Paul Krugman famous quotes

The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century – every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living – has taken place via globalization, that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency.
-- Paul Krugman

#Taken #Successful #Past

Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy.
-- Paul Krugman

#Jobs #Cutting #Creating

It’s not about the budget; it’s about the power...So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.
-- Paul Krugman

#Government #People #Care

The world economy is in a nosedive, and understanding what I call "depression economics" - the weird world you get into when even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, and a messed-up financial system is dragging down the real economy - is essential if we're going to avoid the worst.
-- Paul Krugman

#Zero #Real #Understanding

Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.
-- Paul Krugman

#Rising #Inequality

What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.
-- Paul Krugman

#Zero #Sound #Enough

Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.
-- Paul Krugman

#Class #Political #Action

I don't want a job in the administration; I think I'm more effective carping from the sidelines.
-- Paul Krugman

#Jobs #Thinking #Want

So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.
-- Paul Krugman

#Wages #Minimum Wage #Answers

There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.
-- Paul Krugman

#Bridges #Magic #Bombs

Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
-- Paul Krugman

#Hysteria #Benefits #Favors

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
-- Paul Krugman

#Squares #Law #Numbers

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.
-- Paul Krugman

#Believe #Law #Political

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.
-- Paul Krugman

#Bookstores #Online #Said

If you had to explain America's economic success with one word, that word would be "education".... Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual - a slow-motion erosion of America's relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis ... deals a severe blow to education across the board.... We need to wake up and realize that one of the keys to our nation's historic success is now a wasting asset. Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.
-- Paul Krugman

#Education #Blow #Erosion

I've always believed that a speculative bubble need not lead to a recession, as long as interest rates are cut quickly enough to stimulate alternative investments. But I had to face the fact that speculative bubbles usually are followed by recessions. My excuse has been that this was because the policy makers moved too slowly - that central banks were typically too slow to cut interest rates in the face of a burst bubble, giving the downturn time to build up a lot of momentum.
-- Paul Krugman

#Cutting #Giving #Long

Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It's a modern Republican thing.
-- Paul Krugman

#Normal #Republican #Modern

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
-- Paul Krugman

#Winning #Goal #Political

If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.
-- Paul Krugman

#Simple #Years #Errors

In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.
-- Paul Krugman

#Country #Ignorance

For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
-- Paul Krugman

#Sports #Growth #Economic

One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the 'high school movement' made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education
-- Paul Krugman

#Education #School #Support

In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
-- Paul Krugman

#Sports #Growth #Levels

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you've been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we're hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.
-- Paul Krugman

#Mean #Fate #Despair

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.
-- Paul Krugman

#Feelings #Investing #World

The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.
-- Paul Krugman

#Real #People #Debt

[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.
-- Paul Krugman

#Retirement #War #Army

These days, however, the main problem comes from the right - from conservatives who, unlike most economists, really do think that the free market is always right-to such an extent that they refuse to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it seems to suggest a justification for government action.
-- Paul Krugman

#Believe #Thinking #Government

Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.
-- Paul Krugman

#Running #Silly #Book

Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.
-- Paul Krugman

#Hands #Europe #Opposites

The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
-- Paul Krugman

#Personality #Becoming #Campaigns

Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.
-- Paul Krugman

#Justice #Progress #Gaps

Seven habits that help produce the anything-but-efficient markets that rule the world. 1. Think short term. 2. Be greedy. 3. Believe in the greater fool 4. Run with the herd. 5. Overgeneralize 6. Be trendy 7. Play with other people's money
-- Paul Krugman

#Running #Believe #Thinking

We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn't the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.
-- Paul Krugman

#Dark #Greek #Age

It has been obvious all along, to anyone paying attention, that the politicians shouting loudest about deficits are actually using deficit hysteria as a cover story for their real agenda, which is top-down class warfare. To put it in Romneyesque terms, it's all about finding an excuse to slash programs that help people who like to watch Nascar events, even while lavishing tax cuts on people who like to own Nascar teams.
-- Paul Krugman

#Real #Team #Cutting

Congress has always had a soft spot for "experts" who tell members what they want to hear, whether it's supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth.
-- Paul Krugman

#Cutting #Experts #Want

If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.
-- Paul Krugman

#Men #Years #Wreckage

Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.
-- Paul Krugman

#Thinking #Too Much #Economist

I know that when I look at today's Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. On the other side, however, open immigration can't coexist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global. So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it's an agonizing issue.
-- Paul Krugman

#Strong #America #Issues

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
-- Paul Krugman

#Twilight #Order #Space

Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.
-- Paul Krugman

#Giving #Advice #Sometimes

This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
-- Paul Krugman

#Opposites #Analysis #Serious

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.
-- Paul Krugman

#Mean #Messages

[W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings.
-- Paul Krugman

#Hiking #Political #Employment

The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes; it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.
-- Paul Krugman

#Hands #Keys #Boards

The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn't require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.
-- Paul Krugman

#Hands #Impact #Fiscal Policy

Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).
-- Paul Krugman

#Social #Program #Security

I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.
-- Paul Krugman

#Technology #Thinking #Long

It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand and depending in the long run on the natural rate of unemployment, with microeconomic policies like tariffs having little net effect. Trade policy should be debated in terms of its impact on efficiency, not in terms of phoney numbers about jobs created or lost.
-- Paul Krugman

#Running #Jobs #Numbers

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.
-- Paul Krugman

#People #Problem #Economics

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.
-- Paul Krugman

#Running #Government #Debt

Generous unemployment benefits can increase both structural and frictional unemployment. So government policies intended to help workers can have the undesirable side effect of raising the natural rate of unemployment.
-- Paul Krugman

#Government #Unemployment #Benefits