Opinions from economists
See all occupationsWinona LaDuke,
disagrees
Fracking
Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist.
Nicholas Bloom, Professor of economics
disagrees
Tariffs
Many people who have lost out in the last few decades voted for Trump. Trump will have a difficult time turning them into winners. The jobs of these people are not at risk because of Chinese or Mexican workers, but because of robots and computers. And new trade barriers and higher tariffs are not going to change that.
Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist
disagrees
Tariffs
Trump’s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view of trade. In fact, the structure of his tariffs so far is designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain.
George Borjas, Economist
The presence of all immigrant workers (legal and illegal) in the labor market makes the U.S. economy (GDP) an estimated 11 percent larger ($1.6 trillion) each year.Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University
disagrees
Tariffs
With the election of Trump, America's soft power has taken a big hit. The United States has moved from a position of leadership in the creation of a rules-based international system to a position of leadership in its destruction and the creation of a regime of global protectionism. The damage will be long-lasting.
MIchael Hudson, Economist. Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
disagrees
Fracking
You have a choice. Either you can have more oil, or more clean water. Fracking is not good for the water supply.
John Lott,
disagrees
Assault weapons should be banned
We have tried an assault weapons ban in the United States for ten years and there's no evidence it has any impact.
Alan Greenspan, American economist
disagrees
Tariffs
Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
Jonathan Portes,
HMRC has also published important new data about the fiscal contribution made by recently arrived EEA nationals, showing that they paid more than £3bn in taxes on income while claiming about £0.5bn in HMRC benefits. This provides further confirmation that EU migrants have made a strongly positive contribution to the UK economy and public finances.Walter E. Williams,
disagrees
Tariffs
Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.
Stephen Harper, Canadian economist
disagrees
Tariffs
We have to remember we're in a global economy. The purpose of fiscal stimulus is not simply to sustain activity in our national economies, but to help the global economy as well, and that's why it's so critical that measures in those packages avoid anything that smacks of protectionism.
Robert Mundell, Canadian economist
agrees
Tariffs
The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system.
Peter Navarro, American economist
agrees
Tariffs
Our view is that these actions [Trump's tariffs] are necessary to defend this country, and that they are ultimately bullish for Corporate America, for the working men and women of America, and for the global trading system.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University
agrees
Universal Health Care
As the gap between rich and poor keeps growing and part-time jobs become more common, we must strengthen the social safety net. Universal health coverage would give essential protection, and needs to be part of every society.
Milton Friedman, American economist
disagrees
Tariffs
The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are "protected". The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It's spread widely. There are people that don't have jobs because of tariffs but they don't know it.
Michael Pettis, Professor of finance
disagrees
Tariffs
Put differently, surpluses don’t arise because surplus countries can produce goods more productively or efficiently. They arise from the need to export domestic savings caused by the low household income share of GDP. Because surplus countries direct their excess savings mainly to the US, the only economy deep, flexible and open enough to absorb them, it is the US that must inevitably run capital ...
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Elaine Chao,
disagrees
Tariffs
Smoot and Hawley ginned up The Tariff Act of 1930 to get America back to work after the Stock Market Crash of '29. Instead, it destroyed trade so effectively that by 1932, American exports to Europe were just a third of what they had been in 1929. World trade fell two-thirds as other nations retaliated. Jobs evaporated.
Lawrence Kudlow,
disagrees
Tariffs
The biggest flaw in the Trump economic plan is the tilt toward protectionism. I have parted company with him on this. The question here is whether his campaign bark will turn out to be bigger than his government-policy bite.
Jeffrey Sachs, American economist
disagrees
Basic income
Improve the country’s health services and schools rather than providing cash transfers to households.
Juan Manuel Santos,
disagrees
Tariffs
Protectionism is something that will hurt everybody, but especially the United States.
Farid Khavari,
disagrees
Fracking
By the time the frackers are done in the other states our water will be worth more than oil.
Manmohan Singh, Former prime minister of India
disagrees
Tariffs
Protectionism is a very real danger. It is understandable that in times of a severe downturn protectionist pressures mount but the lessons of history are clear. If we give in to protectionist pressures, we will only send the world into a downward spiral.
Sam Bowman,
disagrees
Soda taxes
A tax on sugary soft drinks is the first step on the road to fat taxes and sugar taxes more generally. It makes little sense to tax sugary drinks on their own, rather than sugar more generally – a couple of Mars bars are just as bad as a bottle of Coke – but the Chancellor probably reckons that the public won’t care if he only targets soft drinks. Once the tax is in place, he will follow the lead ...
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Thomas Sowell, American economist
disagrees
Tariffs
Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
Elizabeth Warren, 28th united states senator from massachusetts (class 1)
agrees
Universal Health Care
Disease, sickness, and old age touch every family. Tragedy doesn't ask who you voted for. Health care is a basic human right.
Sheryl Sandberg, American technology executive, activist, and author
agrees
Net neutrality
Today’s decision from the Federal Communications Commission to end net neutrality is disappointing and harmful. An open internet is critical for new ideas and economic opportunity – and internet providers shouldn't be able to decide what people can see online or charge more for certain websites. We’re ready to work with members of Congress and others to help make the internet free and open for eve...
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Christian Dustmann, Economist
A key concern of the public debate on migration is whether immigrants contribute their fair share to the tax and welfare systems. Our new analysis draws a positive picture of the overall fiscal contribution made by recent immigrant cohorts, particularly of immigrants arriving from the EU.John Key, 38th prime minister of new zealand
agrees
Euthanasia
If I had terminal cancer, I had a few weeks to live, I was in tremendous amount of pain - if they just effectively wanted to turn off the switch and legalise that by legalising euthanasia, I'd want that.
Francine Blau, Economist
The evidence does not suggest that current immigrant flows cost native-born taxpayers money over the long-run nor does it provide support for the notion that lowering immigration quotas or stepping up enforcement of existing immigration laws would generate savings to existing taxpayers.Robert J. Shiller, Professor of economics at Yale and Nobel laureate
agrees
Robot Tax
A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career. This would accord with our natural sense of justice, and thus be likely to endure.
Dean Baker, Macroeconomist and codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
disagrees
Robot Tax
[This] is a tax on productivity growth.
Vince Cable,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
I’m very anti-drugs. I’m very puritanical about it. But the simple truth is that by turning over the marijuana trade to the underworld, it’s creating opportunities for them and it’s making things worse.
Juan Manuel Santos,
agrees
Legalise recreational drugs
The business of illicit drugs is behind violence, corruption and crime in almost the entire planet, and we have to recognize that the so-called War on Drugs - which has been going on for half a century - has not been won or won.
Lawrence Summers, Economist and Harvard University Professor
It is widely feared that half the jobs in the economy might be eliminated by innovations such as self-driving vehicles, automatic checkout machines and expert systems that trade securities more effectively than humans can.
Christopher Pissarides, Nobel Prize winner in Economics
agrees
Basic Income
I am very much in favour, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away incentive to work at the lower end of the market
Greg Mankiw, Harvard professor in economics
agrees
Carbon Tax
People don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't. What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. But you can cut other taxes in response.
Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist
agrees
Carbon Tax
Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax.
Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT
agrees
Carbon Tax
If we're willing to send half a million fellow citizens into battle, to protect oil supplies and our economic way of life, we should be no less willing to make the small sacrifice of paying more for gasoline. A revenue-neutral plan that reduced Social Security taxes by $1 billion for every penny a gallon of gas tax would leave the working poor and middle class better off than before. In the long t...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst
There are resilient ways to solve problems, say feed the world, without complicated technologies that entail fragility and unkown possibilities.David Autor, Economist
It doesn’t really make sense to ask whether automation will affect jobs. Yes, 100 percent of jobs will be affected. Jobs change all of the time. The content of jobs will change. But it’s not as if there’s a fixed amount of work to do. The net number of jobs is rising. Job tasks are changing. In many cases that automation is complementary to the tasks that people do. For example, doctors’ work i... See MoreWilliam A. Darity, Professor of Public Policy at Duke University
agrees
Job Guarantee
Each job offered under a federal employment assurance would be at a wage rate above the poverty threshold, and would include benefits like health insurance. A public sector job guarantee would establish a quality of work and the level of compensation offered for all jobs. The program would be great for the country: It could meet a wide range of the nation’s physical and human infrastructure needs,...
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Andrew McAfee,
As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor.Joel Mokyr,
I don’t see an easy way of solving it [mass unemployment]. It’s an inevitable consequence of technological progress.Yanis Varoufakis, Former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens
agrees
Basic Income
Either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.
Bill Mitchell, Professor of Economics and Musician
disagrees
Basic Income
A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work ... In addition to a Job Guarantee we also demand a Services Guarantee. It is no good having a bare minimum income if the dentists and doctors and shops in your town are closed and the public transport system is deficient.
Ha-Joon Chang, Economist. University of Cambridge
disagrees
Basic Income
The right-wing version of UBI (...) is that the government should provide its citizens with a basic income at the subsistence level, while providing no (or little) further goods and services. As far as I can see, this is the version of UBI supported by the Silicon Valley companies. I am totally against this. There are left-wing libertarians who support UBI, who would set its level quite high, whi...
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William C. Dudley, President of Federal Reserve Bank of New York
disagrees
Cryptocurrencies
[Bitcoin is] more of a speculative activity.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University
disagrees
Cryptocurrencies
[Governments will] regulate it out of existence.
Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director
disagrees
Cryptocurrencies
It's clearly a domain where we need international regulation and proper supervision.
Nouriel Roubini,
disagrees
Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin is the mother of all bubbles, favoured by charlatans and swindlers.
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