Quotes from Joseph E. Stiglitz

today we live in an economy where a few firms can rake in massive amounts of profits for themselves and persist unchecked in their dominant position for years and years.

Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for schoolchildren, and free health care - including heart surgery - for all. You might suspect that a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis.

Economists have a name for these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort. (We'll give a fuller definition of the concept of rent seeking

To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others.

The wealth given to the elites and to the bankers seemed to arise out of their ability and willingness to take advantage of others. One

Jean-Claude Juncker, the proud architect of Luxembourg's massive corporate tax-avoidance schemes and now the head of the European Commission, has taken a hard line—perhaps understandably, given that he may go down in history as the person on whose watch the dissolution of the EU began.

el Brexit en Reino Unido y la elección de Donald Trump en Estados Unidos— plantearon dudas respecto a la sabiduría de los electorados democráticos.

This is an idea called trickle-down economics. It has a long pedigree—and has long been discredited. As we've seen, higher inequality has not led to more growth, and most Americans have actually seen their incomes sink or stagnate. What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21

especially in the United States, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote.

the markedly different patterns across countries demonstrate that policies matter. Inequality is a choice. It is not inevitable.

We had been taught that, once a country reaches a certain stage of development, inequality shrinks—and America had exemplified that theory.9 In the years after World War II, every part of our society had prospered, but the incomes of those at the bottom grew faster than those at the top.

but the truth was just the opposite: advances in economics over the past seventy years had identified the limits of free markets. Of course, anyone with open eyes could have seen this for themselves: episodic unemployment, sometimes massive, as in the Great Depression and pollution so bad in some places that air was unbreathable were just the two most obvious "proofs" that markets on their own don't necessarily work well.

markets on their own will fail to achieve shared and sustainable prosperity. Markets play an invaluable role in any well-functioning economy and yet they often fail to produce fair and efficient outcomes, producing too much of some things (pollution) and too little of others (basic research).

misshapen economy creates misshapen individuals and a misshapen society

we have a system that has been working overtime to move money from the bottom and middle to the top, but the system is so inefficient that the gains to the top are far less than the losses to the middle and bottom.

More than 80 years ago, John Maynard Keynes explained why market economies often have persistent unemployment and taught us how government could maintain the economy at or near full employment.

The rule of law is supposed to protect the weak against the strong and ensure fair treatment for all.

Low growth, stagnating incomes, and growing inequality are, of course, deeply interrelated, and they all are, at least in part, the result of policies begun under President Reagan some four decades ago, policies based on deep and pervasive misunderstandings about what makes for a strong economy.

The irony is that just as markets started delivering more unequal outcomes, tax policy asked less of the top. The top marginal tax rate was lowered from 70 percent under Carter to 28 percent under Reagan; it went up to 39.6 percent under Clinton and down finally to 35 percent under George W. Bush.54 This reduction was supposed to lead to more work and savings, but it didn't.55

When those who seem to be out competing oneself are foreigners, the inclination to say that they are engaging in unfair competition irresistible: to argue otherwise is to suggest that one simply doesn't measure up.

Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low-income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint.

Some thirty years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners received only 12 percent of the nation's income.13

What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21

over the last three decades those with low wages (in the bottom 90 percent) have seen a growth of only around 15 percent in their wages, while those in the top 1 percent have seen an increase of almost 150 percent and the top 0.1 percent of more than 300 percent.27 Meanwhile