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.
When you’re in government, you have a big impact in Washington, but Washington may not be doing very much.
It is always better to tax bad things than good things.
I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.
One of the things that happens when you have austerity is that wages get lower, and some people think lower wages in the short run can increase corporate profits.
Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It’s not going to happen in the United States, and it’s not going to happen in Europe.
The bank bailout should have been more focused on helping small and medium sized banks, on helping homeowners. I think the trade agreements are a disaster.
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.
America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object of derision.
I began my career as a physicist. And in the White House, my buddies were the people from the White House office of science and technology policy. But a lot of the people were lawyers. They like winning an argument, but science-based, evidence-based reasoning was just sort of not in their framework.
For the president of the United States, reputation does matter. The reputation of the United States does matter. We are dealing with countries all over the world. They want to know if your word is good. Trump’s word is not good.
The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.
Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.
I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
What’s going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection – like in the U.K.
We could have managed globalization in ways that ordinary citizens would have benefited rather than just the corporations. Trade is beneficial. There are gains to be had from taking advantage of comparative advantage and specialization. That’s true, if you manage globalization right.
A lot of my book, ‘The Price of Inequality,’ is about why there has been an increase in rent-seeking.
The diminishing economic role of the United States in the global economy means that global political power will also become more dispersed. The world will become multipolar. By clumsily re-asserting a wish for U.S. dominance, Donald Trump is accelerating the opposite.
For Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement – unilaterally abrogated by Trump – was part of the ‘pivot to Asia,’ a re-assertion of the role of America in that part of the world.
We share a common planet, and the world has learned the hard way that we have to get along and work together. We have learned, too, that cooperation can benefit all.
If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, ‘There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.’
High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power.
We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.
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