Robert J. Shiller Quotes

Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.

Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety.

I think it’s a nutty idea to fool around with the Social Security system and run the risk of hurting the people who have been saving all their lives…. It may be a new idea but it is a dumb one.

I am telling you, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs.

industries which had lost 14 per cent of their labor power through the Sunday rest would perhaps be incapable of carrying on, so that finally the workers would lose their livelihood.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

American investors [abroad] receive an interest return higher by at least 2 percent on the average than they would receive from similar government or industrial investment within the United States …. It is obvious that they are taking a correspondingly greater risk. A considerable portion of this investment is in areas (as in parts of Latin-America) where political unrest is chronic and where legislation changes rapidly, or in areas in which there is a serious possibility of war or bankruptcy.

I'm one of many who have seen their parents and their friends lose their jobs, lose their income, lose their livelihood because of the European Union.

I don't think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security.

The entertainment industry isn't secure.

The typical jobs that a lower-skilled immigration worker might do might be construction work, it might be hospitality work, it might be restaurant work, or might be not working at all and just going onto the welfare system if there isn't a job for that individual.

American men do have genuine reasons for anxiety. The traditional jobs that many men have filled are disappearing, thanks to automation and outsourcing. The jobs that remain require, in most cases, higher education, which is increasingly difficult for non-affluent families to afford.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

If I had more skill in what I'm attempting, I wouldn't need so much courage

I've been saying this for years: There is no longer such a thing as a safe and secure job.

When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn't keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.

I think people now live in an age in which the only thing - they don't think about getting ahead. They think about surviving.

I don't think that Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically.

Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relations with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first-line attention. In this regard we could learn much from the Japanese. We must reinvest in the human side of management.

No one is guaranteed a job in this.

Here's why I think the public service jobs are almost unavoidable: When we have downturns in the economy - and we will, for we haven't repealed the business cycle - unemployment will build, yet we no longer have any safety net. What are we going to do? Unless we decide to pull out all the stops and lower interest rates immediately and risk turning a recession into wild inflation, we're going to have to figure out some way of providing some more, not job security, but employment security.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.