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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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Joseph Stiglitz
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 9
Critic
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
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University Teacher
Writer
Gary
Indiana
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz
Never
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Imperfect
Economist
Information
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Always
Market
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More quotes by Joseph Stiglitz

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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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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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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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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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In a globally integrated economy, the biggest challenge is to make sure there is adequate global aggregate demand, achieved through spending, when countries like China feel they must save high levels of dollar reserves to protect against international currency volatility.
Joseph Stiglitz
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Climate change is a reality.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The national debt will have increased by approximately 50% in just eight years! We will have created a new unfunded entitlement - disability and health care benefits for the huge number of disabled veterans returning from the Iraq war.
Joseph Stiglitz
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Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.
Joseph Stiglitz
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It is unlikely that others would even demand their money back overnight, for doing so would lead to the value of the dollar plummeting what they would get back with be worth little. But what we are already seeing is an erosion of confidence of the dollar, which is seeing the dollar fall in value.
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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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
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The problem with NAFTA was with what we wanted. And there, the agenda had been set by our corporations. So what is true is that workers in the United States and workers in the developing countries were often disadvantaged. They were worse off. The big winners were our corporations.
Joseph Stiglitz
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In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.
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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We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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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.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush's Jr. friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier.
Joseph Stiglitz
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The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.
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