13 Quotes by Robert Lucas, Jr.

Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions about human capital spillovers are simply staggering. Once one starts to think about them, it’s hard to think of anything else.

Most trails can be fairly simple.

Solitude is an essential quality of wilderness.

The potential gains from improved stabilization policies are on the order of hundredths of a percent of consumption, perhaps two orders of magnitude smaller than the potential benefits of available supply-side fiscal reforms.

I was born in 1937, in Yakima, Washington, the oldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton Lucas. My sister Jenepher was born in 1939 and my brother Peter in 1940. My parents had moved to Yakima from Seattle to open a small restaurant, The Lucas Ice Creamery.

The central predictions of the quantity theory are that, in the long run, money growth should be neutral in its effects on the growth rate of production and should affect the inflation rate on a one-for-one basis.

The observation that money changes induce output changes in the same direction receives confirmation in some data sets but is hard to see in others. Large-scale reductions in money growth can be associated with large-scale depressions or, if carried out in the form of a credible reform, with no depression at all.

I obtained a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Fellowship and entered the graduate program in History at the University of California. With no Greek or French and minimal Latin and German, I was in no position to pursue my classical interests, so I began work at Berkeley with little more than an open mind.