Robert J. Shiller Quotes

The phrase 'private option' itself has become politically toxic.

Perceptions are essential in politics.

Politics is involved when you don't tackle inefficiency and burden people with higher tariffs.

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

Government frequently has a problem recognizing perception versus reality.

On the contrary, the characteristic element of the present situation is that economic questions have finally and irrevocably invaded the domain of public life and politics.

We are a coalition government, and that limits our options in some ways. Privatization happens to be one such area.

Politics doesn't matter, policy does.

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks.

Policy and politics are always mixed up.

Politics is economics in action.

Legislators don't want to seem anti-science or anti-progress.

Congress, rather than administrative agencies should fashion any policy that is not only of great economic importance but also one that has divided the faiths and loyalties of classes of people.

The military budget got out of control and the tax cuts were helping the wealthy …. President Reagan was less and less interested in what I had to say

I have never been governed by polls … people misunderstand economic development.

You have the socialist parties ruling Denmark putting in conservative policies because the conservatives control the media and the public discourse.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view - or be so abstract as to be meaningless.

Don't liberal Democrats ever learn economic principles, or does their class warfare trump all else?

Economic policy and decision making do not function in a political vacuum.

The challenge has been, we make policy in the world of politics.

Liberalism is financed by the dividends from Conservatism.

American public policy is run on a myth.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

As the economy faces such difficulties, more tough questions need to be asked about what the Tories would do if elected. Their ideology of free markets and small government needs challenging. That has to be part of our job.