Robert Kuttner Quotes

Why, then, should we have to lower our living standards? What is the mysterious source of the economic loss? If productivity is increasing, why should we sacrifice services and wages?

The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.

In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.

If social security depresses savings rates, it is only because it is unfunded.

If got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?

American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically "larger" public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.

Henry Ford, in a sense, was the first Keynesian. He paid his assembly workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars.

Britain, with the most completely socialized health system in the West, now spends the lowest fraction of GNP on health care of any major nation. There are frequent complaints of excessive waits for elective surgery and other inconveniences, but British citizens live slightly longer than Americans, on average, and our overall health conditions are comparable.

Technological advance often thrives in sheltered and subsidized markets, which defy free trade.

When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.

Political conservatives have focused on tax reduction as an economic growth strategy for three reasons. First it is self-serving; it saves rich people lots of money. Second, it comports with their ideological allegiance to laissez-faire economics. And third, tax incentives are less intrusive to business-as-usual than any other form of government planning.

Can we reverse these deeply rooted sources sources of inequality? Or are they just endemic to a capitalist economy?

Technological change is beneficial only when other jobs replace the ones lost.

In a world where technology and capital are highly transferable, there is a real risk that comparative advantage comes to be defined as whose labor force will work for the lowest wage.

Keynes, like Freud and Marx, deserves to be read in the original, not through the glosses of his lesser disciples.