Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

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Joseph Stiglitz

Profession : Economist

Birth : February 9, 1943

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Stiglitz

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

Joseph Stiglitz

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

Joseph Stiglitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Stiglitz

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

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 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

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