Quotes from Annie Lowrey

Maybe kindness is not a distraction from or orthogonal to change. Maybe it is a pathway to it.

The Millennials graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple years living in their parents' basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages.

Numerous studies have shown income inequality growing since the late 1970s. Real earnings have fallen for many families, with globalization, the decline of unions and technological innovations eroding workers' wages.

Depriving immigrant families of health care, healthy food, insurance, and antipoverty supports does not just hurt them. In the long term, it hurts everyone.

Climate change is killing Americans. Wildfires, heat waves, mudslides, hurricanes, and floods lead to hundreds if not thousands of deaths every year. But those are only the direct fatalities.

The student-loan crisis has an underappreciated emotional valence too: The debt makes people miserable. In one survey, more than half of borrowers said that they have experienced depression because of their debt. Nine in 10 reported experiencing anxiety.

Talking with economists, climate scientists, and psychologists convinced me that depersonalizing climate change, such that the only answers are systemic, is a mistake of its own. It misses how social change is built on a foundation of individual practice.

The government is more responsive to wealthy communities than poor communities, and to wealthy people than poor people.

The cost-of-living crisis extends beyond housing. Health-care costs are exorbitant, too: Americans pay roughly twice as much for insurance and medical services as do citizens of other wealthy countries, but they don't have better outcomes.

Perhaps the country's most pressing problem is its high uninsured rate. Every other country as wealthy as the United States has figured out how to cover its entire population, generally at a much lower cost, too.

It is a country that professes to care for babies. But in the United States, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries. Premature birth and low birth weight are common ailments, with lifelong and even intergenerational effects.

In functioning high-income countries, the government guarantees the provision of essential goods and services: medical care, transit between cities, supplies for public schools, financial support to weather a period of unemployment.

The risk that people pose to wolfdogs is far greater, statistically, than the risk that wolfdogs pose to people. Many are bred in miserable, inhumane conditions, and kept in equally miserable, inhumane conditions.

Cows and other livestock account for roughly one-sixth of all greenhouse-gas emissions, and as a general point, eating meat means taxing the Earth.

A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements.

In the longer term, immigrants contribute more to the government's coffers than they receive in social spending. Moreover, these programs are not just welfare or a handout, but also an investment, helping ensure that families are healthy, educated, and able to work and support themselves over the course of generations.

The pandemic has proved true over and over again what was already well known: that income and wealth are protective when it comes to health.

In the long run, lawmakers should keep in mind that tax rates are far from the only reason a rich person might consider flight: Decaying infrastructure and degrading public services are surely just as important.

Local tax increases can cause high-net-worth individuals to move, tax experts said; tax avoidance and tax arbitrage are multitrillion-dollar affairs, and rich people are sensitive to tax rates. But many of the people who move when their home state raises taxes are close to retirement anyway.

So overall in the entire economy, the issue is not that health care costs are growing dramatically. The issue is that the burden placed on families is. So just between 2010 and 2016, the cost burden of family private insurance premiums jumped 28%, whereas incomes rose less than 20%.

The things to watch are whether the country's borrowing costs are rising, whether its budgetary allotment for payments on the debt is increasing, and whether it is spending on good priorities. Those big, scary debt numbers are not as big and scary as they used to be.

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.

The world is falling apart and nobody is there for you, 2020 has shown it over and over again. But American capitalism is.

Many women are the lower-earning partner in a married couple, thanks in part to forces that relegate women to less remunerative professions and pay them less for the same work.