Nick Hanauer Quotes

We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true.

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.

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.

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 theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn’t a physical law like F=MA. It’s a moral law, like ‘Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It’s how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

I have, oddly, two ski houses – trying to sell one.

I think the people who end up being extraordinarily successful – it’s been my observation – tend to care enormously about status, particularly business people, right? Because the only point of money, you know, the only reason to have a 300-foot-long boat is because they’re bigger than 200-foot-long boats.

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.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

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.

I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don’t need food stamps – since when is that left-wing? How did that become ‘leftie?’ That doesn’t seem leftie to me. That seems common sense.

In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art.

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?

Once America’s CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth.

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.

The thing about a real economy is that it actually is like the game of Monopoly in the sense that when one person has all the money, the game is over. And in a game of Monopoly, of course, that’s quite charming, but in a real economy, it’s much more problematic.

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?

Amazon didn’t create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.

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.

I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews.

Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

Prosperity isn’t something that squirts out of rich people.

The only really expensive thing in our family budget, frankly, is private air travel.

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.

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Diversity is America’s most valuable resource. It is what makes us the most innovative nation on Earth.

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.

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.