Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Economic power often stems from biases rather than objective facts, leading to inequality.
In this quote, Nick Hanauer emphasizes that the driving forces behind economic decisions are not solely based on hard data or empirical evidence, but are instead influenced by personal prejudices and preferences. He highlights a tendency among the wealthy and powerful to prioritize their own interests, perpetuating systems of inequality regardless of clear evidence that showcases the need for fairness and balance.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on economic policy, one might say, 'As Nick Hanauer pointed out, the motivations behind economic decisions are often driven by biases rather than facts.'
More from Nick Hanauer
All quotes →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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability - old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.
Constructive trade, the two-way exchange of goods and services, is the most efficient and logical way for each nation . . . to build a stable prosperity, a prosperity based not on aid, but on mutually beneficial economic contacts.
One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels.
Reforms aimed at increasing an economy's flexibility are always hard - and even more so at a time of weak growth - because they require eliminating protections for vested interests in the short term for the sake of greater long-term prosperity.