If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing the human impact behind economic statistics.
Elizabeth Warren's quote highlights the disconnect that can occur in discussions about economic issues, where statistics such as unemployment rates and mortgage-backed securities fail to account for the real families affected by these numbers. By urging us to talk about families, she reminds us that behind every statistic lies a personal story, and these issues are not just abstract numbers but represent the struggles and lives of countless individuals.
In practice
During a presentation on economic policy, this quote can be used to stress the human aspect behind the numbers.
Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.
I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.
Conventional economic theory... counts the depletion of resources as the accumulation of wealth.
Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
The trouble with capitalism as a system is that only those who have or can get capital can make it work for them, and that leaves out damn near all of us.
Budget consolidation and economic growth are two sides of the same coin.
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