Top 30 Nick Hanauer Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Nick Hanauer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing

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.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art.
Nick Hanauer
The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.
Nick Hanauer
I’m not the world’s best philosopher. But I am one of the world’s best strategists. I will put my strategic abilities against anybody on Earth.
Nick Hanauer
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?
Nick Hanauer
I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
Amazon didn’t create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.
Nick Hanauer
Rising inequality is toxic to growth. High levels of inequality exclude people – both as innovators and customers – diminishing both innovation and demand.
Nick Hanauer
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 Hanauer
Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It’s how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.
Nick Hanauer
During Seattle’s successful campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage, our opponents would sometimes roll their eyes and snort, ‘If $15 is so good, why not $50?’ It was a straw man argument: Nobody was proposing a $50 minimum wage; it would have been too high, and we said so.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
The higher the unemployment rate, the more leverage I have to ‘encourage’ you to ‘do what it takes’ to keep your job. And so you work even more hours, pushing unemployment up and wages down. And that, my friends, is one of the little tricks that keeps you poor and me rich.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
I make an eight-figure income annually.
Nick Hanauer
Prosperity isn’t something that squirts out of rich people.
Nick Hanauer
There is no earthly reason why Walmart and McDonald’s and Walgreens and these other giant, profitable institutions should have one worker in need of public assistance. It’s ridiculous.
Nick Hanauer
Greed is a sin because humans are social creatures. And they simply cannot survive without the opposite of greed, which is cooperation.
Nick Hanauer
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.’
Nick Hanauer
A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do.
Nick Hanauer
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 Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
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.
Nick Hanauer
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 Hanauer