Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

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

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.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

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.

Governments can enhance growth by increasing inclusiveness.

A country's most valuable resource is its people. So it is essential to ensure that everyone can live up to their potential, which requires educational opportunities for all.

Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.

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.

The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush's Jr.

friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier.

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.

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.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

GDP tells you nothing about sustainability

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.

But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.

Anybody who knows about capitalism knows that bankruptcy is an essential part of capitalism.

If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future - and these markets clearly did not exist - what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?

Unfettered market American-style capitalism doesn't work.

Developing countries can't afford that kind of luxury. They just can't afford it. Period. If there's a mistake, they can't afford to put out $2 trillion.

The fact that the government had to put up hundreds of billions of dollars to Citibank in guarantees was a public declaration that Citibank was a mess. Making Citibank go through financial restructuring would not have conveyed any more different information. So it's very hard to see why it would have had that kind of a panic if it were done well.

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

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.

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.

The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.

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

Not everybody is qualified to go to Stanford, but everybody should have access to the best qualify for which they are eligible.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development;

MIT in my development as a professional economist.

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

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

The proposal for a new global reserve currency - or Special Drawing Rights - is a good idea for many reasons. Yes, for the Chinese it would cushion any fall in the value of the dollar per se because it would only be part of a basket of other currencies, including the yen and the euro.

The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.

Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that's gonna continue.

As a rich country, we can, in some sense, "afford" the war.

But spending money on the war means that we are not spending money on other things that we could have spent the money on.

Workers' rights should be a central focus of development.

The Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded - 17,000 so far including roughly 20 percent with serious brain and head injuries. Even the estimate of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and healthcare costs that taxpayers will have to spend for years to come.

We noted the psychological problems facing many of the returning from Iraq veterans - of the 700,000 returning veterans, more than a 100,000 have been diagnosed with problems, but the numbers are likely to get worse, as those with multiple deployments return. We should have valued the loss of life as a result of these suicides, using the same procedures we used for the loss of those who died in combat.

Global demand for dollars has supplanted demand for manufactured goods and services, resulting in multilateral trade deficits and loss of jobs at home.

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.

I'm writing from New Zealand - a country that decided from the beginning that the War was wrong, and chose not to participate in Iraq War.

What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.

When you think of policies that are going to address inequality of wealth, you have to be very thoughtful about what economists call "incidence of taxes." If most of the savings is being done by capitalists, and you tax the return on capital, then they will have less to invest. That would mean, over the long run, that the rate of interest would go up. That would therefore undo some of the intent to lower the income of capitalists.

Climate change is a reality.

The national debt will have increased by approximately 50% in just eight years! We will have created a new unfunded entitlement - disability and health care benefits for the huge number of disabled veterans returning from the Iraq war.

I don't think if we had been able to make that choice rationally, we would have said that's what we want to do. We would have said: "Can't we save the banks and solve our health care problems?" The answer is yes. You could have.