Eric Maskin Quotes
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I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely.
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The Nobel Prize is not very important for the winners - they are usually pretty successful people already. But it is valuable as a way of drawing the public's attention to important work in economics.
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A properly designed tax system can strike a balance between helping the poor and, at the same time, giving people the incentive to work.
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If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods.
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I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.
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I don't want to make public statements about issues that I have not studied in detail.
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I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.
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Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand.
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At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.
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Economic forecasting has actually got pretty good over the years, though admittedly, we don't always get it right.
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Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.
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I probably learned most at MIT by teaching and working with Peter Diamond, who acted like a big brother to me during my time in the department.
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This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division?
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I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey.
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Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.
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When a bank calls in a loan, it obviously hurts the customer in question. But it also adversely affects other banks that have lent to this borrower. They are now less likely to be repaid and so can't as readily lend to their own customers.
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How do we ensure in the case of public goods that they are provided at all, and that they are provided at the right level, taking into account citizens' preferences?
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If I'm a bank, and I'm making risky loans, I have an incentive, if I can, to make those loans using other people's money: in other words, to make highly leveraged loans.
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In various countries around the world, assets that had previously been in the hands of governments were sold off to the private sector in the hope that this would lead to a more efficient allocation, that these assets would be put to better use.
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There is universal consensus among experts that the earth's atmosphere is heating up - and that we are responsible for it by putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We also know that the consequences of global warming are catastrophic. But how do we make sure that all countries reduce greenhouse gases?
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Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.
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I have a strong attachment to Harvard.
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Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves.
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I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one.