Robert Lucas Jr.

I do not see how one can look at figures like these without seeing them representing possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia's or Egypt's? If so, what exactly? If not, what is it about the "nature of India" that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

— Robert Lucas Jr.

So I am skeptical about the argument that the subprime mortgage problem will contaminate the whole mortgage market, that housing construction will come to a halt, and that the economy will slip into a recession. Every step in this chain is questionable and none has been quantified. If we have learned anything from the past 20 years it is that there is a lot of stability built into the real economy.

— Robert Lucas Jr.

I guess everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole.

— Robert Lucas Jr.

For policy, the central fact is that Keynesian policy recommendations have no sounder basis, in a scientific sense, than recommendations of non-Keynesian economists or, for that matter, non-economists.

— Robert Lucas Jr.

The Keynesian Revolution was, in the form in which it succeeded in the United States, a revolution in method. This was not Keynes’s intent, nor is it the view of all of his most eminent followers. Yet if one does not view the revolution in this way, it is impossible to account for some of its most important features.

— Robert Lucas Jr.

A key element in all Keynesian models is a ‘trade-off between inflation and real output: the higher is the inflation rate; the higher is output (or equivalently, the lower is the rate of unemployment).

— Robert Lucas Jr.