Paul Krugman Quotes - Page 5

On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

The planet will continue to cook.

[I]f one asks what substantive contributions [F. A. Hayek] made to our understanding of how the world works, one is left at something of a loss. Were it not for his politics, he would be virtually forgotten.

If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.

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

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

We 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.

In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price-determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of apples or coal. And it is for that reason, rather than the practical details, that the broader political movement of which the demand for a living wage is the leading edge is ultimately doomed to failure: For the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away.

When stock prices are rising, it's called ''momentum investing''; when they are falling, it's called ''panic.''

A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble

[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.

But where will the Fed find another bubble?

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.

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.

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.

as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.

By rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

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.

In fact, I'd say that the sources of the economy's expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and - very much in third place - tax cuts.