Rosa Luxemburg Quotes

We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.

Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.

The facts of our present industrial system are of so, complicated a nature that they have not only defied the attention of economists for the last fifty years, but they have deceived practical men who have given to them not only the time economists have given, but their whole lives.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

[It] is exactly what politicians want. They want you to feel and behave like children while they pretend to be the all-knowing benevolent father. While they rile you up about how immigrants are stealing your jobs, they distract you from enlightening facts, including the assessment of some experts that the influx of Latino immigrant workers of the past 25 years has had less effect on employment patterns than factories that moved abroad, the decline of labor unions and the recurring recessions. So while we’re told to focus on building a massive wall to keep out immigrants, the real causes of job loss and economic instability continue unabated.

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little short of military force can keep them in place.

The offshoring of American jobs by global corporations and the deregulation of the U.S. financial system have resulted in American economic failure.

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.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Market forces will one day crush the Federal Reserve. One day, the market forces will reverse.

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.

In the industrial world we have the problem of having more productive capacity than we know what to do with. That's at the root of the unemployment crisis: we've got so productive at making things, we don't require people to be involved in making the basics of life any more. Or nearly as many people.

Every time economic and technical development takes a step forward, forces emerge which attempt to create political forms for what, on the economic-technical plane, has already more or less become reality.

What people recognize is that there's a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward.

Human labor is becoming the cheapest of commodities.

Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters--perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair--may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple as that.

For most of history, the prime source of human insecurity was nature. Capitalist societies have been oriented toward innovation and dynamism, to the creation of new knowledge, new products, and new modes of production and distribution. All this has shifted the locus of insecurity from nature to the economy.

Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.

The cycle of jobless youth, uncertainty about the future, depressing consumption, and weak investment and stresses on both the supply and demand side of economies are all thorns in the wheel of capitalism.

I think that when voters react negatively to trade and investment, they are really expressing their angst about the pace of technological change.

The consumer is going through a period around the world of uncertainty - whether geopolitical uncertainty, economic uncertainty - and that makes them a little nervous as well.

The United States faces structural employment problems because of the long-term effects of globalization and technology. This was only exacerbated by the Great Recession.