"The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there."

“An early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability — the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.”

“The theories that I helped develop explained why unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, but do not even produce efficient outcomes. Interestingly, there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency. The only question that has been raised concerns the ability of government to remedy the deficiencies of the market. Within academia, a significant fraction of economists are involved with developing and expanding on the ideas of imperfect information that I explored. For instance, Edmund Phelps, this year’s Nobel Prize winner, belongs to this "school" of thought. But in political discourse, simplistic “market fundamentalism” continues to exert enormous influence.”

“Growing up in Gary Indiana gave me, I think, a distinct advantage over many of my classmates who had grown up in affluent suburbs. They could read articles that argued that in competitive equilibrium, there could not be discrimination, so long as there are some non-discriminatory individuals or firms, since it would pay any such firm to hire the lower wage discriminated-against individuals, and take them seriously. I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced. To me, the theorem simply proved that one or more of the assumptions that went into the theory was wrong.”

“Today, as we face a retreat from the rules-based, liberal global order, with autocratic rulers and demagogues leading countries that contain well over half the world’s population, Fukuyama’s idea seems quaint and naive.”

“They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.”

“The global financial system is not working well, and it is especially not working well for developing countries. Money is flowing uphill, from the poor to the rich. With nearly two-thirds of reserves being held in dollars, the United States is, in this sense, the major recipient of these benefits. If the interest rate America has to pay is just one percentage point lower than it otherwise would be on these $3 trillion of loans from poor countries, what America received from the developing countries via the global reserve system is more than it gives to the developing countries in aid.”