Joseph Stiglitz Famous Quotes
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American inequality didn't just happen. It was created.
No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.
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.
What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.
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 must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.
Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.
Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.
I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
World War II was really unusual, because America was in the Great Depression before. So the war did help the US economy to get securely out of this decline. This time, the war [in Iraq] is bad for the economy in both the short and long run. We could have spent trillions in research or education instead. This would have led to future productivity increases.
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.
I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.
I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: "What kind of financial or banking system do we want?" Macro, you would say: "What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?"
I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.
Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can't function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations.
International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.
Most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.
In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.
You can't overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.
I think in part the reason is that seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are.
I think that for the developing world there are many versions of capitalism, and countries have to choose one that's appropriate.
Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that's gonna continue.
The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid.
One has to always ask the question: Where can one be most effective in helping shape policies? It is always difficult when you're inside because you're very constrained.
For that to happen, growth has to be very strong. To get back to normalcy, we will have to have extended growth of more than 3 percent. That's not in the cards.
Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.
In debate, one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue - it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.
I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.
Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
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.
We could have saved Wall Street without putting our future in jeopardy. I predicted that there would be all-around consequences - in the long run as well as in the short run. People are now saying we can't afford health care reform because we spent all the money on the banks. So, in effect, we're saying that it's better that we give rich bankers a couple of trillion than giving ordinary Americans access to health care.
Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.
If you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here.
When I said "the pocket of the banks," it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.
What most Americans mean when they say "the end of the recession" is, "When will it be back to normal? When can we get jobs? When will the employment rate be back to 4 percent or 5 percent?"
The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.
Wall Street banks have used the same tactic that Bush used in the war on terror - fear - and they've basically said that if you don't do what we tell you, the sky will fall. If you don't do what we tell you, it will be the end of capitalism as we know it. The failure of Lehman Brothers lent some credence to those fears.
Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.
Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.
But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.
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.
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.
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 reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.
GDP tells you nothing about sustainability
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 extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.
Climate change is a reality.
They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.
I recognized that information was, in many respects, like a public good, and it was this insight that made it clear to me that it was unlikely that the private market would provide efficient resource allocations whenever information was endogenous.
There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history-a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it's crucial to get the history straight.