From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The case for free trade is much stronger than the case for free capital movement. The case for free capital movement is weak, because financial markets suffer from very serious failures (right now is a nice example of that).
What we have seen here is a pseudo-nuclear war. An unwind of misused financial instruments created a huge economic shock- which will fundamentally change the next quarter century of our economic story.
Warren Buffett had a phrase I really liked: You want to give your kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing. I set up a plan to create wealth for them—and I wildly overshot that.
As far as I'm concerned any business that's up and running within an hour of having mortar [attacks shows remarkable resilience].
A speculative bubble exists when the price of something does not equal its market fundamentals for some period of time for reasons other than random shocks. [Fundamental] is usually argued to be a long-run equilibrium consistent with a general equilibrium
Roughly speaking, a child born today in a very poor country can expect to live about 40 years, while a child born today in a wealthy country could expect to live about 80 years.
He developed national income measures which were then taken-up by the UN and governments as the accepted measure of economic performance. The standardisation of this measure by the UK was ultimately what engendered it's adoption as the criteria of economic success.
I think both examples share one glaring mistake. They overlook the fact that even though knowledge diffuses, it is also agglomerative—it tends to concentrate. When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation.
The representative agent model (and its descendants) imposed a straightjacket that made it difficult to think clearly about what was going on [in the economy]… To me [Stiglitz], the strangest aspect of modern macroeconomics was that the central banks were using a model in which banks and financial markets played no role.
You are all so smart… and this was so bad… how could your discipline have not seen it coming? Implicit in the Queen's question was the assertion that economists don't get out enough and talk to people in the wider economy.
In a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
One of the things I'm interested in encouraging people to think about is the whole area of risk. What really is risky?! In many ways I think it's actually much safer to take things into your own hands rather than trusting your destiny to an uncertain jobs market.