Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

Real median household incomes in the U.S. were basically the same in 1989 as in 2014. But we are also seeing similar challenges in the U.K. in the stagnation of real wages.

Median compensation in America has been stagnant over 25 of the last 30 years, the only exceptions being the last 5 years of the 1990s.

I think that people have been looking at 40 years of flat wages. You know, the reality is you've got folks in diners and hair shops and barber shops all over this country who look at their own lives and think, you know, "My parents did better than I'm doing and my kids might not do as well as I'm doing." And that's because wages have been slashed for so long.

We're living through an era of higher income inequality than the country has experienced since before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, most people are running in place, and those in the bottom quintile of the economy are being swept backward year in and year out. A worker with a high school education today is likely to earn less in real terms than did their parents and grandparents in the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, while overall life expectancy is increasing in America, for those with low levels of education it's actually declining.

Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are lower than they were 10 years ago, if you can believe that.

We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing.

If workmen are denied any increase in real wages and they can look forward only to a better standard of living through reduction of prices, progress for them is terribly slow, and they become impatient and dissatisfied.

Middle-income wage earners have essentially had no pay increases since 2000.

People at the very top of the income scale also benefited from globalization and automation. But the income of working- and middle-class people in the developed world has stagnated.

One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.

Real wages for male workers in the United States are about what they were in the '60s.

We're the highest taxed nation in the world. Our middle class is just reeling from the taxes. And you know, if you think about it, the middle class and the workers of this country, who really built the country, they haven't had a raise in 12 years. They're making less now actually - to be even worse about it, they're making less now than they did 12 years ago.

Workers in the United States are making less than they were almost 20 years ago, and yet they are working harder.But so am I working harder, that I can tell you.

While prices of goods continue to rise, American worker's wages remain stagnant.

We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

If you look at the US economy over the last 15-20 years wages have been stagnating or even declining.

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.

Since NAFTA was put in place, Mexico has lost 1.9 million jobs and most Mexicans' real wages have fallen.

Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.

Americans feel squeezed between prices that are rising and wages which are not.

I will rejoin the national debate …. America’s economic house is no longer in order.

In 1980, the top 10 percent earned 2.7 times as much as the bottom 10 percent.; in 2013, the top 10 percent took home 3.7 times as much. This is because for decades, the median wage growth has lagged behind the average wage growth.

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.