Top 60 Joseph Stiglitz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What you measure affects what you do. If you don’t measure the right thing, you don’t do the right thing.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

2. “In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

3. “It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

4. “Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that’s gonna continue.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

5. “Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

6. “GDP tells you nothing about sustainability.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

7. “Climate change is a reality.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

8. “The important lesson of the deficit is – and the national debt – is we have to be careful about how we’re spending money.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

9. “If you’re injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you’re fighting for your country. There’s a double standard here.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

10. “Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

11. “International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn’t go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

12. “The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

13. “Not everybody is qualified to go to Stanford, but everybody should have access to the best qualify for which they are eligible.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

14. “Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

15. “Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations – as the TPP would – will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

16. “My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me, an approach to learning which was later reinforced by my experiences at Amherst.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

17. “If the President asked you to help, I don’t think anybody could refuse, unless one felt that one couldn’t be effective.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

18. “I think that for the developing world there are many versions of capitalism, and countries have to choose one that’s appropriate.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

19. “Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can’t function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

20. “Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

21. “The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

22. “Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

23. “Governments can enhance growth by increasing inclusiveness. A country’s most valuable resource is its people. So it is essential to ensure that everyone can live up to their potential, which requires educational opportunities for all.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

24. “American inequality didn’t just happen. It was created.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

25. “The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

26. “The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

27. “Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people’s ability. That leads to insurance.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

28. “No one would look just at a firm’s revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

29. “The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush’s Jr. friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn’t be happier.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

30. “I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

31. “There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

32. “If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future – and these markets clearly did not exist – what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?”

— Joseph Stiglitz

33. “Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

34. “The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged – debating – helped shape my interests in public policy.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

35. “The military is focusing only on the short run costs. If they don’t provide appropriate body armor, they save some money today, but the healthcare cost is going to be the future for some other president down the line. I view that as both fiscally and morally irresponsible.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

36. “The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

37. “Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

38. “You can’t overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

39. “Unfettered market American-style capitalism doesn’t work. Developing countries can’t afford that kind of luxury. They just can’t afford it. Period. If there’s a mistake, they can’t afford to put out $2 trillion.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

40. “Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

41. “As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability – the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

42. “You saw on your TV what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Reserves or National Guard are usually the people we use for those national emergencies. They weren’t here, they were over in Iraq, and so we were less protected.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

43. “When I said “the pocket of the banks,” it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

44. “One has to always ask the question: Where can one be most effective in helping shape policies? It is always difficult when you’re inside because you’re very constrained.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

45. “The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

46. “The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

47. “I don’t think if we had been able to make that choice rationally, we would have said that’s what we want to do. We would have said: “Can’t we save the banks and solve our health care problems?” The answer is yes. You could have.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

48. “I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

49. “I understand why political leaders in the beginning want to be cheerleaders to generate optimism. But to admit that they didn’t understand the depths of the problem afterwards, I found a little bit surprising.”

— Joseph Stiglitz

50. “There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.”

— Joseph Stiglitz