Barry Eichengreen Quotes

This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression.

Long-term unemployment is particularly costly to those directly affected, of course. But in addition, because of its negative effects on workers' skills and attachment to the labor force, long-term unemployment may ultimately reduce the productive capacity of our economy.

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers.

With unemployment still abysmally high, the Obama economy is crushing Hispanics' dreams for their children to live a better life.

We've created the class of folks who are unemployed for longer than a year that it's very, very difficult to reconnect to society.

Unemployment is of vital importance, particularly to the unemployed.

While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.

Men and women of high professional standing have been reduced to the status of vagrants.

Millions of middle-class Americans, in free fall during the economic collapse that began around 2008, have had a taste of what it means to be poor.

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

The real people who suffer when business is leaving or not successful are the people in the middle class.

I have a lot of hard-working, blue-collar people in my district who are at the end of their unemployment benefits.

No country can afford to lose a generation to unemployment.

There are a lot of people who are moving from unemployment to disability rolls, and there are a lot of people who have been out of work for a long time who are unable to get jobs. And I think that from a long-term perspective, this is not just a human tragedy, but it's going to be a potentially big hit on the economy in the future.

In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.

Nothing has more impact on my district than unemployment.

Anyone who has lived in an area with high unemployment knows how it erodes social bonds, lowers the resilience of the unemployed and their families, and damages the prospects of the next generation.

Look how many millions of people are underemployed or have lost their jobs. The last thing I'm going to do is play politics with their future.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

We can't afford as a nation - not because of money but because of our social fabric - to have large numbers of people who are not working.

Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work in order to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.