Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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

The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Letting bygones be bygones is a basic principle in economics.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Society can't function without shared prosperity.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.