Paul Krugman Quotes

#1. And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg.

Paul Krugman

#2. [I]f one asks what substantive contributions [F. A. Hayek] made to our understanding of how the world works, one is left at something of a loss. Were it not for his politics, he would be virtually forgotten.

Paul Krugman

#3. If Europe's example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don't drive them too much.

Paul Krugman

#4. Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.

Paul Krugman

#5. The planet will continue to cook.

Paul Krugman

#6. I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of doctrines - how support for a false dogma can become politically mandatory, and how overwhelming contrary evidence only makes such dogmas stronger and more extreme.

Paul Krugman

#7. I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law.

Paul Krugman

#8. I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

Paul Krugman

#9. I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

Paul Krugman

#10. Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups

Paul Krugman

#11. People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try to find a job or may not try to find one as quickly as they would without the benefit.

Paul Krugman

#12. The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.

Paul Krugman

#13. In fact, I'd say that the sources of the economy's expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and - very much in third place - tax cuts.

Paul Krugman

#14. Open immigration can't exist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure healthcare and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global

Paul Krugman

#15. Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.

Paul Krugman

#16. Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.

Paul Krugman

#17. Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

Paul Krugman

#18. Anyone who thinks that the last 80 years, ever since FDR took us off gold, have been a doomed venture, that strikes me as kind of cranky.

Paul Krugman

#19. The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.

Paul Krugman

#20. One is reminded of the old joke about the centipede who was asked how he managed to coordinate his 100 legs : He started thinking about it and could never walk properly again.

Paul Krugman

#21. Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you've been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we're hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

Paul Krugman

#22. And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.

Paul Krugman

#23. Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

Paul Krugman

#24. Debt is one person's liability, but another person's asset.

Paul Krugman

#25. But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

Paul Krugman

#26. Congress has always had a soft spot for "experts" who tell members what they want to hear, whether it's supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth.

Paul Krugman

#27. What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.

Paul Krugman

#28. I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.

Paul Krugman

#29. For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Paul Krugman

#30. Our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies - but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.

Paul Krugman

#31. The rich are different from you and me: they have more influence.

Paul Krugman

#32. The world economy is in a nosedive, and understanding what I call "depression economics" - the weird world you get into when even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, and a messed-up financial system is dragging down the real economy - is essential if we're going to avoid the worst.

Paul Krugman

#33. Instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.

Paul Krugman

#34. I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it.

Paul Krugman

#35. In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.

Paul Krugman

#36. Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Paul Krugman

#37. Under the gold standard America had no major financial panics other than in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933.

Paul Krugman

#38. A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble

Paul Krugman

#39. Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).

Paul Krugman

#40. However, the fact that an economist offers a theoretical analysis does not and should not automatically command respect. What is needed is some assurance that the analysis is actually relevant.

Paul Krugman

#41. I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

Paul Krugman

#42. It's not about the budget; it's about the power ... So will the attack on unions succeed? I don't know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn't.

Paul Krugman

#43. I've always believed in expansionary monetary policy and if necessary fiscal policy when the economy is depressed.

Paul Krugman

#44. I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you're in late or latish middle age.

Paul Krugman

#45. I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.

Paul Krugman

#46. The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.

Paul Krugman

#47. Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.

Paul Krugman

#48. We should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn't know in advance who we'd be.

Paul Krugman

#49. The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

Paul Krugman

#50. Generous unemployment benefits can increase both structural and frictional unemployment. So government policies intended to help workers can have the undesirable side effect of raising the natural rate of unemployment.

Paul Krugman

#51. When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

Paul Krugman

#52. I don't want a job in the administration; I think I'm more effective carping from the sidelines.

Paul Krugman

#53. Simple doesn't mean stupid. Thinking that it does, does.

Paul Krugman

#54. Programmers have a saying: garbage in, garbage out.

Paul Krugman

#55. Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.

Paul Krugman

#56. Rising inequality isn't about who has the knowledge; it's about who has the power.

Paul Krugman

#57. Are you, or is someone you know, a gadget freak? If so, you doubtless know that Wednesday was iPhone 5 day, the day Apple unveiled its latest way for people to avoid actually speaking to or even looking at whoever they're with.

Paul Krugman

#58. Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.

Paul Krugman

#59. If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

Paul Krugman

#60. I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?

Paul Krugman

#61. We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.

Paul Krugman

#62. There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises.

Paul Krugman

#63. As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.

Paul Krugman

#64. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Paul Krugman

#65. I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.

Paul Krugman

#66. It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.

Paul Krugman

#67. I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.

Paul Krugman

#68. If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money.

Paul Krugman

#69. If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.

Paul Krugman

#70. Coming up with a good idea, with an insight into the way the world works that is really new and that you really believe in, is a deeply satisfying experience.

Paul Krugman

#71. What Republicans have actually put on the table is almost nothing. All of the rest is just big talk. So how is the president supposed to negotiate with people who say, 'Here's my demands. By the way, I can't give you any specifics. Just make me happy'?

Paul Krugman

#72. As an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.

Paul Krugman

#73. The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.

Paul Krugman

#74. Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.

Paul Krugman

#75. People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.

Paul Krugman

#76. Consumer spending is now plunging at serious-recession rate ... even if the rescue now in train succeeds in unfreezing credit markets, the real economy has immense downward momentum. In addition to financial rescues, we need major stimulus programs.

Paul Krugman

#77. [I]n America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception - namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power.

Paul Krugman

#78. Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

Paul Krugman

#79. [W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings.

Paul Krugman

#80. There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.

Paul Krugman

#81. But where will the Fed find another bubble?

Paul Krugman

#82. [Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.

Paul Krugman

#83. Evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.

Paul Krugman

#84. [The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

Paul Krugman

#85. If it were profitable to have indentured servants in the modern world, I'm sure that Richard Scaife's think tanks would have no trouble finding justifications, and assorted Christian groups would explain why it's God's will.

Paul Krugman

#86. One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the 'high school movement' made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education

Paul Krugman

#87. The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy.

Paul Krugman

#88. Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It's a modern Republican thing.

Paul Krugman

#89. Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We've gone from bad economic doctrine. We've even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we're talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering upon the already miserable.

Paul Krugman

#90. If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.

Paul Krugman

#91. A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

Paul Krugman

#92. Can we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism on the United States? The scariest part is that the media is part of that machine.

Paul Krugman

#93. Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones ... You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.

Paul Krugman

#94. Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.

Paul Krugman

#95. If you're doing your job right, some substantial group of people [is] going to be mad at you.

Paul Krugman

#96. By rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Paul Krugman

#97. The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

Paul Krugman

#98. [D]ebt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

Paul Krugman

#99. When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they've shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.

Paul Krugman

#100. So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.

Paul Krugman