But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they’re funny, they’re not company men who work their way up the chain.
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
Debt is one person’s liability, but another person’s asset.
Economists don’t usually make good speculators, because they think too much.
For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law.
I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.
I don’t think I’ve had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.
I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.
If Europe’s example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don’t drive them too much.
If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.
In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.
Politics determine who has the power, not who has the truth.
Social Security is a social insurance program – it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).
The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn’t require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.
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.
The rich are different from you and me: they have more influence.
The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.
Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
What saved the economy, and the New Deal was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.
