Top 255 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Stiglitz - Page 2

Ensuring preschool education for all and investing more in public schools is essential if the U.S. is to avoid becoming a neo-feudal country where advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.

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

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

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

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.

A less healthy America is not going to be as productive.

There's a long list of investments that governments could and should be making. There is strengthening infrastructure, such as transport and communications; there is investment in education; there is investment in families, particularly putting measures in place that free women from having to make the choice between raising a family and work.

When you're in government, you have a big impact in Washington, but Washington may not be doing very much.

Under the rule of law, if the government wants to prevent firms from outsourcing and offshoring, it enacts legislation and adopts regulations to create the appropriate incentives and discourage undesirable behaviour. It does not bully or threaten particular firms or portray traumatised refugees as a security threat.

If there is a silver lining in the Trump cloud, it is a new sense of solidarity over core values such as tolerance and equality, sustained by awareness of the bigotry and misogyny, whether hidden or open, that Trump and his team embody.

Growth is not an objective in itself; we should be concerned with standards of living.

While it was an experiment to bring them together, nothing has divided Europe as much as the euro.

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.

President Trump sees the world in transactional and zero-sum terms - if something is good for China, it must be bad for the U.S. By contrast, economists see the world in much more nuanced ways: if globalization is well-managed, it can be a positive-sum game, where both the U.S. and China gain; if it is badly managed, it can be negative-sum.

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

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.

Europe can't rely on a Trump-led U.S. for its defence. But, at the same time, it should recognise that the cold war is over - however unwilling to acknowledge it America's industrial-military complex may be.

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.

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

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

Donald Trump's astonishing victory in the U.S. presidential election has made one thing abundantly clear: too many Americans - particularly white male Americans - feel left behind.

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

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.

I'm enough of a political junkie to know if you have large numbers of people much worse off, you're going to have consequences.

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.

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.

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

Trump will fail even in his proclaimed goal of reducing the trade deficit, which is determined by the disparity between domestic savings and investment.

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

Trump has been criticized by mainstream Republicans for not really being one of them. But he is definitely one of them when it comes to the central palliative for any ill befalling the country: a tax cut for the rich.

Tax policy should reflect a country's values and address its problems.

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.

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.

By taxing CO2, firms and households would have an incentive to retrofit for the world of the future. The tax would also provide firms with incentives to innovate in ways that reduce energy usage and emissions - giving them a dynamic competitive advantage.

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

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

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

Letting bygones be bygones is a basic principle in economics.

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.

Negative interest rates hurt banks' balance sheets, with the 'wealth effect' on banks overwhelming the small increase in incentives to lend.

Behind Trump's promise to 'make America great again' lie many fallacies. The most important fallacy is that America's place in the world can be restored to the one it occupied after World War II, when Europe was still recovering from vast devastation and most developing countries were still European colonies. It can't be.

The laws of normal economics dictate that lower taxes combined with increased spending will lead to bigger deficits.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 diminishing economic role of the United States in the global economy means that global political power will also become more dispersed. The world will become multipolar. By clumsily re-asserting a wish for U.S. dominance, Donald Trump is accelerating the opposite.

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.

With the election of Trump, America's soft power has taken a big hit. The United States has moved from a position of leadership in the creation of a rules-based international system to a position of leadership in its destruction and the creation of a regime of global protectionism. The damage will be long-lasting.

America will suffer under Trump.

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.

It is always better to tax bad things than good things.

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.

There is a broad consensus, not only in the United States but in most of the world, that if you are in an economic downturn, you need to stimulate. Germany seems to be an exception.

If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, 'There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.'

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.

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

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