Alan S. Blinder Quotes

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.

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.

History is full of examples of poorer nations that become wealthy by exploiting their comparative advantage in cheap labor to become globally competitive in a range of manufacturing industries.... If robots are expected to take over many of the menial jobs currently performed by people, the concern should not be for the working class in wealthy countries but for the billions living in the developing world who will now have lost the only established ladder out of poverty.

I don’t buy the argument that there are certain jobs that American just will not do.

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.

It is U.S. workers who lose out when employers cannot get the high-tech graduates they need to compete with foreign companies in the 21st century economy.

Low-wage jobs have gone offshore. We need to innovate to stay competitive.

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.

Globalization has redefined the competition for employment and incomes in the United States. Tradeoffs will have to be made between the two.

We want to export our products but not our jobs.

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

I'm working with the New Dems, who are talking about the future of work, which is something I'm very interested in in New Jersey.

My honest answer to what's going to happen to the future of jobs is I don't know.

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.

In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premium for low-skilled workers in manufacturing is smaller than it once was.

Our great history has been that people came to Michigan because you didn't have to have a college degree to get a good-paying job. Consequently, we have got a larger number of our population that right now are facing outsourcing, et cetera, without higher or advanced degrees.

In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay.

Every day more Americans watch their jobs being shipped overseas.

This 21st century economy holds great promise for our people. But unless we give all Americans the skills they need to succeed, countries like India and China will take good-paying jobs that should be ours.

I will tell you that I am going to be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.

Can the private sector create enough good jobs that pay well for everyone that wants one?

If there are not sufficient jobs to go around then government must create jobs to give everyone an opportunity

Transformation in the nature of work tend to brings wrenching social changes in their wake.