Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done.

But most studies have found that cheating of public assistance programs is quite modest, perhaps 2 percent—less than tax evasion by the wealthy.

You are the bows from which your children As living arrows are sent forth. —KHALIL GIBRAN, Lebanese-American poet

also designed to keep girls chaste is breast ironing.

The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering, tasked by Congress with investigating how to reduce child poverty in the United States, issued a landmark report in 2019 that concluded that each year child poverty costs Americans about $1 trillion in crime, education and welfare costs and related expenses.

I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do something for our children'.

lifetime risk of maternal death is one thousand times higher in a poor country than in the West. That should be an international scandal. The gap, moreover, is getting wider.

America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Some 80 percent of Americans addicted to opioids began with prescription painkillers, not with illegal street drugs. Essentially, pharmaceutical executives acted like Colombian drug lords, with legal approval. Many cities and states, including Baltimore, are now suing Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies to recover some of the costs of treating the opioid epidemic, but no one can ever give Daniel back what he lost.

In the United States, we rely on local property taxes to fund public schools, so rich suburbs enjoy first-rate public schools that are a pipeline to the best universities, and underprivileged children suffer in third-rate schools with, often, the worst teachers.

The problem is that capitalists typically don't know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don't know how to grow it well.

Not since the Great Depression has America experienced the kind of working-class stagnation that we've seen in recent decades, and it has fed polarization, racism and bigotry, gnawing away at our social fabric.

The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

America ranks number 41 in child mortality, according to the Social Progress Index, which is based on research by three Nobel Prize–winning economists and covers 146 countries for which there is reliable data. We rank number 46 in internet access, number 44 in access to clean drinking water, number 57 in personal safety and number 30 in high-school enrollment.

Overall, the Social Progress Index ranks the United States number 26 in well-being of citizens, behind all the other members of the G7 as well as significantly poorer countries like Portugal and Slovenia, and America is one of just a handful of countries that have fallen backward.

The first lesson of our journey and theme of this book is that to a degree unnoticed in more privileged parts of America, working-class communities have collapsed into a miasma of unemployment, broken families, drugs, obesity and early death. America

The gains in wealth and income have gone largely to a tiny share of the population, as is common knowledge by now. The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades.

There's a brittleness to life for about 150 million Americans, with a constant risk that sickness, layoffs or a car accident will cause everything to collapse. One in seven Americans lives below the poverty line, a substantially higher rate than in Canada or other OECD countries, and scholars estimate that half of all Americans will at some point slip below the line.