Science & Tech Quote by William J. Clinton

Clinton sells the new economy as a moral fable with a paycheck at the end. The line is pure Third Way triangulation: it flatters aspiration ("what you learn") while quietly shifting responsibility onto the individual in a labor market being reshaped by trade liberalization, deregulation, and rapid technological change. The rhetoric is clean and managerial, built to sound like common sense rather than ideology. If wages rise with learning, then policy can focus on education and training without picking fights over unions, executive pay, or the fraying safety net.

The phrase "knowledge-based economy" does heavy lifting. It frames economic upheaval as progress, not dislocation, and turns inequality into a skills gap problem rather than a power problem. Clinton is also doing coalition politics: reassuring business that government will feed the talent pipeline, while offering voters a nonthreatening promise of mobility. You can hear the 1990s confidence in metrics and market-friendly reform; even the 85 percent figure reads like a PowerPoint bullet aimed at suburban parents and anxious workers.

That statistic functions less as evidence than as a nudge. It implies a simple arbitrage: move into IT, earn more. The subtext is that losers in the transition are under-credentialed, not under-protected. It's an optimistic message with a quiet edge: if you fall behind, the economy didn't fail you; you failed to keep up. In the Clinton era, that was the political genius and the blind spot.