James Mirrlees

The world's been pretty good at coming up with new ways of doing things.

Encourage your own curiosity; pursue the problems based on that. Don't get diverted by trying to do things for your own advancement. In other words, don't be lured into responding to incentives.

It became clear I wanted to be a development economist. I mean, I said I wanted to work on the economics of poor countries. And I'd actually say that I don't think that was so much about narrowing the gap as about increasing their incomes, which means economic growth, which is really my prime interest.

You know there's problems - you can see all the poverty and so on - but it's quite another matter to know what you can do about it.

Don't get diverted by trying to do things for your own advancement. In other words, don't be lured into responding to incentives.

It's not going to be true that every country has the same technological possibilities, but there is no reason why it might not be more or less true. Broadly, that the idea that the same technologies should be available everywhere seems to me very plausible.

I think, in effect, in most of the European countries, the total marginal tax rate is over 50 percent; that's to say, add on other taxes like VAT to the income tax.

Encourage your own curiosity; pursue the problems based on that.

When things begin to go bad, the perception of people makes it worse.