One of the arguments I make for the failure of the euro is that, at the time it was being constructed, there was a 'neo-liberal' ideology which said that all we need to do to make this thing work is to get deficits low, keep inflation low, and take down barriers, and then everything would be fine.

If there is a silver lining in the Trump cloud, it is a new sense of solidarity over core values such as tolerance and equality, sustained by awareness of the bigotry and misogyny, whether hidden or open, that Trump and his team embody.

The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.

If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future - and these markets clearly did not exist - what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

There is something about the mindset of a scientist that is different - an awareness of uncertainty, modeling, proof.

Donald Trump's astonishing victory in the U.S. presidential election has made one thing abundantly clear: too many Americans - particularly white male Americans - feel left behind.

The IP standards advanced countries favour typically are designed not to maximise innovation and scientific progress, but to maximise the profits of big pharmaceutical companies and others able to sway trade negotiations.

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object of derision.

There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.

I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.

I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, 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.

I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced.

For the president of the United States, reputation does matter. The reputation of the United States does matter. We are dealing with countries all over the world. They want to know if your word is good. Trump's word is not good.

I don't think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security.

Society can't function without shared prosperity.

The bank bailout should have been more focused on helping small and medium sized banks, on helping homeowners. I think the trade agreements are a disaster.

We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.

The euro zone was driven by the neoliberal view that markets are always efficient. That in itself is political. There was no pressing economic need that the euro was required to solve, but leaders believed that it would foster growth.

In the end, the politics of the euro zone weren't strong enough to create a fully integrated fiscal union with a common banking system, etc.

A single currency entails a fixed interest rate, which means countries can't manage their own currency to suit their own needs. You need a variety of institutions to help nations for which the policies aren't well suited. Europe introduced the euro without providing those structures.

America's role in the global economy inevitably was going to diminish; we're smaller relative to - as China, India, other emerging markets grow.

China-led globalization in some ways worries me because they are not concerned about human rights, labor rights. They probably aren't even really concerned about competitive marketplaces. So in some ways, they're like Mr. Trump.

It isn't inevitable that we have a globalization which is used by the corporations not to pay taxes. It is not inevitable that we have a form of globalization in which corporations use the threat of moving jobs abroad to lower wages. None of this is inevitable.

We could have managed globalization in ways that ordinary citizens would have benefited rather than just the corporations. Trade is beneficial. There are gains to be had from taking advantage of comparative advantage and specialization. That's true, if you manage globalization right.

Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.

European officials thought that austerity was part of what they called their 'convergence policies,' of trying to bring countries together. Instead, it actually made things worse. There's more inequality within countries and more disparity across countries.

A less healthy America is not going to be as productive.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.

What I argued in 'The Great Divide' is that societies can't function without trust, both politically and economically.

Americans like to say we're fighting for democracy, and yet young Americans have come to the view that democracy doesn't deliver.

What's going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection - like in the U.K.

I'm enough of a political junkie to know if you have large numbers of people much worse off, you're going to have consequences.

I began my career as a physicist. And in the White House, my buddies were the people from the White House office of science and technology policy. But a lot of the people were lawyers. They like winning an argument, but science-based, evidence-based reasoning was just sort of not in their framework.

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.

While it was an experiment to bring them together, nothing has divided Europe as much as the euro.

With my kids, I'm a little sappier than my father may have been.

If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, 'There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.'

To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that U.S. trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations.

Trump will fail even in his proclaimed goal of reducing the trade deficit, which is determined by the disparity between domestic savings and investment.

Trump assumed office promising to 'drain the swamp' in Washington, D.C. Instead, the swamp has grown wider and deeper.

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.