"I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?"
"A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research."
"A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes."
"A modern economy is marked by the feasibility of endogenous change: Modernization brings myriad arrangements from expanded property rights to company law and financial institutions."
"Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s."
"I could try to incorporate or reflect in my models what it is that an employee, manager, or entrepreneur does: to recognize that most are engaged in their work, form expectations and evolve beliefs, solve problems, and have ideas. Trying to put these people into economic models became my project."
"In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income."
"The main cause of Europe's deep fall - the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth - is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swaths of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates, and it depresses employment."
"Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand."
"Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply."
"After a major loss of dynamism in the 1960s, productivity growth rates began dropping in most countries, falling by half in the U.S. in the 1970s and more or less ceasing altogether in France, Germany and Britain in the late 1990s."
"'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth."
"Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls."
"With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders."
"Some economists believe that the Greeks' work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the classical virtues can do nothing to offset the dearth of innovation that plagues the economy."
"The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy."
"No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure."
"There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings."
"When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut."
"Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired."
"I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going."
"One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, they're afraid to stay the course, so they start selling. The other thing is that I think, as entrepreneurs keep on waiting to produce new things, that there's an accumulation of as-yet-unexploited new ideas that keeps mounting up."
"Things can get only so bad. People want to eat, so at some point they resist further cuts to their consumption - it's not a bottomless pit."
"An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains."
"America's peak years of indigenous innovation ran from the 1820s to the 1960s. There were a few financial panics and two depressions, to be sure. But in this period, a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all, and engaging careers for most."
