Ely Devons, an English economist, once said at a meeting,
“If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’” And they would soon discover that they would maximize their utilities. (Coase 1999)

This Ely Devons‘ astute quote was mentioned by a notable Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences laureate Ronald Coase in his famous lecture at the International Society of New Institutional Economics conference (1999), which is especially worth to be reading by economists who, according to Coase, “do not study the workings of the actual economic system”, while their discipline “over the years, has become more and more abstract and divorced from events in the real world”. Well, that’s from the horse’s mouth…

(See here more economists’ surprisingly truthful quotes on economics)

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