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" I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews. "
Nick Hanauer
Generations
Come
Atheist
Related Quotes:
" The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me. "
Nick Hanauer
History
Truth
Change
" You see, we capitalists will never actually ask you to work overtime. I don't even track your hours. I just make it clear that I trust you to get your job done in the time allotted. And then I hand you twice as much work as you can reasonably do in a 40-hour week. "
Nick Hanauer
You
Work
Week
" Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power. "
Nick Hanauer
Economics
How
Status
" Amazon didn't create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy. "
Nick Hanauer
Economy
Jobs
Amazon
" I make an eight-figure income annually. "
Nick Hanauer
Income
Make
" Greed is a sin because humans are social creatures. And they simply cannot survive without the opposite of greed, which is cooperation. "
Nick Hanauer
Survive
Social
Sin
" A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do. "
Nick Hanauer
Growth
Class
You
" We became enthralled with the view that wealth trickled down from the top and that if you poured money into rich people, sort of like an ingredient, prosperity and jobs would squirt out of them like donuts. And if you understand economies in the 19th-century way, that view is plausible, and I think a lot of people accepted it. "
Nick Hanauer
View
Rich
Money
" Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption. "
Nick Hanauer
Society
You
Problems
" I think the people who end up being extraordinarily successful - it's been my observation - tend to care enormously about status, particularly business people, right? Because the only point of money, you know, the only reason to have a 300-foot-long boat is because they're bigger than 200-foot-long boats. "
Nick Hanauer
Boat
Think
Business
" The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker. "
Nick Hanauer
Rich
Powerful
Facts
" All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another? "
Nick Hanauer
Problems
Fire
Action
" I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don't need food stamps - since when is that left-wing? How did that become 'leftie?' That doesn't seem leftie to me. That seems common sense. "
Nick Hanauer
Food
Enough
Common Sense
" I'm not the world's best philosopher. But I am one of the world's best strategists. I will put my strategic abilities against anybody on Earth. "
Nick Hanauer
I Am
Will
Best
" The higher the unemployment rate, the more leverage I have to 'encourage' you to 'do what it takes' to keep your job. And so you work even more hours, pushing unemployment up and wages down. And that, my friends, is one of the little tricks that keeps you poor and me rich. "
Nick Hanauer
You
Me
Job
" During Seattle's successful campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage, our opponents would sometimes roll their eyes and snort, 'If $15 is so good, why not $50?' It was a straw man argument: Nobody was proposing a $50 minimum wage; it would have been too high, and we said so. "
Nick Hanauer
Argument
Man
Good
" The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon. "
Nick Hanauer
Need
You
Poverty
" I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. "
Nick Hanauer
Risk
Think
Tolerance
" The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. "
Nick Hanauer
Love
Us
Rich
" Diversity is America's most valuable resource. It is what makes us the most innovative nation on Earth. "
Nick Hanauer
Earth
America
Diversity
" A lot of people think that persuasion is all about values and aligning values. I largely disagree. I think persuasion generally, and political persuasion more particularly, has much more to do with explaining in new ways and connecting dots in new ways than just invoking emotions and values. "
Nick Hanauer
New
Values
Think
" I have absolutely no rituals or routines other than I work obsessively and think constantly about my work, to the dismay and discomfort of everyone I employ. And my family. "
Nick Hanauer
Family
Other
Think
" Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make. "
Nick Hanauer
Key
People
You
" No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that. "
Nick Hanauer
Drive
Only
Class
" The thing about a real economy is that it actually is like the game of Monopoly in the sense that when one person has all the money, the game is over. And in a game of Monopoly, of course, that's quite charming, but in a real economy, it's much more problematic. "
Nick Hanauer
Real
Economy
Game
" We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? "
Nick Hanauer
Economics
Everyone
Better
" It is true that rich people can spend more money than middle class people, but there's this upper limit on what we can spend. I drive a very nice car, but it's only one car. I don't own a thousand, even though I earn a thousand times the median wage. I have a few jackets, not a few thousand. "
Nick Hanauer
Nice
People
Money
" The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense. "
Nick Hanauer
Will
Better
Bad
" Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth. "
Nick Hanauer
Care
Value
Growth
" The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn't a physical law like F=MA. It's a moral law, like 'Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.' "
Nick Hanauer
Law
Down
Go