Amity Shlaes Quotes

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Amity Shlaes

Profession : Author

Birth : September 10, 1960

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

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

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

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

Amity Shlaes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy people suffer their own kind of agony, and no wonder. After all, what is the average life of the policy person? You go into government if you are lucky, do your best, aren't appreciated, take all the blame for policies for which you are only partly responsible, leave, realize your reputation has been damaged, maybe permanently.

Amity Shlaes

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

Eventually the dollar won't always rule. Eventually there will be a challenge to the United States and it will have to be like other countries that are a bit concerned about their currency, and then have to ratchet back in order to - right, in order to sustain. We just haven't reached that point yet.

Amity Shlaes

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

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

Amity Shlaes

With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.'

Amity Shlaes

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

Amity Shlaes

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

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

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