Jeff Greene Quotes

Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978.

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.

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

I had the good fortune to be raised in the 1940s and the 1950s. As I entered business in the late 1950s and 1960s, America was just coming into its own as a great industrial power. It allowed young entrepreneurs to start their engines, to start their businesses, to borrow a little money and to leverage what they had.

We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort.

If England became a world power, it was because of the industrial revolution.

Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

Since World War II, inflation - the apparently inexorable rise in the prices of goods and services - has been the bane of central bankers.

Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the planet. The once-labeled 'Third World' is edging its way into the 'First World.'

Mass prosperity came with the mass innovation that sprung up in 1815 in Britain, soon after in America, and later in Germany and France: It brought sustained growth to these nations - also to nations with entrepreneurs willing and able to copy the innovations.

The explosive growth in places like Shanghai has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into a thriving new middle class. What China has done is nothing short of an economic transformation, and the citizens of this country have every right to be proud.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

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.

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

The history of Europe over the last several centuries provides clear evidence of the transformative power of commerce.

The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

Why is the N.F.L. so popular? The N.F.L. grew in the comfort zone after World War II. People had money and time. A popular American sport got bigger.

After World War II, the major estates really did collapse.

It's kind of a terrible irony, in a way, that the solution to America's problems was World War II.

Japan rose from the ashes of World War II as a 'trading state,' the model for export-led growth. It is not clear that the old export model of growth will be sustainable in a more 'balanced' global economy that does not rely so heavily on the U.S. consumer.

What the 'supposed 99 percent' don't realize is that they are better off if there are more fat cats, not less.