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.
Nick HanauerRead
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
EconomicsInequalityPrejudicePowerPreferences
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.
Nick HanauerRead
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 HanauerRead
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 HanauerRead
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 HanauerRead
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 HanauerRead
Similar quotes
Over the years, the U.S. economy has shown a remarkable ability to absorb shocks of all kinds, to recover, and to continue to grow. Flexible and efficient markets for labor and capital, an entrepreneurial tradition, and a general willingness to tolerate and even embrace technological and economic change all contribute to this resiliency.
Ben BernankeRead
Global capital markets pose the same kinds of problems that jet planes do. They are faster, more comfortable, and they get you where you are going better. But the crashes are much more spectacular.
Lawrence SummersRead
We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.
David MametRead
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.
Robert J. ShillerRead
It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression.
Henry FordRead