Amity Shlaes Quotes

#1. The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.

Amity Shlaes

#2. When you do something moral and upright and wander off by yourself, well, everyone doesn't always follow you, do they, right? You pat yourself on your sanctimonious back but it doesn't mean the crowd rewards you for doing what you think is right.

Amity Shlaes

#3. We're in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don't believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.

Amity Shlaes

#4. It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

Amity Shlaes

#5. The most remarkable thing about Calvin Coolidge is that he served for 67 months, and when he left office, the budget was lower than he came in. In real terms - in nominal terms with vanilla on top - he cut the budget year over year.

Amity Shlaes

#6. Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.

Amity Shlaes

#7. Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for contracts.

Amity Shlaes

#8. Entitlements seem to grow with prosperity; not only because they are indexed to inflation or GDP, but also because a prosperous country tells itself it can afford more benefits.

Amity Shlaes

#9. Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.

Amity Shlaes

#10. Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won't inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years.

Amity Shlaes

#11. The 1920s are the decade that signaled the arrival of a gift that still means a lot to us: Saturday.

Amity Shlaes

#12. By playing on people's desire to belong to groups, Facebook creates a new, inclusive society. After all, Facebook is not like Harvard College. Anyone with access to the Internet can sign up.

Amity Shlaes

#13. What's wrong with the auto industry isn't that it failed to create jobs. What's wrong is that it emphasizes jobs over general growth itself.

Amity Shlaes

#14. If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending.

Amity Shlaes

#15. The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

Amity Shlaes

#16. A while ago I did a story comparing the change in employment rates in recessions in the U.S. and in Europe, and what I found was that America fired a lot of people and rehired a lot of people faster than Europe. That difference is disappearing, and that is a problem.

Amity Shlaes

#17. Prices don't merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.

Amity Shlaes

#18. People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

Amity Shlaes

#19. Many writers, including myself, have detailed how irresponsible government actions slow economic recoveries. Similar behavior by individuals impedes growth, too. If you can't find someone reliable to do a deal with, you simply don't do the deal at all.

Amity Shlaes

#20. In my view, if you have one in 10 unemployed - something is wrong with the economy whether you call it recession or not.

Amity Shlaes

#21. When you see government leaders really bullying business, you know that government's economic policy is failing. They get angry and they get desperate.

Amity Shlaes

#22. If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

Amity Shlaes

#23. Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.

Amity Shlaes

#24. I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.

Amity Shlaes

#25. Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.

Amity Shlaes

#26. Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.

Amity Shlaes

#27. The Grand Old Party's abiding affection for a 'bigger and better' presidency isn't entirely logical. After all, the Obama presidency commenced with an effort to reenact the Hundred Days. Yet President Obama's first-term economic performance itself was not 'big' but mediocre - tiny, even.

Amity Shlaes

#28. In the end, all new schools, public or private, snobby or not, add value to the education market, making it bigger and more efficient, in the same way that Zuckerberg added wealth to the economy even for non-Facebook fans.

Amity Shlaes

#29. The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.

Amity Shlaes

#30. Who is the forgotten man...? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.

Amity Shlaes

#31. I'm always for lower taxes because lower taxes make people want to do things. Less burden, more fun, and economics is about people wanting to have fun. Growth is fun for people in the marketplace.

Amity Shlaes

#32. Young parents in America are holy and not to be messed with. If they say something is correct, we all acquiesce. And is there any man, woman or canine who doesn't leap out of the way when one of those giant, all-terrain Bugaboo strollers comes barreling down the sidewalk?

Amity Shlaes

#33. FDR's job results were, to put it politely, disturbing.

Amity Shlaes

#34. To investors, job creation is a second-order effect. Market participants care first about interest rates, exchange rates, bond prices and the one great factor that affects all three: the long-term solvency of a bond company called the U.S. government.

Amity Shlaes

#35. Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

Amity Shlaes

#36. Everybody should pay some tax, just as everybody should vote.

Amity Shlaes

#37. Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.

Amity Shlaes

#38. The difference between recession and depression is simple. Recession, goes the saying, is when you lose your job; depression is when I lose mine.

Amity Shlaes

#39. Anti-parent music seems to be all the pop-rock market wants.

Amity Shlaes

#40. There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.

Amity Shlaes

#41. The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.

Amity Shlaes

#42. McCain likes strong defense, and he's viscerally suspicious of big companies. So he's more a Square Deal guy than a New Deal guy.

Amity Shlaes

#43. The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race.

Amity Shlaes

#44. Seems like Americans just want it to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular.

Amity Shlaes

#45. Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

Amity Shlaes