James Mirrlees Quotes
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I must confess that I had expected the rigorous analysis of income taxation in the utilitarian manner to provide arguments for high tax rates. It has not done so.
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The world's been pretty good at coming up with new ways of doing things.
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It became clear I wanted to be a development economist. I mean, I said I wanted to work on the economics of poor countries. And I'd actually say that I don't think that was so much about narrowing the gap as about increasing their incomes, which means economic growth, which is really my prime interest.
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Encourage your own curiosity; pursue the problems based on that. Don't get diverted by trying to do things for your own advancement. In other words, don't be lured into responding to incentives.
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You know there's problems - you can see all the poverty and so on - but it's quite another matter to know what you can do about it.
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When things begin to go bad, the perception of people makes it worse.
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An approximately linear income tax schedule is desirable; and in particular negative income tax proposals are strongly supported,
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It's not going to be true that every country has the same technological possibilities, but there is no reason why it might not be more or less true. Broadly, that the idea that the same technologies should be available everywhere seems to me very plausible.
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I think, in effect, in most of the European countries, the total marginal tax rate is over 50 percent; that's to say, add on other taxes like VAT to the income tax.
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Don't get diverted by trying to do things for your own advancement. In other words, don't be lured into responding to incentives.
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Economics takes a while to learn, even if much of it is in a way quite simple. It is simple to be wrong as well as to be right, and it is none too easy to distinguish between them.
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The income tax is a much less effective tool for reducing inequalities than has often been thought.
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Encourage your own curiosity; pursue the problems based on that.