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Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can’t function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations.

Joseph Stiglitz

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Joseph Stiglitz
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 9
Critic
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Science Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Gary
Indiana
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz
Society
Regulation
Making
Mechanism
Order
Maintain
Certain
Rules
Enforcing
Without
Function
Delegate
Kind
Stop
Delegates
People
Responsibility
Regulations
Sure
Enforcement

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I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
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The Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded - 17,000 so far including roughly 20 percent with serious brain and head injuries. Even the estimate of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and healthcare costs that taxpayers will have to spend for years to come.
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Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.
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There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.
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The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.
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No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.
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As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.
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I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.
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Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.
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For that to happen, growth has to be very strong. To get back to normalcy, we will have to have extended growth of more than 3 percent. That's not in the cards.
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One has to always ask the question: Where can one be most effective in helping shape policies? It is always difficult when you're inside because you're very constrained.
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What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.
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The grand larceny that occurred in Russia, the corruption that resulted in nine or ten people getting enormous wealth through loans-for-shares, was condoned because it allowed the reelection of Boris Yeltsin.
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The roots of the crisis in East Asia were in private sector decisions. The biggest problems were the misallocation of investment, most notably to speculative real estate, and risky financing, especially borrowing short-term debt on international markets.
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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?
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Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.
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When I said the pocket of the banks, it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.
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Unfettered market American-style capitalism doesn't work. Developing countries can't afford that kind of luxury. They just can't afford it. Period. If there's a mistake, they can't afford to put out $2 trillion.
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In fact, for just about 1/6 of the cost of an Iraq War, we could have put the social security system on sound financial footings for the next 50 to 75 years. The problems can be managed - but not if we continue to fight this war for another 80 years.
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For 60 years, since World War II, we have been trying to create a rules-based system, a global economic system. We understand that what makes our economy function is what we call the rule of law, and what is true domestically is also true internationally. It is important to have rules by which we govern our relations with other countries.
Joseph Stiglitz