34 Quotes by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.

My study of economics had taught me that the ideology of many conservatives was wrong; their almost religious belief in the power of markets – so great that we could largely simply rely on unfettered markets for running the economy – had no basis in theory or evidence.

Today, China alone holds more than $1 trillion in public and private American IOUs. Cumulative borrowing from abroad during the six years of the Bush administration amounts to some $5 trillion. Most likely these creditors will not call in their loans – if they ever did, there would be a global financial crisis.

If a business borrows to buy a machine, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. During the past six years, America – its government, its families, the country as a whole – has been borrowing to sustain its consumption. Meanwhile, investment in fixed assets – the plants and equipment that help increase our wealth – has been declining.

The powerful try to frame the discussion in a way that benefits their interests, realizing that, in a democracy, they cannot simply impose their rule on others. In one way or another, they have to “co-opt” the rest of society to advance their agenda. Here.

Europe’s reaction to the UK’s referendum was dominated by the same harsh response that greeted Greece’s June 2015 ballot-box rejection of its bailout package. Herman Van Rompuy, former European Council1 president, expressed a widespread feeling when he said that Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum “was the worst policy decision in decades.” In so saying, he revealed a deep antipathy toward democratic accountability.

As we look out at the world, the United States not only has the highest level of inequality among the advanced industrial countries, but the level of its inequality is increasing in absolute terms relative to that in other countries.

Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America’s legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the “rule of law,” but in today’s America the proud claim of “justice for all” is being replaced by the more modest claim of “justice for those who can afford it.

Part of the reason for this is that much of America’s inequality is the result of market distortions, with incentives directed not at creating new wealth but at taking it from others.