Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.
Joseph Stiglitz
High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power.
Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.
I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.
Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'
Behind Trump's promise to 'make America great again' lie many fallacies. The most important fallacy is that America's place in the world can be restored to the one it occupied after World War II, when Europe was still recovering from vast devastation and most developing countries were still European colonies. It can't be.
Tax policy should reflect a country's values and address its problems.
When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.
When you're in government, you have a big impact in Washington, but Washington may not be doing very much.
The diversity of Europe is its strength. But for a single currency to work, over a region with enormous economic and political diversity, is not easy.
After the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the shutdown of much of New York City by Sandy in 2012, and now the devastation wrought on Texas by Harvey, the U.S. can and should do better.
A lot of my book, 'The Price of Inequality,' is about why there has been an increase in rent-seeking.
Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.
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.
Hedge funds are not noted for their long-term thinking - for them, a quarter is an eternity.
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.
Trump has been criticized by mainstream Republicans for not really being one of them. But he is definitely one of them when it comes to the central palliative for any ill befalling the country: a tax cut for the rich.
We could have managed globalization in ways that ordinary citizens would have benefited rather than just the corporations. Trade is beneficial. There are gains to be had from taking advantage of comparative advantage and specialization. That's true, if you manage globalization right.
When you have a highly divided society, it's hard to come together to make investments in the common good.
A politically astute president who understood deeply the economics and politics of corporate tax reform could conceivably muscle Congress toward a reform package that made sense. Trump is not that leader.
Letting bygones be bygones is a basic principle in economics.
Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It's not going to happen in the United States, and it's not going to happen in Europe.
With neoliberalism discredited and austerity failed, we need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again. But this time in the right way. We need rules that focus on long-term economic growth, and the only kind of sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.
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.
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.
Donald J. Trump has the good fortune of taking office as the economy is finally recovering from the 2008 crisis.
Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.
But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
Technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining. There is no way that Trump can bring significant numbers of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.
We share a common planet, and the world has learned the hard way that we have to get along and work together. We have learned, too, that cooperation can benefit all.
The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.
America and the world are paying a high price for devotion to the extreme anti-government ideology embraced by Donald Trump and his Republican party.
In addition to offering benefits to those who invest, carry out research, and create jobs, higher taxes on land and real-estate speculation would redirect capital toward productivity-enhancing spending - the key to long-term improvement in living standards.
Globally, manufacturing jobs are on the decline, simply because productivity growth has outpaced growth in demand.
Trump can bring jobs back, but they will be minimal-wage jobs, not the high-paying jobs of the 1950s.
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.
One can only hope that America, and other countries, will not need more natural persuasion before taking to heart the lessons of Hurricane Harvey.
To maximise global social welfare, policymakers should strongly encourage the diffusion of knowledge from developed to developing countries.
Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.
If Trump wants to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, the rest of the world should impose a carbon-adjustment tax on U.S. exports that do not comply with global standards.
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.
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.
It's very clear that TPP was promoted by corporate interests, it was driven by ideology, not by economic science. And when they started looking at the net trade benefits, they are miniscule.
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.
The reality is that what we did in 2010 with the Dodd-Frank wasn't enough.
With the election of Trump, America's soft power has taken a big hit. The United States has moved from a position of leadership in the creation of a rules-based international system to a position of leadership in its destruction and the creation of a regime of global protectionism. The damage will be long-lasting.
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.
An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year - an economy like America's - is not likely to do well over the long haul.
