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Paul Krugman

135 quotes

“To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy, a government wedded to the ideology of competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to the theory of evolution.”
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)
“So let's start telling the truth: competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies. And the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous.”
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)
“If growth in East Asia is indeed running into diminishing returns, however, the conventional wisdom about an Asian-centered world economy needs some rethinking.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Myth of Asia's Miracle", Foreign Affairs (November/December 1994)
“That's a hard answer to accept, especially for those American policy intellectuals who recoil from the dreary task of reducing deficits and raising the national savings rate. But economics is not a dismal science because the economists like it that way; it is because in the end we must submit to the tyranny not just of the numbers, but of the logic they express.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Myth of Asia's Miracle", Foreign Affairs (November/December 1994)
“The world is full of self-organizing systems, systems that form structures not merely in response to inputs from outside but also, indeed primarily, in response to their own internal logic. Global weather is a self-organizing system; so, surely, is the global economy.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be a progressive, then, means being a partisan—at least for now. The only way a progressive agenda can be enacted is if Democrats have both the presidency and a large enough majority in Congress to overcome Republican opposition. And achieving that kind of political preponderance will require leadership that makes opponents of the progressive agenda pay a political price for their obstructionism—leadership that, like FDR, welcomes the hatred of the interest groups trying to prevent us from making our society better.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 13. The Conscience of a Liberal. W. W. Norton & Company. 352 pages ISBN 978-0-393-06069-0, 1st edition (2007)
“Most economists, to the extent that they think about the subject at all, regard the Great Depression of the 1930s as a gratuitous, unnecessary tragedy.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The kind of economic trouble that Asia experienced a decade ago, and that we're all experiencing now, is precisely the sort of thing we thought we had learned to prevent. In the bad old days big, advanced economies with stable governments-like Britain in the 1920s-might have had no answer to prolonged periods of stagnation and deflation; but between John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, we thought we knew enough to keep that from happening again.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I’ve just noted, Greenspan warned about irrational exuberance, but he didn’t do anything about it. And in fact, the Fed chairman holds what I believe is a unique record among central bankers: he presided over not one but two enormous asset bubbles, first in stocks, then in housing.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models—for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dubya's Double Dip?", The New York Times, 2 August 2002
“What saved the economy, and the New Deal was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Op-ed, "Franklin Delano Obama," New York Times, November 10, 2008
“When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", The New York Times (September 2, 2009)
“Things could have been even worse. This week, we managed to avoid driving off a cliff. But we’re still on the road to nowhere.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Regarding the last-minute deal that ended the 2013 U.S. government shutdown just before the U.S. defaulted on its debt
“Many liberals have changed their views in response to new evidence. It’s an interesting experience; conservatives should try it some time.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Holding people accountable for their past is O.K., but imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys, isn’t. Abraham Lincoln didn’t meet that standard; neither did F.D.R. Nor, for that matter, has Bernie Sanders (think guns).”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sanders Over The Edge (April 8, 2016)
“The Sanders campaign has brought out a lot of idealism and energy that the progressive movement needs. It has also, however, brought out a streak of petulant self-righteousness among some supporters. Has it brought out that streak in the candidate, too?”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sanders Over The Edge (April 8, 2016)
“If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Economic Fallout (November 9, 2016)
“The fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Populism Perplex, (November 25, 2016)
“Nobody can credibly promise to bring the old jobs back; what you can promise — and Mrs. Clinton did — are things like guaranteed health care and higher minimum wages. But working-class whites overwhelmingly voted for politicians who promise to destroy those gains.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Populism Perplex, (November 25, 2016)
“You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay County as a response to disagreements about trade policy. The only way to make sense of what happened is to see the vote as an expression of, well, identity politics — some combination of white resentment at what voters see as favoritism toward nonwhites (even though it isn’t) and anger on the part of the less educated at liberal elites whom they imagine look down on them.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Populism Perplex, (November 25, 2016)
“Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Populism Perplex, (November 25, 2016)
“With great wealth comes great pettiness.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Warren Versus the Petty Plutocrats (September 30, 2019)
“Nonetheless, William Barr — again, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, responsible for defending the Constitution — is sounding remarkably like America’s most unhinged religious zealots, the kind of people who insist that we keep experiencing mass murder because schools teach the theory of evolution. Guns don’t kill people — Darwin kills people!”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: God Is Now Trump’s Co-Conspirator (October 14, 2019)
“The [Trump impeachment] inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trump and His Corrupt Old Party: For Republicans, there is no bottom (November 21, 2019)
“The way to deal with China would have been a broad coalition of countries that play by the rules. Instead, we've conveyed the message that big countries don't need no rules. And China is a very big country.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: comment on Trump Is Abusing His Tariff Power, Too (January 23, 2020)
“Republicans Add Insult to Illness”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: column (March 23, 2020)
“Because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue (July 30, 2020)
“If Keynes was Luther, Friedman was Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. And like the Jesuits, Friedman’s followers have acted as a sort of disciplined army of the faithful, spearheading a broad, but incomplete, rollback of Keynesian heresy. By the century’s end, classical economics had regained much though by no means all of its former dominion, and Friedman deserves much of the credit.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Who Was Milton Friedman?", The New York Review of Books (February 15, 2007)
“Keynesian theory initially prevailed because it did a far better job than classical orthodoxy of making sense of the world around us, and Friedman’s critique of Keynes became so influential largely because he correctly identified Keynesianism’s weak points. And just to be clear: although this essay argues that Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Who Was Milton Friedman?", The New York Review of Books (February 15, 2007)
“In effect, Japan in the Nineties offered a fresh opportunity to test the views of Friedman and Keynes regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy in depression conditions. And the results clearly supported Keynes’s pessimism rather than Friedman’s optimism.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Who Was Milton Friedman?", The New York Review of Books (February 15, 2007)
“Piketty ends Capital in the Twenty-First Century with a call to arms — a call, in particular, for wealth taxes, global if possible, to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth. It’s easy to be cynical about the prospects for anything of the kind. But surely Piketty’s masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading makes such a thing considerably more likely. So Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why We’re in a New Gilded Age", The New York Review of Books (May 8, 2014)
“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 (born 1953) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Dark Age of Macroeconomics", 27 January 2009
“The best you can say about economic policy in this slump is that we have for the most part avoided a full repeat of the Great Depression. I say “for the most part” because we actually are seeing a Depression-level slump in Greece, and very bad slumps elsewhere in the European periphery. Still, the overall downturn hasn’t been a full 1930s replay. But all of that, I think, can be attributed to the financial rescue of 2008-2009 and automatic stabilizers. Deliberate policy to offset the crash in private spending has been largely absent.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economics in the Crisis" (March 5, 2012)
“Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Beatings Must Continue", 30 April 2013
“We’re now in the seventh year of a slump brought on by Wall Street excess; the wizardly job of “allocating the economy’s investment resources” consisted, we now know, largely of funneling money into a real estate bubble.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Iron Men of Wall Street", 16 February 2014
“It has been obvious for quite a while that Sanders — not just his supporters, not even just his surrogates, but the candidate himself — has a problem both in facing reality and in admitting mistakes.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Questions of Character (May 17, 2016)
“As Branko says, there was a time when Serbs and Croats seemed to get along fairly well, indeed intermarrying at a high rate. But could anyone now put Yugoslavia back together? At this rate, we’ll soon be asking the same question about America.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Climate Of Treason (July 14, 2017)
“What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 5 January 2019, New York Times
“I do not mean to say that formal economic analysis is worthless, and that anybody's opinion on economic matters is as good as anyone else's. On the contrary! I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders, and imagine that they achieve greater sophistication by avoiding stating their assumptions clearly. The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible (more on that below). But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How I Work", American Economist (1993)
“The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the theory has powerful emotional appeal. Usually that appeal is strongest for conservatives, who can't stand the thought that positive action by governments (let alone—horrors!—printing money) can ever be a good idea. Some libertarians extol the Austrian theory, not because they have really thought that theory through, but because they feel the need for some prestigious alternative to the perceived statist implications of Keynesianism. And some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors. But moderates and liberals are not immune to the theory's seductive charms—especially when it gives them a chance to lecture others on their failings.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Hangover Theory", Slate (Dec. 4, 1998)
“More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response. These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, "A Manifesto for Economic Sense" (June 27, 2012)
“When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the , in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known , in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy—s, a firm commitment to —helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are—and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Depressions are Different”, in Robert M. Solow, ed. Economics for the Curious: Inside the Minds of 12 Nobel Laureates. 2014.
“I do not think this is a permanent condition. The craziness comes more from cultural ethnic issues than anything else, because you have a… A lot of the real craziness come from, if you like, from rural who feel that they’re losing their country, they’re losing ownership of the country. And they are right—we are becoming more diverse, more multicultural. And in the end... they are not the future. In the end, the power they still have will go away. But it’s a very difficult time until then. So the future is Mayor Deblasio of New York, but Ted Cruz is still out there with the ability to do a lot of damage.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in Paul Krugman Interview by Norwegian TV channel NRK (January 8, 2014)
“Why did the magic economy go away? Hundreds of books have been written on that topic. This isn't one of them ― although I'll devote part of a chapter to some plausible stories and take a number of stabs at the issue along the way. But let me cut to the chase: the real answer is that we don't know. There are a lot of stories out there. Most of them, including the ones that have achieved the widest currency, are dead wrong on logical or factual grounds. There are some less popular stories that could be right ― but if you are honest with yourself, you will admit that nobody, yourself included, knows which if any of these stories actually is right.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many economic puzzles, but there are only two really great mysteries. One of these mysteries is why economic growth takes places at different rates over time and across countries. Nobody really knows why the U.S. economy could generate 3 percent annual productivity growth before 1973 but only 1 percent afterward, nobody really knows why Japan surged from defeat to global economic power after World War II, while Britain slid slowly into third-rate status. At any given time there are always policy entrepreneurs willing to claim that they have all the answers, but we'll come to that story in later chapters. The other mystery is the reason why there is a business cycle ― the irregular rhythm of recessions and recoveries that prevents economic growth from being a smooth trend. It was in challenging the orthodox, Keynesian view of business cycles that conservatives first forced a major rethinking of economics.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The phenomenon of recessions puzzled many economists in the early years of this century, and led many of them produce their worst work. Thorstein Veblen went from his brilliant Theory of the Leisure Class to write a really terrible book () purporting to explain economic slumps. Joseph Schumpeter, whose magnificent vision of the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalist growth continues to inspire many economists, wrote a turgid, almost meaningless two-volume study, Business Cycles. Marxists gleefully seized upon the biggest recession of all, the Great Depression of the 1930s, as evidence of the irrationality of capitalism; yet they never offered a good explanation of why and how such things happen, just assurances that socialism would cure them. It fell to the British economist John Maynard Keynes to provide a clear story about what happens during a recession, and some useful advice about how to get out of one.”
Paul Krugman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source