There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.
A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.
I'm 40 years old. What I have seen my whole life is widening income inequality.
There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.
Well-trained and dedicated employees are the only sustainable source of competitive strength.
We're now moving toward a radically different economy. You absolutely can't have a distribution oligopoly. The new oligopolies - and I think there will be new oligopolies - will be oligopolies of trustworthiness. Microsoft, Amazon, Schwab, and other brands will dominate psychic space, not shelf space.
We are creating a one size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures, when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently. Paradoxically we're embracing standardized tests just when the economy is eliminating standardized jobs.
The key to understanding the rise in inequality isn't technology or globalization. It's the power of the moneyed interests to shape the underlying rules of the market.
Averages don't always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet.
We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.
Regardless of how you interpret the facts, you have to come to the conclusion that inequality is widening in the US and in almost every other country.
The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.
Terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.
When top executives get huge pay hikes at the same time as middle-level and hourly workers lose their jobs and retirement savings, or have to accept negligible pay raises and cuts in health and pension benefits, company morale plummets. I hear it all the time from employees: This company, they say, is being run only for the benefit of the people at the top. So why should we put in extra effort, commit extra hours, take on extra responsibilities? We'll do the minimum, even cut corners. This is often the death knell of a company.
I started in the law; and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.
There's a great debate going on, you know, on whether we're moving toward a system of giant oligopolies or a system of multiples of small businesses. Which is it? I think it's both. In every sector of the economy, we have giant brands that are trustworthy guides to what's good, and then a vast number of small groups, many of them project-based, sometimes folding and re-creating, that are offering products and services through those giant global brands.
Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.
The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.
I want a shot for people like me to grow up and do something with themselves.
When I was a kid, the bigger boys would pick on me. So I got an idea that I would make alliances with older boys, like just one or two, who would be my protectors.
I knew Hillary Clinton from undergraduate days and was enormously impressed with her. She was a terrific energy and enthusiasm, and a great organizer. And I knew that she was going to have a political future.
There is a deep desire to change the power structure.
I don't think that our problem, our jobs problem, is fundamentally a problem of trade. I think it has much more to do with the fact that we have not sufficiently educated our population. We have not got out of this great recession with adequate stimulus and adequate fiscal and monetary policies over all.
As to the meaning of "corporate social responsibility," Friedman and I would agree: If a certain action improves the corporation's bottom line, there's no point in labeling it "socially responsible." It's just good business.
One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.
