Top 75 Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

What’s going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection – like in the U.K.

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.

America will suffer under Trump.

America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object of derision.

A politically astute president who understood deeply the economics and politics of corporate tax reform could conceivably muscle Congress toward a reform package that made sense. Trump is not that leader.

China-led globalization in some ways worries me because they are not concerned about human rights, labor rights. They probably aren’t even really concerned about competitive marketplaces. So in some ways, they’re like Mr. Trump.

Hedge funds are not noted for their long-term thinking – for them, a quarter is an eternity.

Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.

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.

It’s very clear that TPP was promoted by corporate interests, it was driven by ideology, not by economic science. And when they started looking at the net trade benefits, they are miniscule.

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.

We share a common planet, and the world has learned the hard way that we have to get along and work together. We have learned, too, that cooperation can benefit all.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.

A lot of my book, ‘The Price of Inequality,’ is about why there has been an increase in rent-seeking.

If Trump wants to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, the rest of the world should impose a carbon-adjustment tax on U.S. exports that do not comply with global standards.

I began my career as a physicist. And in the White House, my buddies were the people from the White House office of science and technology policy. But a lot of the people were lawyers. They like winning an argument, but science-based, evidence-based reasoning was just sort of not in their framework.

Donald J. Trump has the good fortune of taking office as the economy is finally recovering from the 2008 crisis.

High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power.

The Paris climate agreement may be a harbinger of the spirit and mindset needed to sustain genuine global cooperation.

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.

I don’t think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security.

I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.

The IP standards advanced countries favour typically are designed not to maximise innovation and scientific progress, but to maximise the profits of big pharmaceutical companies and others able to sway trade negotiations.

America’s role in the global economy inevitably was going to diminish; we’re smaller relative to – as China, India, other emerging markets grow.

In addition to offering benefits to those who invest, carry out research, and create jobs, higher taxes on land and real-estate speculation would redirect capital toward productivity-enhancing spending – the key to long-term improvement in living standards.

Americans like to say we’re fighting for democracy, and yet young Americans have come to the view that democracy doesn’t deliver.

Globally, manufacturing jobs are on the decline, simply because productivity growth has outpaced growth in demand.

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.

With neoliberalism discredited and austerity failed, we need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again. But this time in the right way. We need rules that focus on long-term economic growth, and the only kind of sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.

To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that U.S. trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations.

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 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.

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.

For Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement – unilaterally abrogated by Trump – was part of the ‘pivot to Asia,’ a re-assertion of the role of America in that part of the world.

After the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the shutdown of much of New York City by Sandy in 2012, and now the devastation wrought on Texas by Harvey, the U.S. can and should do better.

China, with its large emerging middle class, is among the big beneficiaries of globalization.

The bank bailout should have been more focused on helping small and medium sized banks, on helping homeowners. I think the trade agreements are a disaster.

One of the things that happens when you have austerity is that wages get lower, and some people think lower wages in the short run can increase corporate profits.

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn’t go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

It’s very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They’d think you’re crazy.

The Clinton years were not an economic Nirvana; as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during part of this time, I’m all too aware of mistakes and lost opportunities.

Having excessive power in the hands of one country meant the fate of the world was too dependent on what happened in that one country.

We could have managed globalization in ways that ordinary citizens would have benefited rather than just the corporations. Trade is beneficial. There are gains to be had from taking advantage of comparative advantage and specialization. That’s true, if you manage globalization right.

There is something about the mindset of a scientist that is different – an awareness of uncertainty, modeling, proof.

China’s government has far more control over the country’s economy than our government has over ours, and it is moving from export dependence to a model of growth driven by domestic demand. Any restriction on exports to the U.S. would simply accelerate a process already underway.

Trump assumed office promising to ‘drain the swamp‘ in Washington, D.C. Instead, the swamp has grown wider and deeper.

One of the arguments I make for the failure of the euro is that, at the time it was being constructed, there was a ‘neo-liberal’ ideology which said that all we need to do to make this thing work is to get deficits low, keep inflation low, and take down barriers, and then everything would be fine.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.

I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you’re going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.

For the president of the United States, reputation does matter. The reputation of the United States does matter. We are dealing with countries all over the world. They want to know if your word is good. Trump’s word is not good.

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies – whether Australia, the E.U., or Mexico – are stronger. But Trump’s approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

A single currency entails a fixed interest rate, which means countries can’t manage their own currency to suit their own needs. You need a variety of institutions to help nations for which the policies aren’t well suited. Europe introduced the euro without providing those structures.

The diversity of Europe is its strength. But for a single currency to work, over a region with enormous economic and political diversity, is not easy.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

European officials thought that austerity was part of what they called their ‘convergence policies,’ of trying to bring countries together. Instead, it actually made things worse. There’s more inequality within countries and more disparity across countries.

America and the world are paying a high price for devotion to the extreme anti-government ideology embraced by Donald Trump and his Republican party.

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

If manufacturing jobs do come back to the U.S., they will be done by robots in hi-tech parts of the country rather than the Rust Belt states.

When you have a highly divided society, it’s hard to come together to make investments in the common good.

With my kids, I’m a little sappier than my father may have been.

Regulatory reform must move beyond limiting the damage that the financial sector can do and ensure that the sector genuinely serves society.

Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It’s not going to happen in the United States, and it’s not going to happen in Europe.

Too many countries of the former Soviet bloc remain under the control of authoritarian leaders, including some, like the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who have learned how to maintain a more convincing facade of elections than their communist predecessors.

The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged – debating – helped shape my interests in public policy.

Trump can bring jobs back, but they will be minimal-wage jobs, not the high-paying jobs of the 1950s.

One can only hope that America, and other countries, will not need more natural persuasion before taking to heart the lessons of Hurricane Harvey.

Technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining. There is no way that Trump can bring significant numbers of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Free migration within Europe means that countries that have done a better job at reducing unemployment will predictably end up with more than their fair share of refugees. Workers in these countries bear the cost in depressed wages and higher unemployment, while employers benefit from cheaper labor.

What I argued in ‘The Great Divide’ is that societies can’t function without trust, both politically and economically.

In an economy, when the government spends more and invests in the economy, that money circulates, and recirculates again and again. So not only does it create jobs once: the investment creates jobs multiple times.

If Trump actually wants to help those who have been left behind, he must go beyond the ideological battles of the past.