George Akerlof Quotes

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.

I've always believed as a value that the government has a vital - not overwhelming, but vital - role to play in furthering human welfare and good. I think we have an important supportive role to play, hopefully intelligent and sensible.

But when others suggested that the poor should not simply be the objects of these programs but also the subjects - that they should be actively involved in shaping the programs, making decisions about how to spend the money etc. - some of the previous supporters reconsidered.

I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.

Government has a responsibility to the have-nots.

We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.

Government cannot solve our problems. It can't set our goals. It cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities.

I am profoundly disturbed by any attempt to take government responsibility away from government … it is government’s responsibility to educate all of our children …. The fundamental responsibility for poverty of this country does not belong to the churches; it belongs to the government.

The era of big government may be over, but the era of big challenges shouldn't be—and you can't meet big challenges with small ideas.

Attacking poverty is very expensive, and means doing things politically that are either impossible or very difficult to bring off.

We have responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.

Government becomes a burden only when it functions on behalf of the poor.

Competition has brought about two great opposing opinions; one that Government should do nothing, the other that it should do everything. The first arises from the contemplation of the immense wealth heaped up under a system of unimpeded individual action, and of the extraordinary folly and selfishness of the customs and legislation that controlled such action in the past. The second arises from the sufferings which unimpeded individualism has brought upon the working classes, who cry out that Government is bound to protect them from misery and starvation

Nobody believes in the CHIP program more than I. I invented it. I was the one who wrote it.

Most Americans get that there is a need for a safety net in our country, and we support that safety net.

We think there are better solutions to fighting poverty because we see what the War on Poverty has produced. It produced tens of trillions of dollars in spending. It has been a 51-year exercise, and yet the poverty rates in America today are not much better than when we started the War on Poverty.

When you question this war on poverty, you get all the criticisms from adherents to the status quo who just don't want to see anything change. We got to have the courage to face that down, just as we did in the welfare reform of the late 1990s, and if we succeeded, we can help resuscitate this culture and get people back to work.

Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector.

I believe that investing in welfare is crucial - but I also believe that it only works if you're getting help to those who need it. If you're doing it with no results, it's disastrous.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

So we [Americans] have a history a taking care of each other. Now, for some strange reason starting sort of in the 20's with Woodrow Wilson, the government started getting involved in everything.