Top 53 Quotes by Nick Hanauer

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.

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.

If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world.

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.

The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn't going out to eat at restaurants. They're not taking piano lessons. They're not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They're not sending mom flowers on Mother's day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they're doing all of those things.

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.