Paul Hawken Quotes

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

The United States is going to be a rich country, it is going to be prosperous, but it is not going to be able to take the lead in the next phase of global economic development.

This country has been economically successful because of cheap energy and cheap labor and we are never going to have these again.

Human labor is becoming the cheapest of commodities.

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.

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.

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.

The structural changes of globalization and automation that has created concentrated wealth among some people who have had the right skills and the right opportunities has also created extraordinary disruption and havoc among the American middle-class.

We must create a kind of globalization that works for everyone... and not just for a few.

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.

Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.

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

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy.

The West has become the world model; developing countries are dreaming of living like us, which is impossible. They should reject our model, because it is not sustainable. Developing countries should even give us the example, but unfortunately that's not what happens.

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.

For most of the 20th century, we didn't just enjoy economic success in Michigan, we defined it. Our innovators and entrepreneurs created the world's most productive companies, and our unions made sure that productivity led to broad middle class prosperity.

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.

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.

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

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

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time.

Africa has no time to lose. The global economy is fast leaving our continent behind.

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.