Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.
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.
But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
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.
I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.
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.
I don't think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security.
Society can't function without shared prosperity.
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.
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.
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.
The euro zone was driven by the neoliberal view that markets are always efficient. That in itself is political. There was no pressing economic need that the euro was required to solve, but leaders believed that it would foster growth.
In the end, the politics of the euro zone weren't strong enough to create a fully integrated fiscal union with a common banking system, etc.
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.
America's role in the global economy inevitably was going to diminish; we're smaller relative to - as China, India, other emerging markets grow.
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.
It isn't inevitable that we have a globalization which is used by the corporations not to pay taxes. It is not inevitable that we have a form of globalization in which corporations use the threat of moving jobs abroad to lower wages. None of this is inevitable.
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.
Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.
