Alan Greenspan Quotes

“A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region.

The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.”

“America has been much better than almost every other country at resisting the temptation to interfere with the logic of creative destruction.

In most of the world, politicians have made a successful business out of promising the benefits of creative destruction without the costs. Communists have blamed the costs on capitalist greed. Populists have blamed them on sinister vested interests.

European-style socialists have taken a more mature approach, admitting that creation and destruction are bound together, but claiming to be able to boost the creative side of creative destruction while eliminating the destructive side through a combination of demand management and wise intervention.

The result has usually been disappointing: stagnation, inflation, or some other crisis.”

“America’s genius lay in three things that are rather more subtle than invention: making innovations more user friendly; producing companies that can commercialize these innovations; and developing techniques for running these companies successfully.”

“America’s rise to greatness has been marred by numerous disgraces, prime among them the mistreatment of the aboriginal peoples and the enslavement of millions of African Americans. Yet judged against the broad sweep of history, it has been a huge positive.

America has not only provided its own citizens with a prosperous life. It has exported prosperity in the form of innovations and ideas.

Without America’s intervention in the Second World War, Adolf Hitler might well have subdued Europe. Without America’s unwavering commitment to the Cold War, Joseph Stalin’s progeny might still be in power in Eastern Europe and perhaps much of Asia.

Uncle Sam provided the arsenal of democracy that saved the twentieth century from ruin.”

“America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today.”

“By one estimate, U.S. output per worker hour was double Germany’s and five times Japan’s.”

“Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.”

“In the nineteenth century, the population multiplied by a factor of almost fifteen, from 5.3 million to 76 million, a total larger than any European country except Russia.

By 1890, 80 percent of New York’s citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, as were 87 percent of Chicago’s.”

“It rejected the temptation to punish its opponents as the Europeans had done at Versailles, recognizing the wisdom of Herbert Hoover’s advice to Harry Truman in 1946 that 'you can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both'.”

“John Jacob Astor succeeded in amassing America’s biggest fortune by trading in the furs of beavers, otters, muskrats, and bears (though he wisely used some of the money he made from hunting in America’s great wilderness to buy real estate in Manhattan).”

“More than 90 percent of Americans lived in the countryside, either on farms or plantations. Only three cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, had populations of more than 16,000, making them flyspecks compared with London (750,000) or Peking (almost 3 million).”

“Slave owners invested a growing amount of capital in their slaves: by 1861, almost half the total value of the South’s capital assets was in the 'value of negroes'.”

“The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of 'I Love Lucy' in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country’s television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.”

“The population of the Pacific states increased by 110 percent from 1940 to 1960.”

“The United States is also losing the rugged pioneering spirit that once defined it. In 1850, Herman Melville boasted that 'we are the pioneers of the world, the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World'.

Today many of the descendants of these pioneers are too terrified of tripping up to set foot on any new path. The problem starts with school. In 2013, a school district in Maryland banned, among other things, pushing children on swings, bringing homemade food into school, and distributing birthday invitations on school grounds.

It continues in college, where professors have provided their charges with 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings'. It extends to every aspect of daily life. McDonald’s prints warning signs on its cups of coffee pointing out that 'this liquid may be hot'.

Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, 'We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy'.

Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.”

“Thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years.”