Paul Krugman People Quotations

The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.

But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at the Republican National Convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation's freedom, diversity and complexity.

It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.

Asset bubbles have happened even without not-so-easy money. And, in a depressed economy, where alternative uses of money are not great, people are going to bid up the prices of profitable corporations and stuff like that.

People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.

People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try to find a job or may not try to find one as quickly as they would without the benefit.

So, very early reports are that Obamacare exchanges are, as expected, having some technical glitches on the first day — maybe even a bit worse than expected, because it appears that volume has been much bigger than predicted. Here’s what you need to know: this is good, not bad, news for the program. Lots of people logging on and signing up on the very first day is an early indication that it’s going to be fine, that plenty of people will sign up for the first year of health reform.

What Republicans have actually put on the table is almost nothing. All of the rest is just big talk. So how is the president supposed to negotiate with people who say, 'Here's my demands. By the way, I can't give you any specifics. Just make me happy'?

Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you'll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we're bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we're good. And real-world policy - policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families - is being built on that foundation.

Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.

Many people ... prefer to describe themselves as progressives rather than liberals. To some extent that's a response to the decades-long propaganda campaign conducted by movement conservatives, which has been quite successful in making Americans disdain the word liberal but much less successful in reducing support for liberal policies.

If you're doing your job right, some substantial group of people [is] going to be mad at you.

If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.

It’s not about the budget; it’s about the power...So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.