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Who really said it

Teach a Parrot to Say 'Supply and Demand' and You Have an Economist

Not Thomas Carlyle — an anonymous jibe he never wrote Anonymous Earliest known printing 1907 · quoted, unattributed, by the economist Irving Fisher
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

The joke was already in print — and already anonymous — in 1907, when the Yale economist Irving Fisher quoted it on page 6 of The Rate of Interest as something “once wittily remarked” about earlier writers. Carlyle’s name was first attached to it in 1931, explicitly as a guess and fifty years after he died; Quote Investigator finds no substantive support for the ascription ↗.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Teach a Parrot to Say 'Supply and Demand' and You Have an Economist” Not Thomas Carlyle. The parrot-and-economist jibe first appears in print in Irving Fisher, The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination and Relation to Economic Phenomena (New York: Macmillan, 1907), page 6, where Fisher quotes it as an anonymous remark: "Catch a parrot and teach him to say 'supply and demand,' and you have an excellent economist." The earliest link to Carlyle is a hedged guess by Frank A. Fetter in The Masquerade of Monopoly (1931), fifty years after Carlyle's death. Source: Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: Teach a Parrot to Say 'Supply and Demand' and You Have an Economist," 19 July 2013. · Verbatim: “Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Thomas Carlyle. Use the credit shown above instead.

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Provenance

The earliest version anyone has found

Earliest known printing
The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination and Relation to Economic Phenomena
Author & edition
Irving Fisher · Macmillan, New York, 1907 · page 6
Credited to
No one — Fisher calls it a remark “once wittily” made about the early writers on economic problems
First tied to Carlyle
1931, and only as a guess — Frank A. Fetter, The Masquerade of Monopoly

But “supply and demand” is a phrase which has been too often forced into service to cover up difficult problems. Even economists have been prone to employ it to describe economic causation which they could not unravel. It was once wittily remarked of the early writers on economic problems, “Catch a parrot and teach him to say ‘supply and demand,’ and you have an excellent economist.” Prices, wages, rent, interest, and profits were thought to be fully “explained” by this glib phrase. Irving Fisher, 1907

Transcribed from the scanned Macmillan first edition, page 6. Fisher told the joke again, at greater length, in his 1910 textbook Introduction to Economic Science, saying it dated from “a long time ago” — and again naming no author. Both citations at Quote Investigator ↗

Scanned first edition
The Rate of Interest (Macmillan, 1907) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1850 to 1992

How we verified this

  • 1850–1897 — the raw material. Writers were already sneering at “supply and demand” as parrot words: a reviewer in Cooper’s Journal used exactly that phrase in 1850, the labour leader T. V. Powderly called the business man’s explanation “parrot-like” in 1886, and by 1897 a critic wrote that an author “repeats the stock assertions on supply and demand like a trained parrot.” Citations at Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1907 — the joke itself, in print, with nobody’s name on it. Irving Fisher set it on page 6 of The Rate of Interest as something “once wittily remarked” — already an anonymous chestnut he expected readers to recognise. Read the page in the 1907 first edition ↗
  • 1931 — Carlyle’s name arrives, hedged. Frank A. Fetter opened a chapter called “Teach a Parrot” with “It was probably Thomas Carlyle’s none too gentle pen that first wrote…” — a guess, offered fifty years after Carlyle died, with no source given. The Masquerade of Monopoly at the Internet Archive ↗
  • Carlyle’s own books don’t contain it. Past and Present (1843), where he goes after political economy hardest, uses the phrase “supply-and-demand” seventeen times and never once uses the word “parrot.” Nor does the line appear anywhere on his Wikiquote page, sourced or otherwise. Past and Present at Project Gutenberg ↗

Nobody knows who wrote the line, so there is no work and no first-publication date for rights to attach to — the wording that circulates under Carlyle’s name matches no identifiable source. The one text quoted on this page that can be dated, Irving Fisher’s The Rate of Interest (Macmillan, 1907), is long in the public domain in the United States; but Fisher’s sentence is not the sentence people share.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Four things the quote sites get wrong

Carlyle is one of the internet’s great quote magnets, and this line sticks because it sounds exactly like him. The trail behind it is a good deal thinner than the confidence with which it is repeated.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) No evidence

The first person to connect Carlyle with the joke was the economist Frank A. Fetter, in The Masquerade of Monopoly (1931), and he hedged it in the same sentence: “It was probably Thomas Carlyle’s none too gentle pen that first wrote: Teach a parrot to say supply and demand, and you have made a political economist.” A guess, with no citation, published fifty years after Carlyle’s death. Quote Investigator quotes the passage in full ↗

“Teach a parrot the terms ‘supply and demand’ and you’ve got an economist” Modern paraphrase

This is the form the quote sites carry, and it matches nothing in the documented record. The 1907 text reads “Catch a parrot and teach him to say ‘supply and demand,’ and you have an excellent economist”; Fetter’s 1931 version ends “and you have made a political economist.” AZQuotes runs the modern wording under Carlyle’s name ↗

Joseph Schumpeter Also not the originator

A 1992 New York Times review of a Schumpeter biography listed “Catch a parrot, teach him to say ‘Supply and Demand’ and you have an economist” among the aphorisms he scribbled down — but the review did not credit him with coining it, and the joke was already in print in 1907. See the chronology ↗

Carlyle really did despise “supply-and-demand” Why it sticks

He coined the dismal science for political economy in his 1849 essay for Fraser’s Magazine, and Past and Present (1843) hammers the hyphenated phrase “supply-and-demand” seventeen times. What that book never does, anywhere in its length, is use the word parrot. Search the full text at Project Gutenberg ↗

A genuine 19th-century sentiment wearing a 20th-century joke’s clothes: sneering at “supply and demand” as mere “parrot words” runs back to at least 1850, but the gag itself surfaces anonymously in 1907, and nobody has ever found it in anything Carlyle wrote. Quote Investigator’s verdict ↗

Context

A genuine grudge, borrowed for someone else’s joke

Carlyle earned this joke without writing it. In 1849 he pinned on political economy the label that has followed it ever since — the dismal science — and six years earlier Past and Present had already treated “supply-and-demand” as a kind of incantation the age muttered instead of thinking. Attach a parrot gag about supply and demand to any Victorian and Carlyle is the one it sticks to.

The joke’s actual ancestry is scruffier and more interesting. Through the second half of the 19th century, labour writers and art critics kept reaching for the same bird: “supply and demand” were “parrot words” in Cooper’s Journal in 1850; a Knights of Labor leader called the business man’s stock explanation “parrot-like” in 1886; a reviewer in 1897 wrote that an author repeated the stock assertions on supply and demand “like a trained parrot.” By 1907 the metaphor had hardened into a gag with a punchline, and Irving Fisher could quote it as common property. Quote Investigator lays out the chain ↗

Fisher didn’t claim it. Fetter only guessed at it. Carlyle never wrote it.

How the punchline drifted: business man → noted economist → Carlyle

1928. In The Road to Plenty, William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings give the line to an unnamed “some one” — and the punchline is a different profession entirely: “Teach a parrot to say ‘supply and demand’ and you have made a business man.”

1931. Frank A. Fetter titles a whole chapter of The Masquerade of Monopoly “Teach a Parrot,” opens it with the Carlyle guess, and closes it by insisting that “Carlyle’s epigram must be amended” — treating an attribution he had just hedged as established fact a dozen pages later.

1950 to 1989. A US textbook still credits only “a noted economist” in 1950. By 1989 Stephen L. Slavin’s Introduction to Economics prints it as a free-standing epigraph signed “—Thomas Carlyle,” and the modern attribution is locked in. All three citations at Quote Investigator ↗

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Doubt Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the parrot and the economistquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Dated citations from 1850 to 1992, including the 1907 Fisher instance and the hedged 1931 Carlyle ascription.
Fisher, The Rate of Interest (1907)archive.org

Scanned Macmillan first edition. The parrot remark sits on page 6, quoted by Fisher without an author.
Carlyle, Past and Present (1843)gutenberg.org

Carlyle’s most sustained attack on “supply-and-demand” — the phrase appears seventeen times; the word “parrot” appears not once.
Thomas Carlyle on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carlyle’s sourced, attributed, disputed and misattributed quotations. The parrot line appears in none of those sections.
Fetter, The Masquerade of Monopolyarchive.org

Catalog record for the book where the Carlyle guess starts — scanned from the A. M. Kelley reprint of the 1931 edition.
“The dismal science”en.wikipedia.org

Why Carlyle is a magnet for economics jokes: he coined the phrase for political economy in his 1849 Fraser’s Magazine essay.

The name it always lands on

Why the joke found him

Thomas Carlyle

1795–1881 · Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher

Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire in 1795 and died in London in 1881 — the “sage of Chelsea,” author of Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution and Past and Present. He spent much of his career attacking the political economy of his day, and in 1849 handed it the nickname it has never shaken: the dismal science. Past and Present (1843) reaches for the hyphenated phrase “supply-and-demand” seventeen times — which is exactly why a parrot joke about that phrase drifted onto him half a century after his death, even though he never told it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented instance

Irving Fisher, The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination and Relation to Economic Phenomena (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 6 — the earliest instance located by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Teach a Parrot to Say ‘Supply and Demand’ and You Have an Economist,” 19 July 2013. Fisher names no author; no source for the line exists in Carlyle’s works.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Teach a Parrot to Say 'Supply and Demand' and You Have an Economist’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/teach-a-parrot-to-say-supply-and-demand-and-you-have-an/

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