Success Quote by Charles E. Wilson

Wilson is making a hard-nosed, almost therapeutic case for why bosses should stop treating wage restraint as a harmless accounting choice. If the only path workers have to a better life is falling prices, he’s saying, you’ve sentenced them to improvement by decimal point: slow, indirect, and easy to doubt. Deflation might make goods cheaper, but it doesn’t feel like being valued. A raise is legible; “prices went down” is abstract, uneven, and often invisible after rent, healthcare, and debt take their bite.

The intent is managerial, not sentimental. Wilson is warning that patience is not an infinite resource on the factory floor. If workers see productivity rising and profits compounding while their real wages stay flat, they don’t interpret it as macroeconomic prudence; they interpret it as a rigged bargain. “Impatient and dissatisfied” is coded language for unrest: turnover, strikes, political radicalization, or simply the quiet sabotage of morale.

Context matters: Wilson was a major corporate executive in the mid-20th-century American economy, an era when mass production depended on mass consumption and when labor had real organizing power. The quote gestures toward a postwar consensus logic: stable prosperity requires workers who can buy what they make. Subtextually, it’s also a defense of higher wages as a stabilizing technology. Pay people more, and you don’t just boost demand; you buy legitimacy, predictability, and social peace.