Best 130 quotes of Joseph Stiglitz on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

Capital market liberalization includes freeing up deposit and lending rates, opening up the market to foreign banks, and removing restrictions on capital account transactions and bank lending. The focus is on deregulation, not on finding the right regulatory structure.

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.

China's accumulation of reserves is a result of the IMF's mismanagement of the Asian financial crisis a decade or so ago. If countries know they can't rely on the IMF to help them, their best defense is their own reserve cushion. In a time of spreading global recession, too much emphasis on savings in surplus countries like China can impede prospects for global growth.

Climate change is a reality.

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.

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

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.

During my three years as chief economist of the World Bank, labor market issues were looked at through the lens of neoclassical economics. A standard message was to increase labor market flexibility. The not-so-subtle subtext was to lower wages and lay off unneeded workers.

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

Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.

Finance ministers and central bank governors have the seats at the table, not labor unions or labor ministers. Finance ministers and central bank governors are linked to financial communities in their countries, so they push policies that reflect the viewpoints and interests of the financial community and barely hear the voices of those who are the first victims of dictated policies.

For 60 years, since World War II, we have been trying to create a rules-based system, a global economic system. We understand that what makes our economy function is what we call the rule of law, and what is true domestically is also true internationally. It is important to have rules by which we govern our relations with other countries.

For instance, one of the costs of the war is that soldiers today get very seriously injured but stay alive, and we can keep them alive but at an enormous price.

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.

For the United States, our political system is clearly distorted. We have gerrymandering so that there is a situation where a million more voters who vote for Democrats, yet the House is controlled by the Republicans. So clearly, the way our Congress operates is important. The other big issue is the influence of money in politics. It's not only campaign contributions. People like Trump - either you become very dependent on your benefactors or you are very rich.

Fortunately, America remains a robust democracy, where most individuals are not afraid to speak out. What we have done in Iraq has, however, compromised out standing as an advocate of basic human rights - the prime minister of one country responding to criticism of America for its human rights put it, it was liking having Dracula guard the blood bank. The loss of America's moral standing has been one of the great losses of this war.

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.

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 don't think anybody really thinks that one should get rid of the World Bank. Reform is one thing, but getting rid of it I think would be wrong.

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.

I find it scandalous not only that there was so little discussion of the costs of the Iraq war before we went to war - this was, after all, a war of choice - but even five years into the war, the Administration has not provided a comprehensive accounting of the war.

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?

If you destroy a firm, you can't pull it out of bankruptcy overnight.

If you get a flow of credit increasing, as we've seen in the last few years - that flow of credit didn't go to more wealth accumulation as we normally use the term in economics, as capital goods. What you got is an increase in bubbles of one kind or another.

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.

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.

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.

In a globally integrated economy, the biggest challenge is to make sure there is adequate global aggregate demand, achieved through spending, when countries like China feel they must save high levels of dollar reserves to protect against international currency volatility.

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.

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

In fact, for just about 1/6 of the cost of an Iraq War, we could have put the social security system on sound financial footings for the next 50 to 75 years. The problems can be managed - but not if we continue to fight this war for another 80 years.

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

In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.

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.

I often felt myself the lone voice in discussions suggesting that basic democratic principles be followed. I recommended that not only should workers' voices be heard, but they should actually have a seat at the table. You have the old boys' club discussing how the old boys' club should be reformed.

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.

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?

It is a set of policies formulated between 15th and 19th streets by the U.S. Treasury, and World Bank. Countries should focus on stabilization, liberalization, privatization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.