How can you tell when an economist is lying?
His lips are moving.

A woman hears from her doctor that she has only half a year to live. The doctor advises her to marry an economist and to live in South Dakota. The woman asks: will this cure my illness? Answer of the doctor: No, but the half year will seem pretty long.

Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds Demand.

If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.
Winston Churchill

from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, Chapter 16.
Arthur awoke to the sound of argument and went to the bridge. Ford was waving his arms about. "You're crazy Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to be economists, it's..."

Three econometricians went out hunting, and came across a large deer. The first econometrician fired, but missed, by a meter to the left. The second econometrician fired, but also missed, by a meter to the right. The third econometrician didn't fire, but shouted in triumph, "We got it! We got it!"

Found in a paper of Anatol RAPOPORT (Scientific American, July 1967) who tells the following joke which he found in 'The Complete Strategist' by J. D. Williams: "Two policemen are considering the problem of catching the bandit. One of them starts to calculate the optimal mixed strategy for the chase. The other policeman protests. 'While we're doodling,' he points out, 'he is making his getaway.' 'Relax,' says the game-theorist policeman. 'He's got to figure it out too, don't he?'"

Q:Why did God create economists ?
A:In order to make weather forecasters look good.

Q: How many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Eight. One to screw it in and seven to hold everything else constant.

Conversation between two Dinosaurs:
Dinosaur #1: "How many economists does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
Dinosaur #2: "What is an economist?"
Dinosaur #1: "A flunkie mathematician who tries to predict the population of kangaroos in Australia. But that's not important and don't ask what a Kangaroo is."
Dinosaur #2: "I don't know, how many?"
Dinosaur #1: "10 economists and one grad student. One economist to make a model, one to run the regression, one to test the hypothesis, one to interpret the results, one to conclude how to screw it on, one grad student to screw it on, and five economists trying to fight off the dinosaurs trying to eat them.

Economists have forecasted 9 out of the last 5 recessions.

Someone once said about partisan analysts that they use economic data the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination. Or as Disraeli put it, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
-Paul Krugman

Value of human capital:
Engineers and scientists will never make as much money as business executives. Now a rigorous mathematical proof that explains why this is true:
Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.
As every engineer knows,
Work
---------- = Power
Time

Since Knowledge = Power, and Time =Money, we have
Work
--------- = Knowledge
Money

Solving for Money, we get:
Work
----------- = Money
Knowledge

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity regardless of the Work done.
Conclusion: The Less you Know, the more money you Make.

A traveller wandering on an island inhabited entirely by cannibals comes upon a butcher shop. This shop specialised in human brains differentiated according to source. The sign in the shop read:
Artists' Brains $9/lb
Philosophers' Brains $12/lb
Scientists' Brains $15/lb
Economists' Brains $19/lb
Upon reading the sign, the traveller noted, "My those economists' brains must be popular!" To which the butcher replied, "Are you kidding! Do you have any idea how many economists you have to kill to get a pound of brains?!"
HA! ... It's a *supply side* joke!

An economist returns to visit his old school. He's interested in the current exam questions and asks his old professor to show some. To his surprise they are exactly the same ones to which he had answered 10 years ago! When he asks about this the professor answers: "the questions are always the same - only the answers change!"

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Laurence J. Peter

They say that Christopher Columbus was the first economist. When he left to discover America, he didn't know where he was going. When he got there he didn't know where he was. And it was all done on a government grant.

Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, a practical economist, and an old drunk are walking down the street together when they simultaneously spot a hundred dollar bill. Who gets it? The old drunk, of course, the other three are mythological creatures.

Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the opposite thing.

Humor is evolving, now we have a refinement:

"Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying the opposite thing" is true, but is not strong enough. Better:

"Economics is the only field in which two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying opposing things." Specifically, Myrdahl and Hayek shared one.

A COWSMIC VIEW OF WORLD ORGANIZATION

FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and as many eggs as the regulations say you should need.

FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

SINGAPORE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government fines you for keeping two unlicensed animals in an apartment.

MILITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate".

BRITISH DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You feed them sheep's brains and they go mad. The government doesn't do anything.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. After that it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors kill you and take the cows.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

HONG KONG CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because the Feng Shui is bad.

ENVIRONMENTALISM: You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.

FEMINISM: You have two cows. They get married and adopt a veal calf.

TOTALITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: You are associated with (the concept of "ownership"is a symbol of the phallo-centric, war-mongering, intolerant past) two differently-aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.

COUNTER CULTURE: Wow, dude, there's like... these two cows, man. You got to have some of this milk. Far out! Awesome!

SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

JAPANESE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You give the milk to gangsters so they don't ask any awkward questions about who you're giving the milk to.

EUROPEAN FEDERALISM: You have two cows which cost too much money to care for because everybody is buying milk imported from some cheap east-European country and would never pay the fortune you'd have to ask for your cows' milk. So you apply for financial aid from the European Union to subsidise your cows and are granted enough subsidies. You then sell your milk at the former elevated price to some government-owned distributor which then dumps your milk onto the market at east-European prices to make Europe competitive. You spend the money you got as a subsidy on two new cows and then go on a demonstration to Brussels complaining that the European farm-policy is going drive you out of your job.

+EASTERN EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You sell the milk (diluted with some water) at a high price to the neighbors or to anyone at the open-air market. If somebody asks for receipt, you charge for a two times higher price, so nobody will request an invoice. For concerned families with small babies you claim that the milk is "bio", though you collect the grass for feeding at the side of the highway and you keep the milk in plastic barrels used previously as containers of dangerous chemicals. Later, your neighbor or anybody from town will steal the cows and will buy their meat for a high price, and if you ask for a receipt, you will be charged for a two times higher price.