When I was a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.

I didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.

A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.

My God, I don't know anyone who likes to accumulate their wealth more than the Europeans.

Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others.

Italy and France could lop off their excessive wealth through a one-time tax on private wealth.

Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose.

Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.

Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.

The celebration of homeownership seems to be part of a countermovement against popular owning of shares in corporations.

The need to encourage entrepreneurship and ensure that young people have the opportunity to start new businesses is acute.

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.

Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.

Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.

It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.

To prosper and advance, the American business sector is going to need a financial system oriented toward business, not 'home ownership.'

In the 1960s, and stretching back to the 1930s, it was felt by many economists that easy money is a reliable way to increase employment.

I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.

Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.

Unemployment rates tend to rise and fall in roughly equal proportion at all rungs of the ladder, and that happened between 1973 and 1985.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.

Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.

Things can get only so bad. People want to eat, so at some point they resist further cuts to their consumption - it's not a bottomless pit.

When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it - for the challenge of its mysteries.

I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?

Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.

To pump up consumer or government demand would force interest rates up and asset prices down, possibly by enough to destroy more jobs than are created.

The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level.

What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.

Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

My view is that innovation has declined in the everyday processes that businesses tinker with incrementally as they try to become more productive over time.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.

I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.

Entrepreneurs' willingness to innovate or just to invest - and thus create new jobs - is driven by their 'animal spirits,' as they decide whether to leap into the void.

With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.

No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.

In countries operating a largely capitalist system, there does not appear to be a wide understanding among its actors and overseers of either its advantages or its hazards.

In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

As a grandson of farmers in downstate Illinois, I have long admired the dedication of farmers to their work and have written about the role of agriculture in American innovation.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

A modern economy is marked by the feasibility of endogenous change: Modernization brings myriad arrangements from expanded property rights to company law and financial institutions.

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