Market Failure Quotes

• It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

  Gavyn Davies

  Interesting, World, Digital

  52 Copy quote

• Nothing rectifies out-of-control market failures like a healthy dose of
  government intervention and mountains of bureaucracy.

  George Carlin

  Government, Healthy, Mountain

  12 Copy quote

• Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

  Bill Gates

  Government, Ideas, Information

  "The day Bill Gates didn't call me a communist". Interview with Philip Elmer-DeWitt, David S. Jackson, fortune.com. June 28, 2008.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.

  Naomi Klein

  Atmosphere, Climate, Corporations

  "Naomi Klein on Capitalism and Climate Change". "Moyers & Company" with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. November 15, 2012.

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen...We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

  Nicholas Stern

  War, Two, Risk

  5 Copy quote

• Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

  Nicholas Stern

  Climate, Climate Change

  15 Copy quote

• The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

  Elon Musk

  Reality, Oil, Uranium Mining

  "Elon Musk: Refining Gas Uses More Electricity Than Electric Cars". Interview with Matt Rosoff, www.businessinsider.com. October 26, 2011.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Business schools are failing to teach the students about the risks of market failures. We need to include some material on market failures in the core of curriculum.

  Pankaj Ghemawat

  School, Risk, Needs

  4 Copy quote

• I believe in market economics. But to paraphrase Churchill - who said this about democracy and political regimes - a market economy might be the worst economic regime available, apart from the alternatives. I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there's a role for prudential - not excessive - regulation of the financial system.

  Nouriel Roubini

  Believe, People, Political

  12 Copy quote

• What we need to understand is, one, that there are market failures; and two, that there are things like asset bubbles and irrational exuberance. There are periods of booms, bubbles, and manias. These things, if left to themselves, can lead to crashes, to busts, to panics.

  Nouriel Roubini

  Two, Needs, Panic

  7 Copy quote

• If we want growth today to be more innovation-driven, more inclusive and more sustainable, then we need a more active state, not a less active one. Yet we still hear the dogma that we should just fix market failure by focusing on science and infrastructure, and to "level the playing field."

  Mariana Mazzucato

  Innovation, Growth, Needs

  Source: www.salon.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Many politicians and pundits claim that the credit crunch and high mortgage foreclosure rate is an example of market failure and want government to step in to bail out creditors and borrowers at the expense of taxpayers who prudently managed their affairs. These financial problems are not market failures but government failure. ... The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy.

  Walter E. Williams

  Government, Credit, Debt

  5 Copy quote

• The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Meaningful, Real, Years

  9 Copy quote

• Piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers.

  Henry Jenkins

  Moral, Producers, Consumers

  23 Copy quote

• But our energy woes are in many ways the result of classic market failures that can only be addressed through collective action, and government is the vehicle for collective action in a democracy.

  Sherwood Boehlert

  Government, Democracy, Energy

  7 Copy quote

• Deployment of broadband may be hampered by market failures in rural and remote areas. In such cases, well targeted state aid may therefore be appropriate.

  Neelie Kroes

  Deployment, May, Aids

  4 Copy quote

• As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself.

  Bob Frank

  Simple, Two, Invisible Hand

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

  Peter Thiel

  Thinking, Long, Horizon

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.

  George Gilder

  School, Successful, Opposites

  6 Copy quote

• Keynes tried to show that market economies could settle in equilibrium states in which the labour market did not clear, and in which the level of unemployment was high. He believed that this was due to a particular example of market failure, developed in his concept of effective demand.

  Paul Ormerod

  Example, Unemployment, Levels

  "The Death of Economics". Book by Paul Ormerod, 1994.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source