Latest Robert H. Frank Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• No one could argue with a straight face that the couples getting married today are much happier just because their wedding celebrations cost three times as much as those in 1980. Bigger mansions and costlier parties are wasteful in the same sense that larger antlers on all bull elk are wasteful. The good news is that simple changes in the tax system can eliminate much of this waste without having to deny people the right to decide for themselves how best to spend their money.

  Robert H. Frank

  Couple, Party, Simple

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• When people bump up against one another in the course of pursuing their goals, it is in everyone's interest to resolve any resulting problems in the least costly ways possible.

  Robert H. Frank

  People, Goal, Bumps

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• When the economic pie grows larger, it's always possible for everyone to have a larger slice than before. So it's really in all of our interest to make the economic pie larger by eliminating waste whenever and wherever possible.

  Robert H. Frank

  Pie, Waste, Economic

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• If top marginal income tax rates are set too high, they discourage productive economic activity. In the limit, a top marginal income tax rate of 100 percent would mean that taxpayers would gain nothing from working harder or investing more. In contrast, a higher top marginal rate on consumption would actually encourage savings and investment. A top marginal consumption tax rate of 100 percent would simply mean that if a wealthy family spent an extra dollar, it would also owe an additional dollar of tax.

  Robert H. Frank

  Mean, Dollars, Income

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• The fact that many private expenditures are mutually offsetting actually happens to constitute a remarkably good bit of fiscal news. Mutually offsetting spending patterns are wasteful in the same way that military arms races are. In such situations, if each party spends less, nothing is sacrificed, yet resources are freed up that can be put to much better uses.

  Robert H. Frank

  Military, Party, Race

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and eliminate government indebtedness once and for all.

  Robert H. Frank

  Sacrifice, Government, Years

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• It is no exaggeration to say that rising inequality has driven many of the 99 percent into a financial ditch. It also helped spawn the housing bubble that gave us the financial crisis of 2008, the lingering effects of which have forced many OWS protesters to try to launch their careers in by far the most inhospitable labor market we've seen since the Great Depression. Even those recent graduates who manage to find jobs will suffer a lifelong penalty in reduced wages.

  Robert H. Frank

  Jobs, Careers, Suffering

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Rising inequality hasn't really accomplished anything of value for its ostensible beneficiaries, the top one percent. They've all built bigger mansions and staged more lavish parties. But in so doing, they've simply raised the bar that defines what's considered adequate in these categories.

  Robert H. Frank

  Party, Bars, Rising

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• All parents want to send their children to the best possible schools. But because a good school is a relative concept, a family cannot achieve its goal unless it outbids similar families for a house in a neighborhood served by such a school. Failure to do so often means having to send your kids to a school with metal detectors at the front entrance and students who score in the 20th percentile in reading and math. Most families will do everything possible to avoid having to send their kids to a school like that. But because of the logic of musical chairs, they're inevitably frustrated.

  Robert H. Frank

  Children, Reading, School

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• When the rich build bigger, they shift the frame of reference that shapes the demands of the near rich, who travel in the same social circles. Perhaps it's now the custom in those circles to host your daughter's wedding reception at home rather than in a hotel or country club. So the near rich feel they too need a house with a ballroom. And when they build bigger, they shift the frame of reference for the group just below them, and so on, all the way down.

  Robert H. Frank

  Daughter, Country, Home

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• The private sector is first of all much larger than the public sector. The waste we see in that sector does not result from the fact that people spend their money carelessly. Mostly, it occurs because what one family must spend to achieve its goals often depends heavily on what other families spend.

  Robert H. Frank

  People, Goal, Doe

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Many social critics wag their fingers at what they perceive to be frivolous luxury spending. But that misses the point that consumption norms are local. It's not just the rich who spend more when they get more money. Everyone else does, too. The mansions of the rich may seem over the top to people in the middle, but the same could be said of middle-class houses as seen by most of the planet's seven billion people.

  Robert H. Frank

  Class, Luxury, People

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Many decry rising inequality because it makes those who've fallen behind feel impoverished. But it's done much more than cause hurt feelings. It has also raised the real cost to middle-income families of achieving many basic goals. The process begins with the completely unremarkable fact that top earners have been spending at a substantially higher rate than before. They've been building bigger mansions, staging more elaborate weddings and coming-of-age parties for their kids, buying more and better of everything.

  Robert H. Frank

  Hurt, Real, Party

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.

  Robert H. Frank

  Years, People, Growth

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• The primary source of waste in government is that legislators are often under heavy pressure to vote for projects that will benefit their campaign contributors, even when those projects fail a simple cost-benefit test. But with the Supreme Court showing little interest in permitting tighter rules on campaign contributions in recent years, there is little reason to be optimistic that we'll start curbing this kind of waste any time soon.

  Robert H. Frank

  Optimistic, Simple, Government

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• A good school is a relative concept, and the better schools are located in more expensive neighborhoods. But when everyone bids more for a house in a better school district, they succeed only in bidding up the prices of those houses. As before, 50 percent of all children will attend schools in the bottom half of the school quality distribution. As in the familiar stadium metaphor, all stand, hoping to get a better view, only to discover that no one sees better than if all had remained seated.

  Robert H. Frank

  Children, School, Views

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• One reason that might motivate a worker to accept a riskier job at higher pay, for example, would be that doing so would enable him to bid more effectively for a house in a better school district. But if other workers did likewise, none would achieve the goal they were striving for.

  Robert H. Frank

  Jobs, School, Goal

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• We've long known that firms can pay higher wages if they spend less on workplace safety enhancement. Libertarians ask, "If a worker is willing to accept higher wages in return for his agreement to exercise greater caution while performing his job, why should the government prevent him from making that choice?" It's a rhetorically powerful question, yet it overlooks the fact that the agreement in question will have adverse effects on others.

  Robert H. Frank

  Jobs, Powerful, Exercise

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• John Stuart Mill believed that the only acceptable reason for government to limit a person's liberty was to prevent him from causing unacceptable harm to others. Mill was not a libertarian, but many libertarians are quick to cite this principle when arguing against a regulation that they oppose. And I believe most thoughtful libertarians are prepared to embrace something fairly close to Mill's harm principle. But accepting that principle implies accepting many of the institutions of the modern welfare state that libertarians have vigorously opposed in the past, such as safety regulation.

  Robert H. Frank

  Believe, Thoughtful, Past

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• If government is inevitable, the challenge is to come up with the most effective one possible.

  Robert H. Frank

  Government, Challenges, Come Up

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Unless we can act collectively, there would be no way to defend ourselves, no way to define or enforce property rights. We couldn't curb congestion or pollution or build and maintain public infrastructure.

  Robert H. Frank

  Rights, Would Be, Way

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• No society has ever succeeded without a decent government.

  Robert H. Frank

  Government, Decent

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Adam Smith's uncritically enthusiastic modern disciples portray his invisible hand theory as saying that market forces reliably harness selfish individuals to serve the common good. That's often true, but as Darwin recognized clearly, many traits that serve the interests of individual animals make life more difficult for larger groups.

  Robert H. Frank

  Selfish, Animal, Hands

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• As economists have long noted, the puzzle is not that so few people vote, it's that so many do. After all, no individual's vote has ever tipped the balance in a presidential election.

  Robert H. Frank

  Long, People, Presidential

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Only the federal government has the power to spend beyond its current revenue. It shouldn't do that when the economy is at full employment. But it's an essential step for an economy mired in recession.

  Robert H. Frank

  Government, Steps, Essentials

  Source: bobmorris.biz