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The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

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
Ideology
Economics
Called
Religion
Problem

More quotes by Joseph Stiglitz

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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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You can't overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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Most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.
Joseph Stiglitz
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Anybody who knows about capitalism knows that bankruptcy is an essential part of capitalism.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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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They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.
Joseph Stiglitz
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If you destroy a firm, you can't pull it out of bankruptcy overnight.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The military is focusing only on the short run costs. If they don't provide appropriate body armor, they save some money today, but the healthcare cost is going to be the future for some other president down the line. I view that as both fiscally and morally irresponsible.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The country has large unfunded liabilities - social security, health care, and there will have to be some adjustments to these problems. What is scary though is how much worse things have gotten in the last eight years, and the Iraq war is one of the main factors.
Joseph Stiglitz
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Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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?
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.
Joseph Stiglitz
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I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: What kind of financial or banking system do we want? Macro, you would say: What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?
Joseph Stiglitz