Skip to content

The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation and the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and shareholders. The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike.

— Nick Hanauer

Another quote →

Topics

Finance

More quotes by Nick Hanauer

If wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.

Rule four: greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.

I... use my money to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better. And so, for example, the 15-dollar minimum wage that we cooked up has now affected 30 million workers. So that works better.

All Nick Hanauer quotes →

You may also like

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

Isaac Asimov Empire novels (1950)

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

John Stuart Mill Principles of Political Economy (1848)

Economy, in the estimation of common minds, often means the absence of all taste and comfort.

Sydney Smith Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nick Hanauer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.