Joseph E. Stiglitz Quotes

The era of multilateral trade liberalization seems to be nearing an end (at least for a while), as well-founded disillusionment in the developing countries combines with growing protectionist sentiment in the developed world.

The United States and Europe have perfected the art of arguing for free trade while simultaneously working for trade agreements that protect themselves against imports from developing countries. [...] Western negotiators almost take it for granted that they can control what gets discussed, and determine the outcomes.

In part, free trade has not worked because we have not tried it: trade agreements of the past have been neither free nor fair. They have been asymmetric, opening up markets in the developing countries to goods from the advanced industrial countries without full reciprocation.

When I was at the World Bank, it would often be said in the face of obvious failure that our strategy was correct, it just wasn't implemented well.

New technologies (reinforced by new trade rules) are enhancing the market power of incumbent, dominant firms, such as Microsoft, which are all from the developed world; for the first time, in a key global industry, there is a near-global monopolist.

Instead, unchecked by competition [by the USSR] to "win the heart and minds" of those in the Third World, the advanced industrial countries actually created a global trade regime that helped their special corporate and financial interests, and hurt the poorest countries of the world.

Growing up in Gary Indiana gave me, I think, a distinct advantage over many of my classmates who had grown up in affluent suburbs. They could read articles that argued that in competitive equilibrium, there could not be discrimination, so long as there are some non-discriminatory individuals or firms, since it would pay any such firm to hire the lower wage discriminated-against individuals, and take them seriously. I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced. To me, the theorem simply proved that one or more of the assumptions that went into the theory was wrong.

Seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are.

I recognized that information was, in many respects, like a public good, and it was this insight that made it clear to me that it was unlikely that the private market would provide efficient resource allocations whenever information was endogenous.

An early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability — the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future — and these markets clearly did not exist — what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?

Once I undertook the analysis of a problem, I often looked at it from a variety of perspectives. I approached the problem as a series of thought experiments — unlike many other sciences, we typically cannot do actual experiments.

There was an incongruity between many of the models that we were taught and the policy positions that our teachers (and we) believed in. The models seemed more consonant with free market prescriptions, though they were presented more as benchmarks rather than full characterizations.

I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights. We were impatient with those (like President Kennedy) who took a cautious approach. How could we continue to countenance these injustices that had gone on so long? (The fact that so many people in the establishment seemed to do so — as they had accepted colonialism, slavery, and other forms of oppression — left a life-long mark. It reinforced a distrust of authority which I had had from childhood).