Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

If Trump wants to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, the rest of the world should impose a carbon-adjustment tax on U.S. exports that do not comply with global standards.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

- Joseph Stiglitz

I began my career as a physicist. And in the White House, my buddies were the people from the White House office of science and technology policy. But a lot of the people were lawyers. They like winning an argument, but science-based, evidence-based reasoning was just sort of not in their framework.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Too many countries of the former Soviet bloc remain under the control of authoritarian leaders, including some, like the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who have learned how to maintain a more convincing facade of elections than their communist predecessors.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Trump assumed office promising to 'drain the swamp' in Washington, D.C. Instead, the swamp has grown wider and deeper.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Hedge funds are not noted for their long-term thinking - for them, a quarter is an eternity.

- Joseph Stiglitz

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Under the rule of law, if the government wants to prevent firms from outsourcing and offshoring, it enacts legislation and adopts regulations to create the appropriate incentives and discourage undesirable behaviour. It does not bully or threaten particular firms or portray traumatised refugees as a security threat.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The laws of normal economics dictate that lower taxes combined with increased spending will lead to bigger deficits.

- Joseph Stiglitz

I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

A single currency entails a fixed interest rate, which means countries can't manage their own currency to suit their own needs. You need a variety of institutions to help nations for which the policies aren't well suited. Europe introduced the euro without providing those structures.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

America and the world are paying a high price for devotion to the extreme anti-government ideology embraced by Donald Trump and his Republican party.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Ensuring preschool education for all and investing more in public schools is essential if the U.S. is to avoid becoming a neo-feudal country where advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The reality is that what we did in 2010 with the Dodd-Frank wasn't enough.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

After the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the shutdown of much of New York City by Sandy in 2012, and now the devastation wrought on Texas by Harvey, the U.S. can and should do better.

- Joseph Stiglitz

One can only hope that America, and other countries, will not need more natural persuasion before taking to heart the lessons of Hurricane Harvey.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

A politically astute president who understood deeply the economics and politics of corporate tax reform could conceivably muscle Congress toward a reform package that made sense. Trump is not that leader.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Americans like to say we're fighting for democracy, and yet young Americans have come to the view that democracy doesn't deliver.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Negative interest rates hurt banks' balance sheets, with the 'wealth effect' on banks overwhelming the small increase in incentives to lend.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Globally, manufacturing jobs are on the decline, simply because productivity growth has outpaced growth in demand.

- Joseph Stiglitz

We could have managed globalization in ways that ordinary citizens would have benefited rather than just the corporations. Trade is beneficial. There are gains to be had from taking advantage of comparative advantage and specialization. That's true, if you manage globalization right.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The IP standards advanced countries favour typically are designed not to maximise innovation and scientific progress, but to maximise the profits of big pharmaceutical companies and others able to sway trade negotiations.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Donald Trump's astonishing victory in the U.S. presidential election has made one thing abundantly clear: too many Americans - particularly white male Americans - feel left behind.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The diminishing economic role of the United States in the global economy means that global political power will also become more dispersed. The world will become multipolar. By clumsily re-asserting a wish for U.S. dominance, Donald Trump is accelerating the opposite.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

What's going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection - like in the U.K.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

China's government has far more control over the country's economy than our government has over ours, and it is moving from export dependence to a model of growth driven by domestic demand. Any restriction on exports to the U.S. would simply accelerate a process already underway.

- Joseph Stiglitz

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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?

- Joseph Stiglitz

Europe can't rely on a Trump-led U.S. for its defence. But, at the same time, it should recognise that the cold war is over - however unwilling to acknowledge it America's industrial-military complex may be.

- Joseph Stiglitz

With the election of Trump, America's soft power has taken a big hit. The United States has moved from a position of leadership in the creation of a rules-based international system to a position of leadership in its destruction and the creation of a regime of global protectionism. The damage will be long-lasting.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that U.S. trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations.

- Joseph Stiglitz

If Trump actually wants to help those who have been left behind, he must go beyond the ideological battles of the past.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

We share a common planet, and the world has learned the hard way that we have to get along and work together. We have learned, too, that cooperation can benefit all.

- Joseph Stiglitz

When you have a highly divided society, it's hard to come together to make investments in the common good.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.

- Joseph Stiglitz

European officials thought that austerity was part of what they called their 'convergence policies,' of trying to bring countries together. Instead, it actually made things worse. There's more inequality within countries and more disparity across countries.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Having excessive power in the hands of one country meant the fate of the world was too dependent on what happened in that one country.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Regulatory reform must move beyond limiting the damage that the financial sector can do and ensure that the sector genuinely serves society.

- Joseph Stiglitz

It isn't inevitable that we have a globalization which is used by the corporations not to pay taxes. It is not inevitable that we have a form of globalization in which corporations use the threat of moving jobs abroad to lower wages. None of this is inevitable.

- Joseph Stiglitz

China, with its large emerging middle class, is among the big beneficiaries of globalization.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Donald J. Trump has the good fortune of taking office as the economy is finally recovering from the 2008 crisis.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Behind Trump's promise to 'make America great again' lie many fallacies. The most important fallacy is that America's place in the world can be restored to the one it occupied after World War II, when Europe was still recovering from vast devastation and most developing countries were still European colonies. It can't be.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

It is always better to tax bad things than good things.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

China-led globalization in some ways worries me because they are not concerned about human rights, labor rights. They probably aren't even really concerned about competitive marketplaces. So in some ways, they're like Mr. Trump.

- Joseph Stiglitz

While it was an experiment to bring them together, nothing has divided Europe as much as the euro.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The Paris climate agreement may be a harbinger of the spirit and mindset needed to sustain genuine global cooperation.

- Joseph Stiglitz

In addition to offering benefits to those who invest, carry out research, and create jobs, higher taxes on land and real-estate speculation would redirect capital toward productivity-enhancing spending - the key to long-term improvement in living standards.

- Joseph Stiglitz

America's role in the global economy inevitably was going to diminish; we're smaller relative to - as China, India, other emerging markets grow.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Trump will fail even in his proclaimed goal of reducing the trade deficit, which is determined by the disparity between domestic savings and investment.

- Joseph Stiglitz

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

- Joseph Stiglitz

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.

- Joseph Stiglitz

What I argued in 'The Great Divide' is that societies can't function without trust, both politically and economically.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The Clinton years were not an economic Nirvana; as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers during part of this time, I'm all too aware of mistakes and lost opportunities.

- Joseph Stiglitz

America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object of derision.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It's not going to happen in the United States, and it's not going to happen in Europe.

- Joseph Stiglitz

One of the things that happens when you have austerity is that wages get lower, and some people think lower wages in the short run can increase corporate profits.

- Joseph Stiglitz

A lot of my book, 'The Price of Inequality,' is about why there has been an increase in rent-seeking.

- Joseph Stiglitz

I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Trump has been criticized by mainstream Republicans for not really being one of them. But he is definitely one of them when it comes to the central palliative for any ill befalling the country: a tax cut for the rich.

- Joseph Stiglitz

President Trump sees the world in transactional and zero-sum terms - if something is good for China, it must be bad for the U.S. By contrast, economists see the world in much more nuanced ways: if globalization is well-managed, it can be a positive-sum game, where both the U.S. and China gain; if it is badly managed, it can be negative-sum.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

- Joseph Stiglitz

There's a long list of investments that governments could and should be making. There is strengthening infrastructure, such as transport and communications; there is investment in education; there is investment in families, particularly putting measures in place that free women from having to make the choice between raising a family and work.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Letting bygones be bygones is a basic principle in economics.

- Joseph Stiglitz

It's very clear that TPP was promoted by corporate interests, it was driven by ideology, not by economic science. And when they started looking at the net trade benefits, they are miniscule.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Growth is not an objective in itself; we should be concerned with standards of living.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

There is something about the mindset of a scientist that is different - an awareness of uncertainty, modeling, proof.

- Joseph Stiglitz

A less healthy America is not going to be as productive.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Trump can bring jobs back, but they will be minimal-wage jobs, not the high-paying jobs of the 1950s.

- Joseph Stiglitz

An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year - an economy like America's - is not likely to do well over the long haul.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, 'There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.'

- Joseph Stiglitz

But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Obama had to save the banks, sure, but he didn't have to save the bankers and the shareholders and the bondholders. We broke the rules of capitalism in order to save those at the top - as we always do.

- Joseph Stiglitz

For Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement - unilaterally abrogated by Trump - was part of the 'pivot to Asia,' a re-assertion of the role of America in that part of the world.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Tax policy should reflect a country's values and address its problems.

- Joseph Stiglitz

To maximise global social welfare, policymakers should strongly encourage the diffusion of knowledge from developed to developing countries.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

- Joseph Stiglitz

There is a broad consensus, not only in the United States but in most of the world, that if you are in an economic downturn, you need to stimulate. Germany seems to be an exception.

- Joseph Stiglitz

When you're in government, you have a big impact in Washington, but Washington may not be doing very much.

- Joseph Stiglitz

One of the arguments I make for the failure of the euro is that, at the time it was being constructed, there was a 'neo-liberal' ideology which said that all we need to do to make this thing work is to get deficits low, keep inflation low, and take down barriers, and then everything would be fine.

- Joseph Stiglitz

I'm enough of a political junkie to know if you have large numbers of people much worse off, you're going to have consequences.

- Joseph Stiglitz

In an economy, when the government spends more and invests in the economy, that money circulates, and recirculates again and again. So not only does it create jobs once: the investment creates jobs multiple times.

- Joseph Stiglitz

The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.

- Joseph Stiglitz

Society can't function without shared prosperity.

- Joseph Stiglitz

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.

- Joseph Stiglitz

America will suffer under Trump.

- Joseph Stiglitz