Om kostnader och investeringar

"public investment is a much better way to provide economic stimulus than tax cuts, for two reasons. First, if the government spends money, that money is spent, helping support demand, whereas tax cuts may be largely saved. So public investment offers more bang for the buck. Second, public investment leaves something of value behind when the stimulus is over."*

Om lösningar

"When the economy is depressed and monetary policy can’t set it right, the true opportunity cost of government spending is low. So let’s get those projects going."*

Om medelklassens myter

"There’s no obvious reason why consumer demand can’t be sustained by the spending of the upper class — $200 dinners and luxury hotels create jobs, the same way that fast food dinners and Motel 6s do. In fact, the prosperity of New York City in the last decade — largely supported off of super-salaried Wall Street types — is a demonstration that you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people."*

Om dålig brittisk mat

"My theory, basically, was that England industrialized in an era when primitive transportation technology wasn’t up to delivering fresh food to the new urban masses, and the lack of taste stuck. But I have to say that this theory can’t explain why good food is available in the food halls but not in the restaurants."*

Om att få nobelpris

"I feel guilty about not saying more re the auto bailout, the Obama stimulus plan, and more. But I’m sort of at the beck and call of others right now."*

Om sommaren 2009 (examen)

"I’ve been ruminating over economic prospects for next year, and I’m getting scared."*

Om genomgångar

"And it is also crucial to express your ideas in a way that other people, who have not spent the last few years wrestling with your problems and are not eager to spend the next few years wrestling with your answers, can understand without too much effort."

Om mataforer

"The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible [...]. But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing."

Om forskning

"Here are the rules:
1. Listen to the Gentiles
2. Question the question
3. Dare to be silly
4. Simplify, simplify"

Om kartor

"Doing geography is hard work; it requires a lot of hard thinking to make the models look trivial, and I am increasingly finding that I need the computer as an aid not just to data analysis but even to theorizing. Yet it is immensely rewarding. For me, the biggest thrill in theory is the moment when your model tells you something that should have been obvious all along, something that you can immediately relate to what you know about the world, and yet which you didn't really appreciate. Geography still has that thrill."

Om antaganden

"What I began to realize was that in economics we are always making silly assumptions; it's just that some of them have been made so often that they come to seem natural. And so one should not reject a model as silly until one sees where its assumptions lead."

Om novelty

"I suddenly realized the remarkable extent to which the methodology of economics creates blind spots. We just don't see what we can't formalize. And the biggest blind spot of all has involved increasing returns. So there, right at hand, was my mission: to look at things from a slightly different angle, and in so doing to reveal the obvious, things that had been right under our noses all the time."

Om arkitektur som räddar liv

"On a separate note, one good thing is that there haven’t been any reports of people on Wall Street jumping out of windows. That’s because the windows in modern office buildings don’t open."

Om problemlösning

"It’s important to work on both kinds of problems, but it’s also important not to imagine that solving either one automatically solves the other. And the slower-motion issues, realistically, won’t be effectively addressed for a while, probably until whatshisname moves out of the White House. The high-speed stuff, on the other hand, had better be addressed in the next few days."