Joseph Stiglitz
What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Equality
International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.Collection: Education
Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Technology
I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.Collection: Family
If there is a silver lining in the Trump cloud, it is a new sense of solidarity over core values such as tolerance and equality, sustained by awareness of the bigotry and misogyny, whether hidden or open, that Trump and his team embody.Collection: Equality
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.Collection: Politics
The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.
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.
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.
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.
By taxing CO2, firms and households would have an incentive to retrofit for the world of the future. The tax would also provide firms with incentives to innovate in ways that reduce energy usage and emissions - giving them a dynamic competitive advantage.
The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.
But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
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.
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.
Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies - whether Australia, the E.U., or Mexico - are stronger. But Trump's approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.
The bank bailout should have been more focused on helping small and medium sized banks, on helping homeowners. I think the trade agreements are a disaster.
People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.
I don't think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security.
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.
Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.
Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.
Free migration within Europe means that countries that have done a better job at reducing unemployment will predictably end up with more than their fair share of refugees. Workers in these countries bear the cost in depressed wages and higher unemployment, while employers benefit from cheaper labor.
There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.
I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
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.
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.
I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.
Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.
But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.
I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.
Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.
If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future - and these markets clearly did not exist - what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?
Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.
As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.
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.
I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.
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.
For the president of the United States, reputation does matter. The reputation of the United States does matter. We are dealing with countries all over the world. They want to know if your word is good. Trump's word is not good.
Society can't function without shared prosperity.
We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.
The reality is that what we did in 2010 with the Dodd-Frank wasn't enough.
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.
The euro zone was driven by the neoliberal view that markets are always efficient. That in itself is political. There was no pressing economic need that the euro was required to solve, but leaders believed that it would foster growth.
In the end, the politics of the euro zone weren't strong enough to create a fully integrated fiscal union with a common banking system, etc.