International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.
The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.
Regulatory reform must move beyond limiting the damage that the financial sector can do and ensure that the sector genuinely serves society.
China's government has far more control over the country's economy than our government has over ours, and it is moving from export dependence to a model of growth driven by domestic demand. Any restriction on exports to the U.S. would simply accelerate a process already underway.
I'm enough of a political junkie to know if you have large numbers of people much worse off, you're going to have consequences.
To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that U.S. trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations.
President Trump sees the world in transactional and zero-sum terms - if something is good for China, it must be bad for the U.S. By contrast, economists see the world in much more nuanced ways: if globalization is well-managed, it can be a positive-sum game, where both the U.S. and China gain; if it is badly managed, it can be negative-sum.
A single currency entails a fixed interest rate, which means countries can't manage their own currency to suit their own needs. You need a variety of institutions to help nations for which the policies aren't well suited. Europe introduced the euro without providing those structures.
Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.
Ensuring preschool education for all and investing more in public schools is essential if the U.S. is to avoid becoming a neo-feudal country where advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.
Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.
Under the rule of law, if the government wants to prevent firms from outsourcing and offshoring, it enacts legislation and adopts regulations to create the appropriate incentives and discourage undesirable behaviour. It does not bully or threaten particular firms or portray traumatised refugees as a security threat.
In addition to offering benefits to those who invest, carry out research, and create jobs, higher taxes on land and real-estate speculation would redirect capital toward productivity-enhancing spending - the key to long-term improvement in living standards.
I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
China-led globalization in some ways worries me because they are not concerned about human rights, labor rights. They probably aren't even really concerned about competitive marketplaces. So in some ways, they're like Mr. Trump.