Nicholas Barr Quotes

A reduction in the liberty of the least well off cannot be justified even if it is to their economic advantage.

We need a welfare state of some sort for efficiency reasons, and would continue to do so even if all distributional problems were solved.

there is an efficiency case for an institutional welfare state.

The European Commission uses an explicit relative poverty line of 60 per cent of national average income.

By 'trading' (i.e. pooling), individuals can acquire certainty.

Education to the extent that it raises an individual's future earnings, increases her future tax payments; in the absence of any subsidy, an individual's investment in education confers a 'dividend' on future taxpayers.

It is the welfare state that has made capitalism, with all its attendant benefits of economic growth, politically feasible...

The welfare state is the outcome of diverse forces over nearly four centuries of developing social policy.

Money income is a flawed measure of individual welfare.

First, the welfare state is not a subject apart, but fits naturally into the framework of economic analysis. Secondly,the theoretical arguments support the existence of the welfare state not only for well known equity reasons but also - and powerfully - in efficiency terms.

In a world of certainty, the welfare state has only a small role.

Unless the countries of East Asia are very different, rising incomes and the weakening of extended family ties will lead to demands for rising social expenditure.

So far as school education is concerned, many of the assumptions necessary for market efficiency fail, the main problems being imperfect information, imperfect capital markets, and external effects.

It is argued that regulators are frequently captured by those whom they are supposed to regulate.

Perfect competition must hold in product and factor markets, and also (and importantly) in capital markets. The assumption has two essential features: economic agents must be price takers; and they must have equal power.