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" 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
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" One of the things that I think makes me successful is the way in which I collaborate with others. In my opinion, nothing great is ever the product of one mind. It's always a consequence of some sort of self-critical collaboration. "
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" The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn't going out to eat at restaurants. They're not taking piano lessons. They're not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They're not sending mom flowers on Mother's day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they're doing all of those things. "
Nick Hanauer
Mom
Mother
Gym
" The only really expensive thing in our family budget, frankly, is private air travel. "
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" When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer. "
Nick Hanauer
Rich
Creation
Job
" Diversity is America's most valuable resource. It is what makes us the most innovative nation on Earth. "
Nick Hanauer
Earth
America
Diversity
" You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when. "
Nick Hanauer
Me
Society
Show
" 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
" 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
" I have, oddly, two ski houses - trying to sell one. "
Nick Hanauer
Ski
Trying
Houses
" 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
" I make an eight-figure income annually. "
Nick Hanauer
Income
Make
" In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want. "
Nick Hanauer
Know
Understand
People
" 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
" 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
" Like most plutocrats, I, too, am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. "
Nick Hanauer
Over
Own
Proud
" 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
" If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world. "
Nick Hanauer
Job
People
World
" In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art. "
Nick Hanauer
Enough
Work
Society
" 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
" 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
" Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves. "
Nick Hanauer
People
Money
Problems
" People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs. "
Nick Hanauer
Economics
People
Think
" Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations. "
Nick Hanauer
You
Same
People
" 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
" 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
" If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers. "
Nick Hanauer
Places
Taxes
Way
" I have a 15-year-old boy, and we are about to give him car keys, which seems like an act of insanity when you know what you know about 15-year-old boy behavior. But in 2018, we'll have self-driving cars, and it will be so much better. My son may be the last generation of kids who learns to drive. "
Nick Hanauer
Son
You
Drive
" The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. "
Nick Hanauer
Love
Us
Rich
" 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
" 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