Michael Spence Quotes

People are worried about what’s going to happen to their jobs. There’s a lot of off-shoring and out-sourcing taking place. There’s a lot more mobility of labor and of people. Unless we explain what’s happening, people will resort to protectionism and xenophobia.

Trade helps bring us products cheaply, but there is no guarantee whatsoever to assume that it will allow us to replace the jobs that have been lost, and there is no mechanism under productivity that says that, either.

There is a large change coming in the jobs of America and competition from abroad. We should prepare for it rather than let history overwhelm us.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

The hope is that we'll continue to create jobs for the vast majority of people. But if the situation arises that this is less and less the case, then we need to rethink, how do we make sure that everybody can make a living?

Despite all the political sound and fury, little service-sector offshoring has happened to date. But it may eventually amount to a third Industrial Revolution, and industrial revolutions have a way of transforming societies.

Let’s export American products, not American jobs.

Any system of economics is bankrupt if it sees either value or virtue in unemployment.

Yet in this global economy, no jobs are safe. High-speed Internet connections and low-cost, skilled labor overseas are an explosive combination.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

There are 20 million unemployed and what does the Constitution offer us in the Europe of 25, 27 and soon to be 30: policies of unrestricted competition to the detriment of production, wages, research and innovation.

Unemployment in America today is too high. And part of the reason, unfortunately, is that many companies cannot fill the high-skilled jobs increasingly at risk of going overseas.

We didn't start this war - the right wing did. We're tired of seeing good-paying jobs shipped overseas. This fight is about the economy, it's about jobs and it's about rebuilding America.

As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

There are people walking around the streets of Kansas City who are unemployed, while one of our largest employers is not only sending jobs aboard, but then turning around and making a statement about preserving jobs.

The main cause of Europe's deep fall - the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth - is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swaths of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates, and it depresses employment.

My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.

Jobs are critically important, but looking at economic change through the impact on jobs has always been a difficult way to think about economic progress.

With 1.7 million private sector jobs lost and half a million jobs shipped overseas over the past three years, we must take action to spur job creation and restore economic prosperity.

Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal.

The fact of the matter is, this is a very dynamic economy we have, and in this dynamic economy, you have a lot of job gains, but you also have job loss.

The principal problem facing our economy today is jobs.

Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.