Explore Quotes by Paul Krugman

The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.

Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.

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. _x000D_ 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.

Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.

Wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing - correctly - that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people.

There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.

I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law.

The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.

I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.

It’s not about the budget; it’s about the power...So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

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.

[I]f one asks what substantive contributions [F. A. Hayek] made to our understanding of how the world works, one is left at something of a loss. Were it not for his politics, he would be virtually forgotten.

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.

Seven habits that help produce the anything-but-efficient markets that rule the world. _x000D__x000D_1. Think short term. _x000D__x000D_2. Be greedy. _x000D__x000D_3. Believe in the greater fool _x000D__x000D_4. Run with the herd. _x000D__x000D_5. Overgeneralize _x000D__x000D_6. Be trendy _x000D__x000D_7. Play with other people's money

[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

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.

Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.

Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.

Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.