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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.

Robert Reich

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Robert Reich
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 24
Economist
Former United States Secretary Of Labor
Political Scientist
Politician
University Teacher
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Robert Bernard Reich
Understanding
Foundation
Organizational
Social
Beings
Interact
School
Gives
Graduate
Human
Theory
Graduates
Without
Becomes
Studied
Giving
Principles
Context
Started
Useful
Groundwork
Study
Economics
Precedes

More quotes by Robert Reich

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If you're going to be a great guide to what's great for consumers, and, indirectly, for investors, you've got to be very careful about who you contract with and what you're offering.
Robert Reich
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I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.
Robert Reich
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The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.
Robert Reich
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I, from the luxury of my laptop computer, can summon extraordinary bargains on everything I want, and I can also move my savings anywhere. This ability to choose more broadly and to switch more easily is the central fact of modern economic life.
Robert Reich
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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.
Robert Reich
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If you ever want to get a sense of your own personal failure, look at yourself trying to get across a point that nobody is listening to and the situation gets worse and worse.
Robert Reich
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If leadership is about anything, it's about leading. Not leading people back to where they already are, because they don't need that. They're already there.
Robert Reich
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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.
Robert Reich
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If we're concerned about volatility of earnings because we want some more stability in our lives, then let's create, instead of an unemployment insurance system, an earnings insurance system that will moderate the volatility for a certain period of time until we get back on our feet.
Robert Reich
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Cynicism is the largest obstacle to social change. Cynicism is dangerous because people throw up their hands and say, Well it's not possible. Why should I even try?
Robert Reich
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There are party leaders, big corporation, Wall Street. There are very wealthy individuals who kind of represent where the Democratic Party, the official Democratic Party was and to some extent still is.
Robert Reich
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When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need.
Robert Reich
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And now we're suffering the logical culmination of all this: the largest group of government-hati ng, racist, homophobic, misogynistic know-nothing, climate-change denying, evolution-denyi ng, science-denying , anti-immigrant House Republicans in history, bent on taking America back to the 19th century.
Robert Reich
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The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.
Robert Reich
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In journalism, there are only two stories - Oh, the wonder of it, and Oh, the shame of it.
Robert Reich
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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.
Robert Reich
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Now, inventiveness and empathy, those qualities, if they're together in the same person, you've got an entrepreneurial genius. But they do tend to be slightly separate.
Robert Reich
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Being critical of the nation is a far cry from being unpatriotic or anti-American. In fact, most social criticism . . . is based on a love of America's ideals and a concern we're not living up to them.
Robert Reich
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It is a myth that higher taxes lead to less demand and slower growth. In the first three decades after World War II, US top tax rates on the wealthy were never below 70 percent.
Robert Reich
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If you give up on politics, you're giving up on democracy. And if you give up on democracy, you're basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society, take it all. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we give up. Then we are 100 percent plutocracy.
Robert Reich