Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

The international institutions go around the world preaching liberalization, and the developing countries see that means open up your markets to our commodities, but we aren't going to open our markets to your commodities. In the nineteenth century, they used gunboats. Now they use economic weapons and arm-twisting.

When you think of policies that are going to address inequality of wealth, you have to be very thoughtful about what economists call "incidence of taxes." If most of the savings is being done by capitalists, and you tax the return on capital, then they will have less to invest. That would mean, over the long run, that the rate of interest would go up. That would therefore undo some of the intent to lower the income of capitalists.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

We are helping the people that [George W.]Bush says are evil. Teheran couldn't be happier about the high oil prices resulting from the Iraq war.