Quotes

A majority of Americans support Social Security and Medicare, a progressive tax system and a government that regulates business in the public interest, but most share deep skepticism about the government's ability to do all this well.

The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

Art is often valuable precisely because it isn't a sensible way to make money.

The economy works best when better ideas win out over worse ideas, harder work wins out over less work, when it's a fair fight in the marketplace.

When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

To put it simply and a bit crudely: Our economy is demanding more well-educated workers than our schools are providing. To attract this scarce resource, communities have to offer more than just jobs.

The America that I think most Americans would want, most economists on the right or left would want, is one in which a smart, ambitious, hardworking person without a huge amount of resources has a pretty good shot, in the end, of beating out a less smart, less ambitious, less hardworking rich person.

It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.

What we want as an economy is companies and people, you know, working hard to come up with creative ways to be more productive. We don't want companies and people working hard to lobby government for special tax cuts.

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence.

A healthy economy is largely a result of a reasonable balance between consumption today and consumption deferred, and it's pretty clear that balance has been ridiculously out of whack for a while.

If the American government can't stand behind the dollar, the world's benchmark currency, then the global financial system will very likely enter a new era in which there is much less trade and much less economic growth. It would be, by most accounts, the largest self-imposed financial disaster in history.

The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike.

The idea of confidence, of the emotions of the population, is an incredibly important one in economics. John Maynard Keynes called it 'animal spirit.' And if people are feeling generally good about the future, they're more likely to spend money, to start new companies; companies are more likely to hire people, make investments.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

Economics is not a discipline that comes to correct answers - economies are too complex.

Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978.

If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer.

Most rich countries have reported increases in happiness as they become richer.

If the amount of hours spent on FarmVille were spent on actual farming, imagine what we could achieve.

One of the things I would love for people to think about is social responsibility. If you are fortunate enough to be someone who owns land, I think you ought to be making the most efficient use of that land possible.

By virtue of our private property society, we have disconnected individuals from the land. We have put them in high rises and asked them to live their lives in urban settings, disconnected from the land.

The pace of innovation may slow down or speed up depending on the appetite in the public markets, but the constant progress of technology doesn't really ever stop. There's always opportunities for new ideas and creative people to go build great things. I'm always interested in learning about those kinds of opportunities.