, have equal claim to attention. They are the other side of the coin.
While it was long possible and sometimes tempting for physicists to deny the usefulness of the molecular hypothesis, we economists have the good luck of being some of the ‘molecules’ of economic life ourselves, and of having the possibility through human contacts to study the behavior of other ‘molecules’.
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