Alan Greenspan Quotes

Regardless of how it is funded, consumption does not increase productivity; investment and innovation do.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

We need a tax code that promotes savings, investment, achievement, innovation, and hard work.

Good, bad or indifferent, if you are not investing in new technology, you are going to be left behind.

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.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Economic growth creates jobs, and countries grow when they educate their people and pursue policies that encourage households to save, existing businesses to invest, and entrepreneurs to innovate and create new markets.

That the way to achieve higher standards of living for all is through science and technology, taking advantage of better tools, methods and organization.

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

Savings is the fundamental input for capital investment, and capital investment is the primary ingredient in productivity.

For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard - despite decreasing resources - cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

Fiscal decentralisation does not lead to higher economic growth because economic growth is much more driven by factors other than taxes and spending, e.g. increases in technological progress and improved human capital.

In this time of budget cuts, we cannot forget that basic science is a building block for scientific innovation and economic growth in the information age.

If you're not looking toward the future or trying to improve the current technology, you'll be left behind.

Financial service providers act as the lubricating oil in the economy. They link consumers who want to invest their savings for a good return with companies who want to borrow on best terms for expansion.

America's peak years of indigenous innovation ran from the 1820s to the 1960s. There were a few financial panics and two depressions, to be sure. But in this period, a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all, and engaging careers for most.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

As we get better at things, we need less people to produce the things we really need, but what do we do with the rest of the people? They have to be doing something, too, to buy from those few which are doing the really basic stuff, and so that's why we need to be continually producing new stuff.

Productivity and the growth of productivity must be the first economic consideration at all times, not the last. That is the source of technological innovation, jobs, and wealth.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue.