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Paul Krugman
135 quotes
“If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade'”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is Free Trade Passé?", The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1987)
“If there is one single area of economics in which path dependence is unmistakable, it is in economic geography – the location of production in space.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: History and Industry Location: The Case of the Manufacturing Belt", The American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, (May, 1991)
“In the course of describing my formative moment in 1978, I have already implicitly given my four basic rules for research. Let me now state them explicitly, then explain. Here are the rules:1. Listen to the Gentiles 2. Question the question 3. Dare to be silly 4. Simplify, simplify”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How I Work", American Economist (1993)
“But the honest truth is that what drives me as an economist is that economics is fun. I think I understand why so many people think that economics is a boring subject, but they are wrong. On the contrary, there is hardly anything I know that is as exciting as finding that the great events that move history, the forces that determine the destiny of empires and the fate of kings, can sometimes be explained, predicted, or even controlled by a few symbols on a printed page. We all want power, we all want success, but the ultimate reward is the simple joy of understanding.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Incidents from my career (1995)
“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 (born 1953) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Slate, 6 February 1997; as cited by Orrin Judd at brothersjuddblog, 14 August 2004
“If economists ruled the world, there would be no need for a World Trade Organization. The economist's case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case—that is, it says that a country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What should trade negotiators negotiate about?" Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1997)
“It is a bit funny, but also quite sad: Those who preach the doctrine of global glut are tilting at windmills, when there are some real monsters out there that need slaying.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is Capitalism Too Productive?", Foreign Affairs (September/October 1997)
“The idea of comparative advantage—with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both—is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ricardo's Difficult Idea," in G. Cook (ed.), Freedom and Trade: The Economics and Politics of International Trade, Volume 2 (1998)
“There is nothing that plays worse in our culture than seeming to be the stodgy defender of old ideas, no matter how true those ideas may be. Luckily, at this point the orthodoxy of the academic economists is very much a minority position among intellectuals in general; one can seem to be a courageous maverick, boldly challenging the powers that be, by reciting the contents of a standard textbook. It has worked for me!”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why most economists' predictions are wrong", The Red Herring, June 1998
“Now I’m not saying that Keynes was right about everything, that we should treat The General Theory as a sort of secular bible - the way that Marxists treat Das Kapital. But the essential truth of Keynes’s big idea - that even the most productive economy can fail if consumers and investors spend too little, that the pursuit of sound money and s is sometimes (not always!) folly rather than wisdom - is as evident in today’s world as it was in the 1930s. And in these dangerous days, we ignore or reject that idea at the world economy’s peril.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why aren't we all Keynesians yet?", Fortune (Aug. 3, 1998)
“So the story of the baby-sitting co-op is not a mere amusement. If people would only take it seriously—if they could only understand that when great economic issues are at stake, whimsical parables are not a waste of time but the key to enlightenment—it is a story that could save the world.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Baby-Sitting the Economy", Slate (Aug. 13, 1998)
“Here, then, is a revised version of Marshall's rules: (1) Figure out what you think about an issue, working back and forth among verbal intuition, evidence, and as much math as you need. (2) Stay with it till you are done. (3) Publish the intuition, the math, and the evidence - all three - in an economics journal. (4) But also try to find a way of expressing the idea without the formal apparatus. (5) If you can, publish that where it can do the world some good.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Cheers for Formalism", The Economic Journal, Vol. 108, No. 451 (Nov., 1998)
“In short, the success of macroeconomic activism, in both theory and practice, has made it possible for free market microeconomics to survive--again both in theory and in practice.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is the Economic Crisis a Crisis for Economics?", Slate (Nov. 13, 1998)
“The serious lesson of the antics in Argentina, then, is that the big issues of --fixed vs. flexible exchange rates, whether countries should have independent currencies at all--are still wide open. It's an eternal controversy, and not even the pope can resolve it.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Don't Laugh at Me, Argentina", Slate (July 20, 1999)
“So you can take your pick as to which Mundell you prefer; but the Nobel committee basically honored Mundell the younger, the economist who was iconoclastic enough to imagine that Canada, of all places, was the economy of the future--and was right.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: O Canada", Slate (October 19, 1999)
“The whole subject of the liquidity trap has a sort of Alice-through-the-looking glass quality. Virtues like , or a known to be strongly committed to , become vices; to get out of the trap a country must loosen its belt, persuade its citizens to forget about the future, and convince the that the government and central bank aren’t as serious and austere as they seem.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Thinking About the Liquidity Trap", Journal of the Japanese and International Economies (2000)
“There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: When asked to define the economic policy of the Bush administration in a BuzzFlash interview, 11 September 2003
“...Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil companies...Exxon, headed by Mr. Raymond, chose a different course of action: it decided to fight the science....And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics....the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because ExxonMobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a tribute to the importance of Friedman’s work that questions about his legacy bear so directly on contemporary policy issues. But for that reason it’s also important not to engage in . Friedman was a great economist, but like every other great economist in history, he was also wrong about some important things.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response to Nelson and Schwartz, Journal of Monetary Economics 55 (2008)
“Whether the influence of increasing returns on trade and geography is rising or falling, one thing is clear: much was learned from the intellectual revolution that brought increasing returns into the heart of how we think about the world economy. It wasn't just that economists could make sense of previously puzzling data, we found ourselves able to see things that had previously been in an intellectual blind spot. Many people contributed to this process of enlightenment; I'm proud to have been a part of the journey.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography", The American Economic Review (Jun., 2009)
“So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Big Zero", The New York Times (27th December, 2009)
“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 ; 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 (born 1953) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Curious Politics of Immigration", 26 April 2010, The Conscience of a Liberal blog at The New York Times
“… politics determine who has the power, not who has the truth.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Australian Financial Review, 6 September 2010, p. 15, "Time for Obama to abandon caution". Also seen in the Sacramento Bee
“It’s a great honour to be asked to give this talk, especially because I’m arguably not qualified to do so. I am, after all, not a Keynes , nor any kind of serious intellectual historian. Nor have I spent most of my career doing macroeconomics. Until the late 1990s my contributions to that field were limited to international issues; although I kept up with macro research, I avoided getting into the frontline theoretical and empirical disputes.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr Keynes and the moderns" (June 21, 2011)
“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 (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS", August 21, 2011.
“...and [[Newt Gingrich|Newt [Gingrich]]] — although somebody said "he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like," but he is more plausible than the other guys that they’ve been pushing up.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This Week with Christiane Amanpour, November 20, 2011
“in goods and services has expanded steadily over the past six decades thanks to declines in shipping and communication costs, globally negotiated reductions in government s, the widespread outsourcing of production activities, and a greater awareness of foreign cultures and products. New and better communications technologies, notably the Internet, have revolutionized the way people in all countries obtain and exchange information.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paul R. Krugman, Maurice Obstfeld, and Marc J. Melitz, International Economics: Theory & Policy, 9th edition (2012)
“This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Of his paper "The Theory of Interstellar Trade"; quoted in The Economist, 26 October 2013, p. 86
“Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology. Why is economics such a hard subject? Part of the answer has to do with complexity. The economy cannot be put in a box. [...] Another reason economics is hard is that the critical sociologist is right: it involves human beings, who do not behave in simple, mechanical ways.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the example of Ronald Reagan shows, real political success comes not simply from appealing to the interests that people currently perceive but from finding ways to redefine their perceived interests, to harness their discontent in favor of changes that you can lead.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where do ideas about economics come from? They come, of course from economists—where by an "economist" I mean someone who thinks and writes regularly about economic issues. But not all economists are alike, and in fact the genus includes two radically distinct species: The professors and the policy entrepreneurs.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, the problem that the politicians have with the professors is not one of failure to communicate; it is one of failure to say what politicians want (need) to hear, especially when they are trying to seize power from other politicians. And necessity is the mother of invention: a different group, the policy entrepreneurs, has arisen to fill the gap.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like any major intellectual contribution, Keynes's ideas were bitterly criticized. To many people it seems obvious that massive economic slumps must have deep roots. To them, Keynes's argument that they are essentially no more than a problem of mixed signals, which can be cured by printing a bit more money, seems unbelievable.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first stage of Friedman's attack on Keynes was his effective though somewhat slippery critique of the idea that monetary and fiscal policy can be actively used to smooth out the business cycle. Friedman argued that such active policy is not only unnecessary but actually harmful, worsening the very economic instability that it is supposed to correct, and should be replaced by simple, mechanical monetary rules. This is the doctrine that came to be known as "monetarism.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the whole, the monetarism for which Friedman first became famous seems clever, brilliantly argued, but shallow ― and perhaps even a bit disingenuous. Friedman's writings from that period have the feel of a smart man who knows what he wants to believe looking hard for supporting arguments. And I think it is fair to say that up until the late 1960s Friedman and his followers, while influential, were regarded by many of their colleagues as faintly disreputable.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Milton Friedman was not surprised. In 1968, in one of the decisive intellectual achievements of postwar economics, Friedman not only showed why the apparent tradeoff embodied in the idea of the Phillips curve was wrong; he also predicted the emergence of combined inflation and high unemployment, which Paul Samuelson dubbed ".”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By 1980, the work of Feldstein, Boskin, Summers, and others had convinced many economists that U.S. taxes were in fact a significant obstacle to investment. Nor was this all: another major U.S. policy, the Social Security system, was also discouraging saving and investment.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a way, the worst sin of the conservatives was that of hypocrisy. They proclaimed growth as their objective, offered it as the answer to all problems, all while following policies that actually inhibited that growth at least a bit. At the end of the day, however, the most striking fact is how little happened to U.S. long-term growth, good or bad, on their watch.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The new trade theory picture of the world looks something like this: Each country has, at any given time, a set of broad resources—land, skilled labor, capital, climate, general technological competence. These resources define up to a point the industries in which the country can hope to be competitive on world markets. [...] But a country's resources do not fully determine what it produces, because the detailed pattern of advantage reflects the self-reinforcing virtuous circles, set in motion by the vagaries of history.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's tempting to give up—either to retreat to the ivory tower, or to start to play the policy entrepreneur game. After all, what is the use of sophisticated policy thinking or careful examination of the facts if simplistic ideas win every time? One answer is simply that it would be wrong to give up. If the people with good ideas do not fight for them, they have no right to complain about the outcome. But good ideas will still often lose to convenient nonsense. When that happens, every serious economist is ultimately sustained by a faith that the right ideas will eventually prevail.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consider John Kenneth Galbraith or Lester Thurow, both leading economists in the view of the general public, both with all the formal qualifications, both totally ignored by the academic mainstream. Or consider Robert Mundell, who is still revered for his contributions to international monetary theory, yet whose later incarnation as the father of supply-side economics has similarly been ignored.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So what's the moral? We've seen how the insistence on models that meet the standards of rigor in mainstream economics can lead to neglect of clearly valuable ideas. Does this mean that the whole emphasis on models is wrong? Should we make a major effort to open up economics, to relax our standards about what constitutes an acceptable argument? No—the moral of my tale is nowhere near that easy. Economists can often be remarkably obtuse, failing to see things that are right in front of them. But sometimes a bit of obtuseness is not entirely a bad thing.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Homo economicus is an implausible caricature, but a highly productive one, and no useful alternative has yet been found.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of those who reject the idea of economic models are ill-informed or even (perhaps unconsciously) intellectually dishonest. Still, there are highly intelligent and objective thinkers who are repelled by simplistic models for a much better reason: they are very aware that the act of building a involves loss as well as gain.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem is that there is no alternative to models. We all think in simplified models, all the time. The sophisticated thing to do is not to pretend to stop, but to be self-conscious—to be aware that your models are maps rather than reality.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A temporary evolution of ignorance, a period when our insistence on looking in certain directions leaves us unable to see what is right under our noses, may be the price of progress, an inevitable part of what happens when we try to make sense of the world's complexity.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any interesting model of must exhibit a tension between two kinds of forces: "centripetal" forces that tend to pull economic activity into agglomerations, and "centrifugal" forces that tend to break up such agglomerations or limit their size.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession", Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994)
“This article makes three points. First, it argues that concerns about competitiveness are, as an empirical matter, almost completely unfounded. Second, it tries to explain why defining the economic problem as one of international competition is nonetheless so attractive to so many people. Finally, it argues that the obsession with competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and threatening the international economic system.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession", Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994)