Paul Krugman Quotes
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This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
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The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century ... has taken place via globalization.
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Debt is one person's liability, but another person's asset.
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But where will the Fed find another bubble?
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Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.
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A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.
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America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.
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I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.
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Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
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It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand and depending in the long run on the natural rate of unemployment, with microeconomic policies like tariffs having little net effect. Trade policy should be debated in terms of its impact on efficiency, not in terms of phoney numbers about jobs created or lost.
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You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.
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What happened after 9/11 - and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not - was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons....The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
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We should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
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There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crisis.
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The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.
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For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
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People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.
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If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.
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If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money.
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If one asks what substantive contributions F. A. Hayek made to our understanding of how the world works, one is left at something of a loss. Were it not for his politics, he would be virtually forgotten.
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I've always believed that a speculative bubble need not lead to a recession, as long as interest rates are cut quickly enough to stimulate alternative investments. But I had to face the fact that speculative bubbles usually are followed by recessions. My excuse has been that this was because the policy makers moved too slowly - that central banks were typically too slow to cut interest rates in the face of a burst bubble, giving the downturn time to build up a lot of momentum.
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Our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies - but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
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Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction.
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Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.