Joseph Stiglitz Quotes
-
Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.
→ -
Twenty per cent of American children grow up in poverty, and that means they get inadequate nutrition, inadequate health care, and because we have a very local education system, they get inadequate access to education. With those as a starting base, you perpetuate inequality. That's why, here in New York, Mayor de Blasio has made a big deal of trying to focus on preschool education, because by five years old, there are already huge differences. We've finally begun to recognize it.
→ -
Trump said we got snookered. That those agreements like NAFTA were the worst agreements ever and suggested that our trade negotiators were snookered by these smart negotiators from Mexico or Africa. It is laughable. I have watched these trade negotiations. We got what we wanted.
→ -
It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.
→ -
In the U.S., you couldn't have job creation with interest rates of 30 or 40 percent. They had a philosophy that said job creation was automatic. I wish it were true. Just a short while after hearing, from the same preachers, sermons about how globalization and opening up capital markets would bring them unprecedented growth, workers were asked to listen to sermons about "bearing pain." Wages began falling 20 to 30 percent, and unemployment went up by a factor of two, three, four, or ten.
→ -
The decision-making process in the White House does not let most issues get up to the President. The Council thought opening up global markets to derivatives that would destabilize other countries wasn't likely to create a lot of jobs in the U.S. and might adversely affect U.S. interests by causing global economic instability.
→ -
But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
→ -
The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.
→ -
I've always been sceptical about the notion that the market is a person you can engage in an argument with, and that that person is an intelligent, rational, well-intentioned person: it is fantasy. We know that ... the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and is vindictive ... You're dealing with a crazy man ... Having got what he wants he will still kill you.
→ -
The roots of the crisis in East Asia were in private sector decisions. The biggest problems were the misallocation of investment, most notably to speculative real estate, and risky financing, especially borrowing short-term debt on international markets.
→ -
We are helping the people that [George W.]Bush says are evil. Teheran couldn't be happier about the high oil prices resulting from the Iraq war.
→ -
The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.
→ -
Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.
→ -
They [political leaders ] thought the only problem was the banking system, and if they fixed the banking system, all would be fine. But the banking system and the mortgage problem were symptomatic of some deeper problems, and evidently they still haven't recognized those deeper problems.
→ -
In the midst of the East Asian crisis, there were choices. One choice would have been to encourage countries to implement a bankruptcy law that could have threatened the interests of the lenders. Workers' rights should be a central focus of development. But nowhere did issues of workers' rights, including the right to participate in the decisions which would affect their lives in so many ways, get raised.
→ -
Countries were told they had no incentives because of social ownership. The solution was privatization and profit, profit, profit. Privatization would replace inefficient state ownership, and the profit system plus the huge defense cutbacks would let them take existing resources and an increase in consumption. Worries about distribution and competition or even concerns about democratic processes being undermined by excessive concentration of wealth could be addressed later.
→ -
When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington.
→ -
I trace the inequality to a particular set of decisions that we took when we lowered the tax rate from 91% down to very low levels at the top, where we stripped away regulations. So the result of that was not a more dynamic economy, but a more unequal society. We tried the experiment of trickle-down. A third of a century later, we can say fairly definitively that it was a failure.
→ -
You can't overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.
→ -
I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
→ -
As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.
→ -
There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.
→ -
Nationalization of private debts undermines prudential lender behavior and is a government intervention in the market.
→ -
The military is focusing only on the short run costs. If they don't provide appropriate body armor, they save some money today, but the healthcare cost is going to be the future for some other president down the line. I view that as both fiscally and morally irresponsible.
→ -
Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.
→ -
The country has large unfunded liabilities - social security, health care, and there will have to be some adjustments to these problems. What is scary though is how much worse things have gotten in the last eight years, and the Iraq war is one of the main factors.
→ -
I understand why political leaders in the beginning want to be cheerleaders to generate optimism. But to admit that they didn't understand the depths of the problem afterwards, I found a little bit surprising.
→ -
Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.
→ -
What Trump has announced - that he is going to not obey rules by which we govern our relations with other countries. He's going to reject the treaties that we have had in the past. He is going to go from what is called a multilateral system, where we all work together, to trying to deal country by country and basically throw out what has been achieved over a 60-year period.
→ -
Workers' rights should be a central focus of development.
→
Related Authors
-
Thomas Piketty Economist -
Dani Rodrik Economist -
Paul Samuelson Economist -
Kenneth Arrow Economist -
Kenneth Rogoff Professor -
Nouriel Roubini Economist -
Robert Solow Economist -
Friedrich August von Hayek Economist -
Alan Greenspan Economist -
Lawrence Summers Former Undersecretary for International Affairs -
Jeffrey Sachs Economist -
Amartya Sen Economist -
John Kenneth Galbraith Economist -
John Maynard Keynes Economist -
George Akerlof Economist -
Yanis Varoufakis Finance Minister of Greece -
Milton Friedman Economist -
Greg Mankiw Author -
Paul Krugman Economist -
Bruce Greenwald Professor