Adrift Quotes

“The nation once idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Sixty-four percent of people who join extremist groups on Facebook do so because the algorithm steers them there. Less than three years after QAnon appeared online, half of Americans had heard of its conspiracy theories. In reality, what social media favors is that which divides us.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“The internet was built on promises of uniting us in a more socially connected world. It has had the opposite effect. We are a house divided—siloed in our echo chambers, no longer in sync. My NYU colleague Jonathan Haidt says that successful democracies are generally bound together by strong institutions, shared stories, and wide social networks with high levels of trust, but social media weakens all three. Somewhere, in our daze of posting, liking, and tweeting, we’ve lost the plot.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Since then, productivity and wages have decoupled. The value of our output has kept climbing, but the compensation of our workers has stopped reflecting it. Between 1973 and 2014, net productivity grew 72%, but hourly worker compensation grew just 9%. This left worker compensation at less than half what it would have been if the two had stayed in line. In other words, our nation kept winning, but our workers only got to cash in half their chips. The money started going somewhere else.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“While the elites ran, the rest of our nation crawled. The bottom 99% of Americans experienced wage growth that was nearly eight times slower than that of the top 1%, making it significantly harder to build wealth and almost impossible to enjoy the upward mobility their parents had.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Some say we should have more businesspeople in government. I admire great business leaders, but government is not business. Business teaches us to always look for an advantage, to not give anything away without getting more in return. That’s the antithesis of government (and government service), the purpose of which is to contribute to the commonwealth without recompense. 21 Cumulative U.S.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“So while climate change threatens our quality of life and the actual lives of millions who live at or below sea level, we’re paying attention to a billionaire launching himself into space. At least he said, “Thanks to all the Amazon Prime subscribers.” If this doesn’t demonstrate our gross idolatry of tech innovators, I don’t know what does.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“What turns this from bad to terrible, what makes it un-American, is that these advantages are becoming entrenched. The elites are digging in, protecting their growing fortunes from the risks of the very markets they claim to support. Bailouts, tax breaks, and subsidies are the tools of entrenchment. Our capitalism has become cronyism: rugged individualism on the way up, but socialism on the way down.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“In a healthy capitalist economy wealth is always at risk. Competition spurs innovation, disrupts the established order, and creates winners—but also losers. Joseph Schumpeter called it the “gale of creative destruction.” But today in America, those who’ve benefited from prior storms have suppressed that gale, stifling creativity and competition.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Bailouts of $50 billion to companies like Delta, whose CEO earned $13 million in 2020, or healthcare for low-income seniors, healthcare for veterans, and vocational programs for underserved high schoolers? America has made its choice.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“In 1950, the federal minimum wage was $0.75 per hour, or $8.51 in 2021 dollars. But today, the legal minimum is only $7.25 per hour. This effective cut to minimum wage has come even though workers are much more productive than they were seventy years ago. In fact, had minimum wage climbed along with worker productivity, it would have been $22.18 per hour by 2021.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Today, America is more feudal than democratic. One man—Jeff Bezos—has enough capital to end homelessness in the U.S. ($20 billion), eradicate malaria worldwide ($90 billion), and pay 700,000 teachers’ salaries. Bezos makes the average Amazon employee’s annual salary every ten seconds. Yes, we are a country that rewards genius, but we used to be one that showed kindness and generosity to those in need.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“The benefits of financialization are not widespread, largely accruing to asset holders and those working in the financial sector. More importantly, financialization continues to elevate the significance of the markets at the expense of the real world.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“I worry about the effects of age-based inequality. Immigrants, like my parents, come to America so their kids can make better lives for themselves. That used to be attainable. Now young people are fed up. They have less than half of the economic security, as measured by the ratio of wealth to income, that their parents did at the same age. Their share of wealth has crashed. I believe that fading economic opportunity and mobility is a disease, and the symptoms are shame, frustration, and rage. Young people—men in particular—have already found outlets for those feelings: chat rooms on Reddit, meme stocks, and violent protests are all signs of burgeoning boredom and frustration.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Capitalism, which had a mixed history for all but the capitalists themselves, was proving it could, when steadied by the ballast of a broad middle class, create a rich and healthy society.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“An MIT study examined a data set of 126,000 tweets in all categories of information—from science to terrorism to finance—and sorted them based on factual accuracy. The time taken for falsehoods to reach 1,500 people, they found, was six times shorter than it was for the truth. Meanwhile, 7 in 10 U.S. adult Twitter users say they get news on the site, and 80% of all tweets come from 10% of its users.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Research shows that declining marriage rates lead to lower economic output, reduced happiness, and a lower birth rate. A large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men is a malevolent force in any society, but it’s a truly terrifying one in a society addicted to social media and awash in coarseness and guns.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Unlike the temporary reduction in growth during the Depression, this slowdown is a result of fundamental transformations: Americans are having fewer children, and we have gradually narrowed the gateways of immigration. Population growth is a function of life span as well, and where we once experienced steadily lengthening lives, the so-called diseases of despair—drug overdoses, obesity, and suicide, which all accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic—are taking a greater and greater toll every year.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Change always entails risk, because in a dynamic economy accumulated capital can be lost. So it’s natural for winners to want to arrest the pace of change, to shift from offense to defense once the score is in their favor. But doing this is short-sighted and detrimental to the long-term health of society. Let the gale of creative destruction blow.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“The most affluent, the billionaire class whose innovations are giving us this work/live/play-from-home dystopia, will be a million miles away. Literally. They’re taking their windfall profits and investing in moon bases and Mars retreats. I don’t think their vision will ever be realized—Mars is a freezing, airless, irradiated rock. But our billionaire class is arrogant enough to burn off the prosperity of our age in a futile attempt to conquer the next one.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Think about it: Would Michael Milken have been sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2021? Likely not if we’re basing that outcome on the government action handed down to Mark Zuckerberg. He continues to smear lipstick over the cancer that is Facebook, and until we see a financial disincentive for his relentless systemic misconduct, we’ll continue to see no more than a Band-Aid put on the crises his company creates.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“One of the largest transfers of wealth from the young to the old in U.S. history came with the government response to the Covid pandemic. It issued a massive $5 trillion in stimulus, and essentially $3 trillion ended up in the hands of the wrong people. That amount could have been $30,000 for every American who reported pandemic wage losses. Huge swaths of America suffered, while the rich got richer.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“That cohort, largely made up of executives, lawyers, and physicians, has become significantly more populated with  . . . bankers. In 1979, 8 in 100 members of the 1% worked in finance. By 2005, that number had nearly doubled to 14.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“The wealthiest 1% of Americans hold almost half the stocks owned by households. The bottom 80% hold just 13%.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“In America, it’s never been easier to become a billionaire—but it’s never been harder to become a millionaire.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“There’s an inverse correlation between the level of bullshit in a company’s mission statement and its actual performance.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Life is change. The capacity to grow and evolve is what separates living things from mere objects. Stasis is death, to an organism and to a society. A healthy society is vibrant and dynamic, generating ideas and innovation in every field.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“We lost sight of some of the principal reasons for government: to protect the rights of the minority against the majority; to invest in things the market doesn’t like paying for, like education, infrastructure, and deep research; and to provide a safety net for those who slip through the cracks of the capitalist marketplace. Many came to see government as a threat to liberty, not its protector.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Accelerating Technological Advancement Two “laws” help explain the extraordinary changes wrought by the global adoption of the internet. The first is Moore’s Law, named for Gordon Moore, an Intel cofounder. In the 1960s, he observed that the number of transistors that could be squeezed into a single chip was increasing at a predictable rate—doubling about every eighteen months. Thanks to billions of dollars in R&D and engineering investment, that rate of improvement has held ever since. The second law is named after Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, one of the protocols foundational to the internet. Metcalfe posited that the value of a network is equal to the number of connections between users, not just the number of users. Bigger is better, and better, and better. These laws help us quantify something we can see in our online experience: both the power of our devices and the value of the network they’re attached to are millions of times greater than they were at the dawn of the internet era. Plotting this growth reveals an interesting twist, however. For the past thirty years, the value of the internet as described by Metcalfe’s Law has increased more than processing power has improved. But as internet penetration slows, so does the rate of increase in the value of the internet. Meanwhile, Moore’s Law chugs along, suggesting that we may be approaching an inflection point, when changes to our online experience are driven more by technological advancement than by the ever-growing number of online connections.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts

“Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post (conveniently, the biggest media company in D.C.), and he’s building Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2) across the river from—shocker!—the capital city.”
― Scott Galloway, Adrift: America in 100 Charts