Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.

I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.

The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.

When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses?

America's peak years of indigenous innovation ran from the 1820s to the 1960s. There were a few financial panics and two depressions, to be sure. But in this period, a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all, and engaging careers for most.

In America, black urban teenagers have long been lacking in inclusion. In France, there is a comparable lack of inclusion among North Africans. In much of Europe, there has been little attempt to include the Roma.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.'

Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.

As a grandson of farmers in downstate Illinois, I have long admired the dedication of farmers to their work and have written about the role of agriculture in American innovation.

If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.

In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.

Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.

My thinking has always been that the worst problem we have with regard to lack of inclusion is the terribly low labor force participation rates and terribly high unemployment rates of young men, especially young men in ethnic minority groups and, in particular, young black men.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.

The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them.

I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.

When I was a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.

When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it - for the challenge of its mysteries.

I didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.

I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.

It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.

I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

A modern economy is marked by the feasibility of endogenous change: Modernization brings myriad arrangements from expanded property rights to company law and financial institutions.

I could try to incorporate or reflect in my models what it is that an employee, manager, or entrepreneur does: to recognize that most are engaged in their work, form expectations and evolve beliefs, solve problems, and have ideas. Trying to put these people into economic models became my project.

In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

The main cause of Europe's deep fall - the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth - is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swaths of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates, and it depresses employment.

Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.

'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.

Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.

With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.

Some economists believe that the Greeks' work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the classical virtues can do nothing to offset the dearth of innovation that plagues the economy.

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.

When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going.

One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, they're afraid to stay the course, so they start selling. The other thing is that I think, as entrepreneurs keep on waiting to produce new things, that there's an accumulation of as-yet-unexploited new ideas that keeps mounting up.

Things can get only so bad. People want to eat, so at some point they resist further cuts to their consumption - it's not a bottomless pit.

An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.

My view is that innovation has declined in the everyday processes that businesses tinker with incrementally as they try to become more productive over time.

Unemployment rates tend to rise and fall in roughly equal proportion at all rungs of the ladder, and that happened between 1973 and 1985.

Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.

Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market.

At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.