Tjalling Koopmans

"The principal customers aimed for are other economists or members of other professions, who are somewhat closer to the making of policy recommendations... The question of the clientèle is even more ba…"

"One can in particular interpret the proposition as a statement conditions under which the simplicity of incentive structure and the economies of information handling characteristic of a competitive ma…"

"a clearer separation, in the construction of economic knowledge, between reasoning and recognition of facts, for the better protection of both."

"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 …"

"… a rather different class of applications of the idea of best allocation of scarce resources... usually referred to as the theory of optimal economic growth. In most studies of this kind made in the …"

"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 equ…"

"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."

"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."