Nicholas Barr Quotes

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

there is an efficiency case for an institutional welfare state.

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.

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

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.

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

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

It has been argued that relatively poor people will borrow to buy a house, so why not to buy a degree?

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

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.

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

Markets can be efficient or inefficient; so can governments. thus market failure is a counterpoint to government failure.

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

Thus social insurance, in sharp contrast with actuarial insurance, can cover not only risk but also uncertainty.

Efficiency advantages and disadvantages are more finely balanced than with health care - one person's 'sign of a civilized society' is another's 'society is going to the dogs'.