Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Prochnow

Prochnow’s line lands like a boardroom heckle aimed straight at the economist-as-oracle. The surface joke is simple: when decisions actually get good, the economists will be absent. The sharper subtext is about jurisdiction. In corporate life, “better” decisions often come from messy, situated knowledge: the sales manager who hears objections in real time, the operations lead who knows which bottleneck is about to snap, the executive who can read a credit market’s mood before the data is clean. Economists, by contrast, arrive with models built to generalize, and generalization is the enemy of the one-off crisis and the weird edge case where real money is lost.

The line works because it flips the prestige hierarchy. Economists are typically cast as the adults in the room, custodians of rationality. Prochnow suggests they’re a luxury good: impressive, sometimes useful, but rarely decisive when the stakes are immediate. It’s also a quiet dig at retrospective wisdom. Economists often excel at explaining why something had to happen after it happens, converting contingency into inevitability. That rhetorical move can make businesses feel “smart” while changing nothing about how they decide.

Context matters: Prochnow wrote from inside midcentury American business culture, when management was professionalizing and hungry for scientific legitimacy. His quip is an early warning about outsourcing judgment to credentialed abstraction. The punchline isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-alibi: don’t confuse analytic language with accountable choices.