"The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot."
"Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed."
"Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves."
"Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress."
"Broadly shared progress can be achieved with policies that are designed specifically to benefit consumers and workers. And such policies need not even include redistributive taxation, which many workers oppose. Rather, they can focus on ways to encourage competition and discourage rent-seeking."
"The first thing we need to understand when we think about globalization is that it has benefited an enormous number of people who are not part of the global elite."
"Policies aimed at reversing globalization will lead only to a decrease in real income as goods become more expensive."
"It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does."
"International development aid is based on the Robin Hood principle: take from the rich and give to the poor."
"The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper."
"Like many in academia and in the development industry, I am among globalization's greatest beneficiaries - those who are able to sell our services in markets that are larger and richer than our parents could have dreamed of."
"When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them."
"Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives."
"In Scotland, I was brought up to think of policemen as allies and to ask one for help when I needed it."
"Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine."
"Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas."
"The history of Montana has been of the government giving land grants to people that could not possibly turn it into decent farms. And that's destroying their lives. So they don't see the government as something that's out there to help them."
"The Nobel thing is like dying and going to heaven for a while. It's like being transported to a fairyland."
"The people who hate immigrants are people who have never met them!"
"I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history."
"The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school."
"I didn't care for school much - it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the 'tawse' was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid - but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the 'dux,' as the best pupil was called."
"The educational highlights I remember were not in the classroom. My father spent a lot of time with me when he could. He taught me how to take square roots, a skill I have retained but do not use often, except to check that I still remember."
"When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom."
"I have the great good fortune that one of my collaborators in work, Anne Case, is also my collaborator in life."
