Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some gods would dream of.
Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.
I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.
A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.
Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.
You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.
We're committed to working with Congress to doing what the president said he was always going to do, which is cut the deficit in half over the - over his first term.
Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.
There's still racism. Western Europe... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.
There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.
When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance.
We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.
Paternalism is everywhere in our lives. We have to immunise our children unless we are upset about it. In India, it is the opposite. It is possible to get your kids immunised, but you really have to want to.
I don't go to the beach. There is no value in going to the beach. If I did go I would probably read economics books.
A journey of four hundred and thirty miles can be made in any part of the United States, but in Turkey it takes as many days.
Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths.
The Indians could not undertake any widespread cultivation of the plains not only because they lacked iron tools but also because they had no draft animals.
For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race.
Today, no less than in the past, the tetrahedral form of the earth and the relation of the tetrahedron to the poles and to the equator preserve the conditions that favor rapid evolution.
As for the single market, the E.U.'s landmark achievement, there is no question that a euro zone breakup would severely disrupt its operation in the short run.
Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
