Top 100 Krugman Quotes
#1. Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, a whole host of brilliant, courageous critics say all kinds of things, and he [Barack Obama] treats them with respect. They get invited to the White House. I say the same thing, he talks to me like I'm a Cub Scout.
Cornel West
#2. I mean, do you really think Paul Krugman is checking his Twitter account every day to read what I write? Of course not. Every other day maybe, but not every day.
Michael Showalter
#3. In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.
Frances O'Grady
#4. We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.
Cornel West
#5. Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing ...
Barry Ritholtz
#6. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told one of the authors in Seoul, South Korea, a de cade ago that he has always followed one piece of advice that his MIT professors had given him: "Never touch the money system." Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008.
Anonymous
#8. 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
#9. [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
#10. 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
#11. This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
Paul Krugman
#12. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.
Paul Krugman
#13. Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.
Paul Krugman
#15. 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
#16. I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law.
Paul Krugman
#17. Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.
Paul Krugman
#18. I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
Paul Krugman
#19. On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn't be dismissed just because there's no Hitler in sight.
Paul Krugman
#20. I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.
Paul Krugman
#21. Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups
Paul Krugman
#22. 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
#23. The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.
Paul Krugman
#24. If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.
Paul Krugman
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.
Paul Krugman
#28. What saved the economy, and the New Deal was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs.
Paul Krugman
#29. Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
Paul Krugman
#30. For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.
Henry Hazlitt
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.
Paul Krugman
#34. 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
#35. The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
Paul Krugman
#36. Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy.
Paul Krugman
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.
Paul Krugman
#41. Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.
Paul Krugman
#42. Debt is one person's liability, but another person's asset.
Paul Krugman
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.
Paul Krugman
#47. For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
Paul Krugman
#48. 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
#49. The rich are different from you and me: they have more influence.
Paul Krugman
#50. 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
#51. Instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.
Paul Krugman
#52. 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
#53. In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.
Paul Krugman
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.
Paul Krugman
#57. 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
#58. Businesspeople are not used to thinking about closed systems;economists are.
Paul Krugman
#59. Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).
Paul Krugman
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I've always believed in expansionary monetary policy and if necessary fiscal policy when the economy is depressed.
Paul Krugman
#64. The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
Paul Krugman
#65. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.
Paul Krugman
#66. 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
#67. What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.
Paul Krugman
#68. I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.
Paul Krugman
#69. The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.
Paul Krugman
#70. Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.
Paul Krugman
#71. 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
#72. [I]f you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes.
Paul Krugman
#73. 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
#74. Incentives aren't the only thing that matter for economic growth. Opportunity is also crucial, and extreme inequality deprives many people of the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and government programs that reduce inequality can make the nation as a whole richer by reducing that waste.
Paul Krugman
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I don't want a job in the administration; I think I'm more effective carping from the sidelines.
Paul Krugman
#78. Simple doesn't mean stupid. Thinking that it does, does.
Paul Krugman
#79. Programmers have a saying: garbage in, garbage out.
Paul Krugman
#80. When stock prices are rising, it's called "momentum investing"; when they are falling, it's called "panic".
Paul Krugman
#81. Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.
Paul Krugman
#82. The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn't require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.
Paul Krugman
#83. Rising inequality isn't about who has the knowledge; it's about who has the power.
Paul Krugman
#84. 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
#85. Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.
Paul Krugman
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.
Paul Krugman
#89. 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
#90. The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
Paul Krugman
#91. There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises.
Paul Krugman
#92. 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
#93. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Paul Krugman
#94. I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.
Paul Krugman
#95. 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
#96. I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.
Paul Krugman
#97. The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public.
Paul Krugman
#98. If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money.
Paul Krugman
#99. The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
Paul Krugman
#100. Seriously bad ideas (are) bad ideas which appeal to the prejudices of serious people.
Paul Krugman
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