Joseph Stiglitz
economist, university teacher, science writer, non-fiction writer, professor, critic, writer
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All Quotes by Joseph Stiglitz
“My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me, an approach to learning which was later reinforced by my experiences at Amherst.”
“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.”
“What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.”
“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.”
“I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.”
“The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.”
“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.”
“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 ones eyes see every day.”
“The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism.”
“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.”
“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... 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.”
“My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me.”
“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.”
“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 best teachers still taught in a Socratic style, asking questions, responding to the answers with still another question. And in all of our courses, we were taught that what mattered most was asking the right question — having posed the question well, answering the question was often a relatively easy matter.”
“There was an incongruity between many of the models that we were taught and the policy positions that our teachers (and we) believed in. The models seemed more consonant with free market prescriptions, though they were presented more as benchmarks rather than full characterizations.”
“Once I undertook the analysis of a problem, I often looked at it from a variety of perspectives. I approached the problem as a series of thought experiments — unlike many other sciences, we typically cannot do actual experiments.”
“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?”
“Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.”
“When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In the long run, the most important changes required to make globalization work are reforms to reduce the democratic deficit.”
“I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.”
“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.”