Robert Kuttner Quotes

#1. When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.

Robert Kuttner

#2. In a world where technology and capital are highly transferable, there is a real risk that comparative advantage comes to be defined as whose labor force will work for the lowest wage.

Robert Kuttner

#3. What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.

Robert Kuttner

#4. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"

Robert Kuttner

#5. American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.

Robert Kuttner

#6. Donald Rumsfeld should not just be impeached. He should be tried as a war criminal. As for Bush, he can be dispatched by the electorate while we are still a democracy.

Robert Kuttner

#7. Technological change is beneficial only when other jobs replace the ones lost.

Robert Kuttner

#8. Henry Ford, in a sense, was the first Keynesian. He paid his assembly workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars.

Robert Kuttner

#9. It is more than a little ironic that "capital accumulation" once a rather tendentious Marxian view of a supposed capitalist obsession, should have become - of all things - Wall Street's own slogan.

Robert Kuttner

#10. But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one.

Robert Kuttner

#11. Despite its scientific
pretensions, economics still remains more of an art than a science

Robert Kuttner

#12. Not surprisingly, extensive effort in Britain and America goes into finding tax shelter. the system is "efficient" for the shelter industry, not for the economy.

Robert Kuttner

#13. If social security depresses savings rates, it is only because it is unfunded.

Robert Kuttner

#14. If Boeing got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?

Robert Kuttner

#15. Technological advance often thrives in sheltered and subsidized markets, which defy free trade.

Robert Kuttner

#16. In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.

Robert Kuttner

#17. As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

Robert Kuttner

#18. The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.

Robert Kuttner