Economists From The United States

"We also must continue with urgency our ongoing dialogue on the important issues that have been raised in recent months, especially the balance between free speech and discrimination and the role of a university in contributing to better outcomes in the Middle East. Both are topics where I hope Columbia can lead the way in new thinking that will make us the epicenter, not just of protests, but of solutions to the world’s problems."

"I am not just a person who wants to raise taxes and share out more. I want everyone to pay their fair share of taxes and invest more in each other"

"I never had a long term plan. I think a career is not like climbing a ladder – it’s more like climbing a tree. Focusing on climbing the next step on the ladder is a mistake. Sometimes when you are climbing a tree, it’s not linear - you might move sideways, which then helps you get up to the next level."

"We are living in a time of great divisions in our societies – between rich and poor, amongst different races and religions, and across fundamental values and principles. We see the rise of truculent nationalism and troubling fault lines in democracies across the world at a time when our most pressing challenges—such as climate change—require more international agreement. We are on the cusp of many technological revolutions in fields like artificial intelligence, neuroscience, quantum and nano technologies. At the same time, we are aging rapidly and coping with mental health challenges and worsening wellbeing."

"From my perspective, there are two issues at stake. First, we must do a better job of defining the boundaries between the free speech rights of one part of our community and the rights of others to be educated in a place free of discrimination and harassment."

"Our values—as well as our duties under civil rights laws—compel us to condemn hate and to protect every member of our community from harassment and discrimination. Antisemitic language and actions are unacceptable and calls for violence are simply abhorrent."

"Free speech is the bedrock of academic inquiry and excellence. The threats it faces are real — many places ban books, curricula are sometimes determined by politicians rather than educational experts and scholars are at serious risk in many countries."

"So let us forge a new social contract with society and with each other that will make us an exemplar of a great university in the 21st century. We will construct this on a foundation built by the wisdom of our past and forge new frontiers of scholarship and service. The legacy of the Columbians who came before will live on through us, as our legacy will live on through future generations, nurtured by the commitments we reaffirm here today."

"I think at the moment we really are on the cusp of potentially a major change, and I'm quite optimistic about not just all the women we see rising to the top, but also all the young women coming up who will fill those jobs in the future toward gender parity."

"We know we are in difficult economic times with war, recession, and inflation. Where will the money for this investment come from? In tough times, we need to use our limited resources most efficiently. Given the history of climate change, we need an appropriate balance between responsibility and resources."

"But before doing that, let me start with a story from the past. Over 3000 years ago a different kind of climate change caused by volcanic eruptions and changing weather patterns resulted in persistent droughts that caused famines and political unrest in ancient Egypt. The pharaohs of the Ptolemaic dynasty such as Cleopatra went to great lengths to adapt – transferring grain from productive regions to drought plagued areas, opening up grain stores, crossbreeding cattle to develop more heat resistant animals, and providing tax relief. These foresighted efforts managed to prolong the Egyptian empire for a half century longer but ultimately one of the greatest empires the world has ever known collapsed because of the effects of climate change. The difference between then and now is that we are the cause of today’s climate change, and we have the means to stop it by changing our economy."

"Universities and institutions of higher education have existed for millennia, stretching back to the schools of the ancients in places like China, Egypt, Greece, and India. There is something special, even magical, about the tradition of students and scholars coming together to create these unique environments of learning."

"In the past, the middle class could count on a conveyor belt of higher education leading to university, leading to public sector employment. But now, that conveyor belt has stopped."

"I strongly believe that talent is spread evenly around the world, but opportunity is not."

"Rather than tearing ourselves apart, universities must rebuild the bonds within ourselves and between society and the academy based on our shared values and on what we do best: education, research, service and public engagement."

"Technology because it has changed jobs and lots of people haven’t benefited. They have been left behind. They don’t have the skills and they are not in the right place, with the result that their prospects are poor. And the way our whole social contract was predicated on women looking after the young and the old for free – now there are more women going to university than men, globally, not just in the UK, and they are employed, and the cost of them not working is really high, so you want them to work. Yet we haven’t found a way to adjust – a way to look after the young and old without women providing free labour."

"Obviously, it’s a great thing that women are increasingly in leadership roles in top universities. I guess I just sort of feel like it’s about time. It’s my honest opinion. I mean, I don’t wake up every morning thinking, “Oh, I’m the first woman president of Columbia.” You just kind of get on with the job. So I don’t really think about it very much every day. But I think it’s great."

"I’ve worked in a lot of different organizations, and that helps because you often have seen a similar problem somewhere else. Now, organizations all have their different cultures and histories, but it helps to have seen a similar problem. It makes you realize, “I can figure this one out, maybe, or there is a way to solve this puzzle.” The other thing is I’ve worked in a couple of organizations that manage crises, like the International Monetary Fund, or when I was with the Department for International Development, we managed a lot of humanitarian crises around the world. So that teaches you to be calm under stress, and I suspect that skill might be useful in the years ahead."

"The idea that you are successful because you are smart and hardworking is pernicious and wrong, because it means everyone who is unsuccessful is stupid and lazy."

"We are strengthened in this assumption that the earliest Europeans were not only long-headed but also dark-complexioned, by various points in our enquiry thus far. We have proved the prehistoric antiquity of the living CroMagnon type in Southern France ; and we saw that among these peasants, the prevalence of black hair and eyes is very striking. And comparing types in the British Isles we saw that everything tended to show that the brunet populations of Wales, Ireland and Scotland constituted the most primitive stratum of population in Britain. Furthermore, in that curious spot in Garfagnana, where a survival of the ancient Ligurian population of Northern Italy is indicated, there also are the people characteristically dark. Judged, there¬ fore, either in the light of general principles or of local details, it would seem as if this earliest race in Europe must have been very dark. ... It was Mediterranean in its pigmental affinities, and not Scandinavian."

"In sharp contrast, the racial scientists, who will be discussed later, recorded the change of affairs with a note of indignant relief: "In our school days most of us were brought up to regard Asia as the mother of European people. We were told that an ideal race of men swarmed forth from the Himalayan highlands disseminating culture right and left as they spread through the barbarous West." As far as Ripley was concerned, such philological ideas represented the dark age of Indo-European studies: "In the days when . . . there was no science of physical anthropology [and] prehistoric archaeology was not yet . . . a new science of philology dazzled the intelligent world . . . and its words were law. Since 1860 these early inductions have completely broken down in the light of modern research" (Ripley 1899, 453)."

"The utter absurdity of the misnomer Caucasian, as applied to the blue-eyed and fair-headed * Aryan ’ (?) race of Western Europe, is revealed by two indisputable facts. In the first place, this ideal blond type does not occur within many hundred miles of Caucasia ; and, secondly, nowhere along the great Caucasian chain is there a single native tribe making use of a purely inflectional or Aryan language. Even the Ossetes, whose language alone is possibly inflectional, have not had their claims to the honour of Aryan made positively clear as yet. And even if Ossetian be Aryan, there is every reason to regard the people as immigrants from the direction of Iran, not indigenous Caucasians at all. Their head form, together with their occupation of territory along the only highway — the Pass of Dariel — across the chain from the South, give tenability to the hypothesis. At all events, whether the Ossetes be Aryan or not, they little deserve pre-eminence among the other peoples about them. They are lacking both in the physical beauty for which this region is justly famous, and in courage as well, if we may judge by their reputation in yielding abjectly and without shadow of resistance to the Russians. It is not true that any of these Caucasians are even * somewhat typical.’ As a matter of fact they could never be typical of anything. The name covers nearly every physical type and family of language of the Eur-Asian continent except, as we have said, that blond, tall, ‘ Aryan ’ speaking one to which the name has been specifically applied. It is all false ; not only improbable but absurd. The Caucasus is not a cradle — it is rather a grave — of peoples, of languages, of customs and of physical types. Let us be assured of that point at the outset. Nowhere else in the world probably is so heterogeneous a lot of people, languages and religions gathered together in one place as along the chain of the Caucasus mountains.”"

"I might always be an economist at my core, but I don’t have to limit myself to graphs and equations. In fact, if I wanted to achieve the best of which I was capable, I couldn’t afford to limit myself. I’d have to read the big books and grapple with them. I needed … the best that had been written about culture and society throughout the ages."

"[About affirmative action:] Don't dishonor my amazing achievement by chalking it up to favoritism. I resent it. I don't like it. I don't need it. I don't want it. That's not a political position. I'm defending my own dignity here."

"[Why he is willing to suffer consequences from detractors for his research:] I don't covet what they covet."

"One of my secret obsessions [...] is to force people to have civil discourse. I spend hours doing it."

"Self-giving is an act of self-valuing because it presupposes that the person is valuable enough to be considered a gift. Self-giving is inherently more social than self-interest, even rightly understood."

"Today 21% of [total] annual income goes to 1% of households. ...That cannot be the basis of a good democracy."

"Reagan lowered the taxes on the top bracket and that made the [top] 1%... super rich."

"Blackboard economists said that globalization would be good for Americans. ...It had a few winners and... many losers. ...It ...led to an epidemic of Deaths of Despair in which so much was destroyed in America. Hyper-globalization destroyed... neighborhoods and cities and everything in the ... It was like an atomic bomb hit... Alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses accelerated... the destruction of human lives."

"George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Krugman, Thomas Schelling, Herbert Simon, Robert Shiller, Joseph Stiglitz, , and Oliver Williamson... these Nobel Prize winning economists... are usually excluded from mainstream Econ 101 textbooks or relegated to obscure footnotes. ...[I]ntroductory textbooks hype a free-market utopia ...Hence ...do not help to understand the essentials of the real existing market economies... Rather, they present a caricature at a level of abstraction that creates a fantasy world and distorts the student's vision... [A] stereotype that markets are efficient... automatically leading to a blissful life, and they continue to sing the praises... keeping any demurrals muted."

"[T]his book is dedicated to a new kind of economics that promotes Capitalism with a Human Face."

"was supposed to be good for the economy. It meant small government, low taxes, trickle down economics, , and all of these turned out to be bad... The slogan was to starve the beast... the government..."

"Deregulation was supposed to make the economy more efficient... but instead it led to the financial crisis... and Blackboard Economists did not even see the crisis coming when it was around the corner."

"[T]here are better ways to measure progress than in terms of money."

"[F]ree markets, being a human invention, often become dysfunctional; they do not deserve our blind faith."

"One need not be a native utopian to be appalled by a society... [of] gross inequality..."

"Greenspan and Benjamin Bernanke... ignored the evidence because they were blinded by their ideology and the infallibility of the markets. They were prisoners of their own ideology."

"Greenspan... out of hand and cold-bloodedly thwarted [warnings of , , Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Joseph Stiglitz, Nassim Taleb, John Taylor, and] 's valiant efforts to regulate derivatives a decade before the meltdown."

"[R]andom allocation at the start of life cannot... be the basis of a good society."

"There must be something wrong with an economics that fosters a system that leaves so many... stranded that they strike back at the establishment by voting for a leader such as Donald Trump."

"[H]ousing prices had doubled by 2005 in 10 years time, which would have made sense if incomes had also increased substantially, but they didn't."

"The recent election of Donald Trump was fueled by... an economic system that skews its benefits to a select few and leaves too many... scrambling to eke out a bare existence."

"The financial crisis of 2008 illustrated... how markets often go haywire, yet textbooks remain unchanged, failing to convey the fundamental flaws and systematic weaknesses of the free-market system."

"[A]cademics and politicians continue to sing the praises of abstract markets as if... descended... from heaven while maintaining... silence about the fact that without government help, countless... corporations would have landed in the dustbin of history."

"[I]n the United States... southerners were 1.5 cm taller than men of the more industrialized North, even though the per capita income was greater in the North. ...Although England had a higher per capita income... as much as 25%, its soldiers were shorter than those of the United States in the eighteenth century. A century later, Irish recruits into the Union Army were taller than soldiers born in England, although English per capital income was... higher..."

"[M]uch work remains to be done before we have even a complete of Europe and America. ...The contributions to this volume testify to the fact that much has already been accomplished. ...It is important that the research continue, inasmuch as it promises to illuminate a large number of problems."

"[T]eachers of economics should admit... that while markets do well in some circumstances they only do so within an appropriate institutional framework and... in others... [they] often tip the stream of benefits toward a few insiders."

"The ideological commitment to "," ...has brought us to our current, precarious situation."

"In all studies without exception, the positive relationship between social status and physical stature has been consistently documented in various societies and at different times. ...[E]ven in egalitarian America, social standing affected height throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the wake of the New Deal, these effects became less pronounced as became less skewed."