Wealth & Money Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

"Today, our economy is about an economy of ideas" is politician-speak doing what it does best: compressing a complicated shift in power into a phrase that sounds both inevitable and uplifting. Kennedy’s intent is to move the audience’s attention away from the visible machinery of the old economy (factories, smokestacks, extraction) toward something harder to photograph but easier to champion rhetorically: knowledge, innovation, intellectual property, and human capital. It’s a permission structure for policy. If wealth now comes from ideas, then public investment in education, research, broadband, and health isn’t “spending”; it’s infrastructure for productivity.

The subtext is also a quiet reallocation of moral credit. An “economy of ideas” flatters the professional class and the industries that trade in symbols and code, while sidelining the labor that still keeps life running. It’s a comforting narrative for globalization and automation: jobs may vanish, but progress hasn’t; it’s just moved into the head and the cloud. That framing can unify, but it can also anesthetize, turning material dislocation into a story of forward motion.

Context matters: Kennedy, a member of a political dynasty and a public advocate on health issues, speaks from a party tradition that likes marrying market dynamism to social investment. The line lands because it’s both descriptive and prescriptive. It reassures donors and entrepreneurs that government “gets it,” while signaling to voters that the path to security is not protectionism but adaptation - retraining, innovation, and a retooled safety net. The elegance is its vagueness: “ideas” sounds democratic, even as the returns to ideas have become brutally unequal.