Joseph E. Stiglitz > Quotes

“Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz

“Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work

“There are two visions of America a half century from now. One is of a society more divided between the haves and the have-nots, a country in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools, and have access to first-rate medical care. Meanwhile, the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education, and in effect rationed health care―they hope and pray they don't get seriously sick. At the bottom are millions of young people alienated and without hope. I have seen that picture in many developing countries; economists have given it a name, a dual economy, two societies living side by side, but hardly knowing each other, hardly imagining what life is like for the other. Whether we will fall to the depths of some countries, where the gates grow higher and the societies split farther and farther apart, I do not know. It is, however, the nightmare towards which we are slowly marching.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz

“Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.”
― Joseph Stiglitz, The Price Of Inequality

“...decisions were often made because of ideology and politics. As a result many wrong-headed actions were taken, ones that did not solve the problem at hand but that fit with the interests or beliefs of the people in power.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents

“The facts shouldn’t get in the way of a pleasant fantasy.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The same is true for the market economy: the power of markets is enormous, but they have no inherent moral character. We have to decide how to manage them... For all these reasons, it is plain that markets must be tamed and tempered to make sure they work to the benefit of most citizens. And that has to be done repeatedly, to ensure that they continue to do so.”
― Joseph Stiglitz, The Price Of Inequality

“The U.S. incarceration rate is the world’s highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Part of the reason for this is that much of America’s inequality is the result of market distortions, with incentives directed not at creating new wealth but at taking it from others.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“In some circumstances, a focus on extrinsic rewards (money) can actually diminish effort. Most (or at least many) teachers enter their profession not because of the money but because of their love for children and their dedication to teaching. The best teachers could have earned far higher incomes if they had gone to banking. It is almost insulting to assume that they are not doing what they can to help their students learn, and that by paying them an extra $500 or $1,500, they would exert greater effort. Indeed, incentive pay can be corrosive: it reminds teachers of how bad their pay is, and those who are led thereby to focus on money may be induced to find a better paying job, leaving behind only those for whom teaching is the only alternative. (Of course, if teachers perceive themselves to be badly paid, that will undermine morale, and that will have adverse incentive effects)”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“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.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Overborrowing or overlending? Lenders encourage indebtedness because it is profitable. Developing country governments are sometimes even pressured to overborrow ... Even without corruption, it is easy to be influenced by Western businessmen and financiers ... Countries that aren't sure that borrowing is worth the rist are told how important it is to establis a credit rating: borrow even if you really don't need the money.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work

“Ensuring that we have a well-informed public citizenry is important for a well-functioning democracy, and that in turn requires an active and diverse media.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“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, The Three Trillion Dollar War

“America had created a marvelous economic machine, but evidently one that worked only for those at the top.
"Of the 1% for the 1% by the 1%”
― Joseph Stiglitz

“Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America’s legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the “rule of law,” but in today’s America the proud claim of “justice for all” is being replaced by the more modest claim of “justice for those who can afford it.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Se necesitan políticas para un crecimiento sostenible, equitativo y democrático. Esta es la razón del desarrollo. El desarrollo no consiste en ayudar a unos pocos individuos a enriquecerse o en crear un puñado de absurdas industrias protegidas que solo benefician a la elite del país; no consiste en traer a Prada y Benetton, Ralph Lauren o Louis Vuitton para los ricos de las ciudades, abandonando a los pobres del campo de su miseria. El que se pudieran comprar bolsos de Gucci en los grandes almacenes de Moscú no significo que el país se había vuelto una economía de mercado. El desarrollo consiste en transformar las sociedades, mejorar las vidas de los pobres, permitir que todos tengan la oportunidad de salir adelante y acceder a la salud y a la educación. Este tipo de desarrollo no tendrá lugar si sólo unos pocos dictan las políticas que deberá seguir un país. Conseguir que se tomen decisiones democráticas quiere decir garantizar que un abanico de economistas, funcionarios y expertos de los países en desarrollo estén activamente involucrados en el debate. También implica una amplia participación que va bastante más allá de los expertos y los políticos. Los países en desarrollo deben tomar las riendas de su propio porvenir. Pero nosotros en occidente no podemos eludir nuestras responsabilidades”
― Joseph Stiglitz

“I became convinced that the advanced industrial countries, through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, were not only not doing all that they could to help these [developing] countries but were sometimes making their life more difficult. IMF programs had clearly worsened the East Asian crisis, and the "shock therapy" they had pushed in the former Soviet Union and its satellites played an important role in the failure of the transition.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work

“The head of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made it perfectly clear: sophisticated investors don’t, or at least shouldn’t, rely on trust. Those who bought the products the banks sold were consenting adults who should have known better.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“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 E. Stiglitz

“Americans all benefit from the physical and institutional infrastructure that has developed from the country’s collective efforts over generations.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Democracy, we now know, is more than periodic elections in some countries, such elections have been used to legitimize essentially authoritarian regimes and deprive large parts of the citizenry of basic rights.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them

“it’s easy to get rich by getting a state asset at a deep discount.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“If economic power in a country becomes too unevenly distributed, political consequences will follow. While we typically think of the rule of law as being designed to protect the weak against the strong, and ordinary citizens against the privileged, those with wealth will use their political power to shape the rule of law to provide a framework within which they can exploit others.9”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“(a) Recent U.S. income growth primarily occurs at the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (b) As a result there is growing inequality. (c) And those at the bottom and in the middle are actually worse-off today than they were at the beginning of the century. (d) Inequalities in wealth are even greater than inequalities in income. (e) Inequalities are apparent not just in income but in a variety of other variables that reflect standards of living, such as insecurity and health. (f) Life is particularly harsh at the bottom—and the recession made it much worse. (g) There has been a hollowing out of the middle class. (h) There is little income mobility—the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth. (i) And America has more inequality than any other advanced industrialized country, it does less to correct these inequities, and inequality is growing more than in many other countries.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“My study of economics had taught me that the ideology of many conservatives was wrong; their almost religious belief in the power of markets—so great that we could largely simply rely on unfettered markets for running the economy—had no basis in theory or evidence.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent