Top 89 Stiglitz Quotes
#1. Misguided liberal Joseph Stiglitz.Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize winner, claims the American dream is dead.
Jedediah Bila
#2. It is a wonderful and unexpected honor to receive the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Receiving this prize with Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof, whose work I have learned from and admired, makes it even more gratifying.
Michael Spence
#4. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#5. When I said "the pocket of the banks," it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.
Joseph Stiglitz
#6. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#7. I think that for the developing world there are many versions of capitalism, and countries have to choose one that's appropriate.
Joseph Stiglitz
#8. Ensuring that we have a well-informed public citizenry is important for a well-functioning democracy, and that in turn requires an active and diverse media.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#9. International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.
Joseph Stiglitz
#10. The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.
Joseph Stiglitz
#11. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#12. Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.
Joseph Stiglitz
#13. The military is focusing only on the short run costs. If they don't provide appropriate body armor, they save some money today, but the healthcare cost is going to be the future for some other president down the line. I view that as both fiscally and morally irresponsible.
Joseph Stiglitz
#14. They [political leaders ] thought the only problem was the banking system, and if they fixed the banking system, all would be fine. But the banking system and the mortgage problem were symptomatic of some deeper problems, and evidently they still haven't recognized those deeper problems.
Joseph Stiglitz
#15. The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.
Joseph Stiglitz
#16. Power - often military power - was at the origin of these inequities.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#17. Democracy, we now know, is more than periodic elections in some countries, such elections have been used to legitimize essentially authoritarian regimes and deprive large parts of the citizenry of basic rights.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#18. You saw on your TV what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Reserves or National Guard are usually the people we use for those national emergencies. They weren't here, they were over in Iraq, and so we were less protected.
Joseph Stiglitz
#19. I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
Joseph Stiglitz
#20. Americans all benefit from the physical and institutional infrastructure that has developed from the country's collective efforts over generations.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#21. My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.
Joseph Stiglitz
#22. The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.
Joseph Stiglitz
#23. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#24. we have a system that has been working overtime to move money from the bottom and middle to the top, but the system is so inefficient that the gains to the top are far less than the losses to the middle and bottom.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#25. The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.
Joseph Stiglitz
#26. Not everybody is qualified to go to Stanford, but everybody should have access to the best qualify for which they are eligible.
Joseph Stiglitz
#27. I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.
Joseph Stiglitz
#28. Loose money and light regulation were a toxic mixture. It exploded.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#29. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#30. What's worrying is that those in the 1 percent, in attempting to claim for themselves an unjust proportion of the benefits of this system, may be willing to destroy the system itself to hold on to what they have. This
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#31. The head of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made it perfectly clear: sophisticated investors don't, or at least shouldn't, rely on trust. Those who bought the products the banks sold were consenting adults who should have known better.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#32. What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.
Joseph Stiglitz
#33. The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.
Joseph Stiglitz
#34. The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.
Joseph Stiglitz
#35. I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.
Joseph Stiglitz
#36. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#37. You can't overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.
Joseph Stiglitz
#38. In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.
Joseph Stiglitz
#39. Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#40. The powerful try to frame the discussion in a way that benefits their interests, realizing that, in a democracy, they cannot simply impose their rule on others. In one way or another, they have to "co-opt" the rest of society to advance their agenda. Here
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#42. American inequality didn't just happen. It was created.
Joseph Stiglitz
#43. One has to always ask the question: Where can one be most effective in helping shape policies? It is always difficult when you're inside because you're very constrained.
Joseph Stiglitz
#44. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#45. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#46. Most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.
Joseph Stiglitz
#47. As medical care has improved, life expectancy has increased - on average, in the United States, by some two years between 1990 and 2000. But for the poorest group of Americans there has been no progress, and for poor women life expectancy has actually been declining.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#48. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#49. Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.
Joseph Stiglitz
#50. Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#51. Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.
Joseph Stiglitz
#52. Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.
Joseph Stiglitz
#53. If the President asked you to help, I don't think anybody could refuse, unless one felt that one couldn't be effective.
Joseph Stiglitz
#54. The striking thing about America is - it's historically, extraordinary unusual,I don't of any other instance - is that productivity of workers and wages have not moved in tandem.
Joseph Stiglitz
#55. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#56. Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can't function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations.
Joseph Stiglitz
#57. The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid.
Joseph Stiglitz
#58. Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.
Joseph Stiglitz
#59. But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.
Joseph Stiglitz
#60. 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?
Joseph Stiglitz
#61. But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
Joseph Stiglitz
#62. I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
Joseph Stiglitz
#63. We are helping the people that [George W.]Bush says are evil. Teheran couldn't be happier about the high oil prices resulting from the Iraq war.
Joseph Stiglitz
#64. The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush's Jr. friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier.
Joseph Stiglitz
#65. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#67. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.
Joseph Stiglitz
#68. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#70. Decisions were often made because of ideology and politics. As a result many wrong-headed actions were taken, ones that did not solve the problem at hand but that fit with the interests or beliefs of the people in power.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#71. Unfettered market American-style capitalism doesn't work. Developing countries can't afford that kind of luxury. They just can't afford it. Period. If there's a mistake, they can't afford to put out $2 trillion.
Joseph Stiglitz
#72. Borrowers were told not to worry about paying the ever-mounting debt, because house prices would keep rising and they could refinance, taking out some of the capital gains to buy a car or pay for a vacation.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#73. The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#74. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#75. There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.
Joseph Stiglitz
#76. Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.
Joseph Stiglitz
#77. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#78. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#79. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#80. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#81. Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that's gonna continue.
Joseph Stiglitz
#82. No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.
Joseph Stiglitz
#83. The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.
Joseph Stiglitz
#84. What most Americans mean when they say "the end of the recession" is, "When will it be back to normal? When can we get jobs? When will the employment rate be back to 4 percent or 5 percent?"
Joseph Stiglitz
#85. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don't need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#86. Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.
Joseph Stiglitz
#87. 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.
Joseph Stiglitz
#89. Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
Joseph Stiglitz
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