Eric Maskin Quotes

I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.

There is no pure free-market economy.

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

Markets can do certain things, but markets cannot do other things

Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers - not governments - to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.

The public has been sold a bill of goods about the free market being a panacea for mankind.

The reason socialism has failed around the world every time it's been tried is because people in socialist countries have looked at the United States and have said if they can have it that good, we can. It's a failed, flawed ideology, but if you ask socialists why it's always failed, it's because the United States has stood in the way.

Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.

Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.

What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

I don't think that capitalism should be unbridled, if by 'unbridled' you mean unregulated.

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.

First of all, I am not an expert on matters on different economic systems, but in my normal social intercourse with my friends we discussed matters like that.

The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.

I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.

Instead of ideological objectives of a political nature, today we are faced with ideological objectives of economic nature.

There are two forces in this and in every other nation of the world today. One force is the taker and the other force is the maker.

They say that open markets are the solution to everything and, if left alone, the invisible hand will solve all problems. Sadly, the reason the invisible hand often appears invisible is that, quite often, it is not there.

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses.

Prediction of whether or not the capitalist order will survive is, in part, a matter of terminology.

Democracy and capitalism have both been hacked.

Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.