Robert J. Shiller Quotes

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.

There is a fear of innovation because people are afraid of job loss.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

Displacement by technology has probably occurred since the invention of the shovel.

The bottom line is that while automation is eliminating many jobs in the economy that were once done by people, there is no sign that the introduction of technologies in recent years is creating an equal number of well-paying jobs to compensate for those losses.

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

I don't think that artificial intelligence means doomsday, and I think many new jobs will be created, too. However, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that these new types of jobs will favor low-income demographics. We need to address the needs of those who will be left out of the new job market.

Most of the folks to whom I listen are concerned for their future. Too many of them know someone who's out of work, has lost their own job, or fear they might. And, they increasingly believe that the opportunity for a better life for their children is slipping away.

Henry Fonda one time said that every time he had a job, he thought it was gonna' be the last one. And, if you got any sense, you gotta' think that because, you know when somebody's gonna do a dip, some of 'em go pretty far down.

I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.

When people have lost their jobs or are afraid of losing their jobs in the future, they lash out. They want others to know about their fears, their pain.

People clinging to job security, savings, retirement plans, and other relics will be the ones financially-ravaged from 2010-2020, the most volatile world-changing decade in history.

I have met too many people who are looking for work, worrying about their mortgage, uncertain about their health insurance, and doubting that things will get any better anytime soon. Not just concerned about the present, many of us are doubting the future.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

It's a scary life and sometimes you think you'll never work again.

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.

The anxiety does crawl up. The other night I was having panic attacks: 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen to me? Am I ever going to have another job?'

A perfect storm is in the making: financial uncertainty, economic downturn, government cuts, rising unemployment and a future that looks less clear the more we try to fathom it.

No one really has any job security anymore, including myself.

What kind of America do people want to leave for their children? What horrors are down the road, stuff that was unthinkable 30 years ago?

The root of the worker’s resistance to technological change is the conflict between labor as a commodity and labor as a resource. Increased productivity imposes upon the worker a risk of obsolescence.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

Only in a minority of cases will workmen be able to recognize the technological change responsible for their dismissal. For this it would be necessary that machines be introduced in an existent plant under the eyes of the workmen and that dismissal be effected immediately after.

There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery