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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’.

— Tjalling Koopmans

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More quotes by Tjalling Koopmans

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)

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