Alan Greenspan Workers Quotations

Should the pool of workers continue to shrink,

the pressure to enlarge the pool of skilled workers also requires that we strengthen the significant contributions of other types of training and educational programs, especially for those with lesser skills.

The rates of return on investment in the same new technologies are correspondingly less in Europe and Japan because businesses there face higher costs of displacing workers than we do, ... Moreover, because our costs of dismissing workers are lower, the potential costs of hiring and the risks associated with expanding employment are less.

The ratio of the number of workers contributing to social security to the number of beneficiaries has declined to the point where maintaining the annuity value of benefits on retirement at a level well in excess of accumulated contributions has become extremely unlikely.

As I see it, heightened job insecurity ... explains a significant part of the restraint on (wages), and the consequent muted price inflation, ... Surveys of workers have highlighted this extraordinary state of affairs.

Despite the tightest labor markets in a generation, more workers report in a prominent survey that they are fearful of losing their jobs than similar surveys found in 1991 at the bottom of the last recession, ... The marked move of capital from failing to technologies to those at the cutting edge has quickened the pace at which job skills become obsolete.

This diminishing of opportunities for such workers is why retraining for new job skills that meet the evolving opportunities created by our economies has become so urgent a priority,

The bottom line, however, is that, while immigration and imports can significantly cushion the consequences of the wealth effect and its draining pool of unemployed workers for awhile, there are limits,