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Economics is not a morality play.

Paul Krugman

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Paul Krugman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 28
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More quotes by Paul Krugman

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I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?
Paul Krugman
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Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?
Paul Krugman
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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.
Paul Krugman
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Can we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism on the United States? The scariest part is that the media is part of that machine.
Paul Krugman
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Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.
Paul Krugman
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But where will the Fed find another bubble?
Paul Krugman
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Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can't find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they're offering. Almost always it turns out what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage. No wonder they come up short.
Paul Krugman
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Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.
Paul Krugman
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Our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies - but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
Paul Krugman
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Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones...You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.
Paul Krugman
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Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be armed and dangerous without being ostracized but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.
Paul Krugman
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These days, however, the main problem comes from the right - from conservatives who, unlike most economists, really do think that the free market is always right - to such an extent that they refuse to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it seems to suggest a justification for government action.
Paul Krugman
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It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.
Paul Krugman
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The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.
Paul Krugman
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There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.
Paul Krugman
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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.
Paul Krugman
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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
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I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
Paul Krugman
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Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom.
Paul Krugman
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So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.
Paul Krugman