Nick Hanauer
Nick Hanauer
Nick Hanaueris an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist living in Shoreline, Washington...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
business cost create devote equally fewer jobs key people profit revenue time
Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make.
accepted became economies jobs money people poured prosperity sort top understand view
We became enthralled with the view that wealth trickled down from the top and that if you poured money into rich people, sort of like an ingredient, prosperity and jobs would squirt out of them like donuts. And if you understand economies in the 19th-century way, that view is plausible, and I think a lot of people accepted it.
jobs thinking two
Now one person doing the job of one and a half. So as an employer I can get two people to do the work of three, and think about what that does for profits.
jobs creating squirrels
When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.
jobs unemployment wages
My message is that the counterclaim - which is that if wages go up, employment will go down - is a scam. It's a con job. It's an intimidation tactic. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that it's true. On the contrary, where you find high wages you usually find low unemployment.
jobs would-be today
If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth to the wealthy leat to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.
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Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.
money monopoly quite
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.
accept apartment decent expensive hard learned pay rent state super
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.
people pursue socially societies tech
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.
accurate complex dependent ecosystem embraces people perfectly rejects
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.
create human medium money people problems prosperity simply society solutions wealth
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.
absolutely constantly discomfort dismay family rituals routines work
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.
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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.