The longer people are unemployed, the less employable they become. Skills become rusty; managers look more suspiciously at someone who has been out of work for years than a candidate already employed. – Nina Easton
Our pride is tied up in being right. We tend to favor data that confirm our beliefs, so we don’t see alternatives. Too often, leaders practice defense routines that become self-reinforcing. – Nina Easton
I’ve been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught – from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships. – Nina Easton
Community colleges are popular among political leaders of both parties. But because of the lack of funding and a lack of direction, they have lost their critical edge in preparing workers for a 21st-century economy. – Nina Easton
Your company is probably going to get hacked. The velocity and complexity of hacking attempts has skyrocketed, with companies routinely facing millions of knocks on the vault door. – Nina Easton
A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics. – Nina Easton
Jobless workers, especially those out of work for months and years, don’t have the skills to multitask in a fast-paced economy where medical workers need to know electronic record-keeping, machinists need computer skills, and marketing managers can no longer delegate software duties. – Nina Easton
When I visited the Water Institute’s Baton Rouge offices overlooking the Mississippi River, I couldn’t find a drop of the charged politics that drives so many environmental conversations in Washington. – Nina Easton
A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges – the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws. – Nina Easton
If you want to know how Hillary Clinton could try to distance herself from President Obama’s much-criticized foreign policy, listen closely to the words of her former top strategist, Anne-Marie Slaughter. – Nina Easton
We know that inflation distorts economic behavior. In the 1970s, a combination of high tax rates and inflation prompted investors to flee production in favor of protection. – Nina Easton
The guardians of your company’s cyber security should be encouraged to network within the industry to swap information on the latest hacker tricks and most effective defenses. – Nina Easton
Sea World’s killer whale collection needs constant replenishing. The average life span of the animals in captivity is less than half the average for killer whales in the ocean. – Nina Easton
Ralph Reed is deeply ambitious and always was so. There was a time when he… in one of my interviews, he said he pondered running the Ross Perot campaign, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do the Christian Right thing; he was worried that it boxed him into a corner. – Nina Easton
It’s true that many of the leaders who started at non-elite colleges as undergrads later attended prominent graduate schools in law, business, medicine, and so on. But the point is that they found their own way there – as young men and women in their early 20s, not teenagers pressed into action by parents and peers. – Nina Easton
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a platform of ‘ending welfare as we know it.’ His political worldview, drawn from like-minded thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council, was based in private sector growth and personal responsibility. – Nina Easton
A huge segment of the country has always felt overtaxed. In 1938, when taxes were roughly 17% of income, a ‘Fortune’ survey found that nearly half of all Americans thought they paid too much relative to what they got in return. – Nina Easton
Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf – the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet – even post-Katrina’s modernized levees will be overwhelmed. – Nina Easton
In May 2007, congressional Democrats and the Bush administration agreed to a plan to include environmental and international labor standards in upcoming trade agreements. – Nina Easton
Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can’t avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect. – Nina Easton
Economically, long-term joblessness means fewer dollars for consumption. For deficit control, it means fewer taxpayers contributing to government revenues and tens of billions more spent on unemployment insurance. – Nina Easton
Disability has become a form of permanent welfare for a lot of folks. It’s not that hard to prove a mental illness or mental issues or pain issues. – Nina Easton
Direct mail was the basis of a lot of new Right organizations in the ’70s and early ’80s, and it actually led to the downfall of the majority of them. It’s very expensive, and you end up putting your organization more and more in debt if you’re not successful with it. – Nina Easton
Message to all you crazed parents desperately hiring tutors and padding your kid’s thin resume: Chillax. Attending an elite college is no guarantee of leadership, life success, or earnings potential. – Nina Easton
To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance. – Nina Easton
Public anger over bank bailouts was as much about fairness as the billions of dollars spent. – Nina Easton