Joseph Stiglitz

“Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.”

“There is something about the mindset of a scientist that is different - an awareness of uncertainty, modeling, proof.”

“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.”

“I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.”

“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.”

“The laws of normal economics dictate that lower taxes combined with increased spending will lead to bigger deficits.”

“For Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement - unilaterally abrogated by Trump - was part of the 'pivot to Asia,' a re-assertion of the role of America in that part of the world.”

“Too many countries of the former Soviet bloc remain under the control of authoritarian leaders, including some, like the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who have learned how to maintain a more convincing facade of elections than their communist predecessors.”

“The euro zone was driven by the neoliberal view that markets are always efficient. That in itself is political. There was no pressing economic need that the euro was required to solve, but leaders believed that it would foster growth.”

“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.”

“If manufacturing jobs do come back to the U.S., they will be done by robots in hi-tech parts of the country rather than the Rust Belt states.”

“America will suffer under Trump.”

“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.”

“Society can't function without shared prosperity.”

“President Trump sees the world in transactional and zero-sum terms - if something is good for China, it must be bad for the U.S. By contrast, economists see the world in much more nuanced ways: if globalization is well-managed, it can be a positive-sum game, where both the U.S. and China gain; if it is badly managed, it can be negative-sum.”

“Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.”

“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.”

“Donald J. Trump has the good fortune of taking office as the economy is finally recovering from the 2008 crisis.”

“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.”

“People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.”