Paul Krugman Quotes
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There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.
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One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education.
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Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.
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The planet will continue to cook.
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The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
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The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.
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The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
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Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.
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I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.
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Debt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.
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I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you're in late or latish middle age.
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I don't want a job in the administration; I think I'm more effective carping from the sidelines.
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As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.
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Consumer spending is now plunging at serious-recession rate ... even if the rescue now in train succeeds in unfreezing credit markets, the real economy has immense downward momentum. In addition to financial rescues, we need major stimulus programs.
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The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.
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The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living has taken place via globalization, that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency.
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There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.
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Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.
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I've always believed in expansionary monetary policy and if necessary fiscal policy when the economy is depressed.
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I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
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To the extent that sacrifices need to be made, shouldn't the people who've made out like bandits this past generation be first in line? The problem with getting out of the slump is that we need to spend more. It's not that somebody needs to spend less. We have idle workers who have the skills and the willingness to work. We have idle factories. Dealing with this is not about saying somebody needs to suffer. It's saying that we need to be prepared to open the taps.
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I think if you're a liberal, you believe that we all are, at least to some extent, our brothers' keepers, you really believe that we have a sumptuary responsibility to make sure that life is decent for everybody in America, that you believe that society out to be broadly shared, and you believe that you can't have a real democracy unless you have a little bit, at least, of economic democracy.
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If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
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I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.