"[A]lmost all the data supports the notion that we have a lot more free time than we used to, and a lot more recreation.... The reason people feel they're so pushed for time when the data says otherwise is that the growth of the recreation and leisure industry has made you feel frustrated about not being able to go out and do all of these wonderful things."
- W. Michael Cox
cheif economist of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas
[Wired Sept 1999, p161]
"A 1997 [LA] Times poll of Orange County workers found that more than half worked more than 40 hours each week and said they were working harder than they did five years previously. Well-publicized studies done by Harvard economist Juliet Schor indicate that Americans work 163 hours more a year than they did in the 1960's (a timeframe that dovetails nicely with the entrance of large numbers of women into the professional workplace)."
[LA Times Sept 6, 1999, E3]
Wired: "What about the poor?"
Guilder: "By all material dimensions, today's poor - the bottom fifth - live a lot better than the upper middle class of the 1950's. In fact, the average American today lives better than the millionares of the late 1800's.
Wired: "But will they prosper as quickly as the rich?"
Guilder: "The gap between the rich and the poor is not widening. This is a claim that is usually based on myths. Dubious statistics about the poor in America leave out, among other things, pension funds, Social Security payments, the value of home ownership, and the multiplication of smaller households."- Geroge Guilder
profiteer
[interviewed by Kevin Kelly in Wired Sept 1999, p156]
"Today, the richest 1 percent of the US population - about 2.7 million people - account for 40 percent of the wealth."
[Wired Aug 1999, p66]
"While analysts have been left dumbstruck by the fact wages nationally are rising at only 3% or 4% in the face of such low unemployment, there is evidence of an even more astounding trend... for some categories of workers, wages are not even keeping up with inflation."
[LA Times Aug 30, 1999, A15]
"Economist Alec Levenson of the Milken Institute in Santa Monica said the growing gap between college graduates and others has been well documented over the last 20 years. 'Our booming economy doesn't change those long-range trends,' he said. 'For many high school graduates and dropouts, their wages haven't even kept up with inflation.'"
[LA Times Sept 1, 1999, C8]
"Computer programmers are not cowards. Programmers are tough, they are strong at heart, they are macho! These men had fathers who were steelworkers. Now in their generation, they may look weak, they may look skinny as a rail, but they are tough as their fathers ever were. They can do battle. And that's why we called our product CodeWarrior."
- Jean Belanger
chairman and CEO of Metrowerks.
"We swoon with the thicknes of our own tongue when we say 'I love you,' as in the eye of a child lost a long while will be found the contraction of that distance - a child going small in the claws of a beast, coming furiously up the furlongs of the iris. We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoke, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy."
-Dr Matthew O'Connor
[Nightwood Djuna Barnes]