Quotes About Society

Sexto, visto que las reglas del juego y tantos otros aspectos de nuestra economía y sociedad dependen del Gobierno

Antes que una reforma económica habrá que hacer una reforma política.

We had been taught that, once a country reaches a certain stage of development, inequality shrinks—and America had exemplified that theory.9 In the years after World War II, every part of our society had prospered, but the incomes of those at the bottom grew faster than those at the top.

misshapen economy creates misshapen individuals and a misshapen society

Some thirty years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners received only 12 percent of the nation's income.13

the six heirs to the Wal-Mart empire command wealth of $69.7 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society.

The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don't need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security. They can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people.

The most important "endowment," from our perspective, is a society's learning capacities (which in turn is affected by the knowledge that it has; its knowledge about learning itself; and its knowledge about its own learning capacities)

Already, data showed that the American dream of rags to riches, the Horatio Alger story, was largely a myth. Economic mobility was extremely limited. The abolition of the estate tax could solidify these changes, creating a new "class" society, based not on ancient nobility as in Europe, but on the bonanza of the Roaring Nineties. The

truth-telling, truth-discovering, and truth-verification institutions evolved, and we owe to them much of the success of our economy and our democracy.21 Central among them is an active media. Like all institutions, it is fallible; but its investigations are part of our society's overall system of checks and balances, providing an important public good.

Reagan redirected the country's economy, but he also crystallized a redirection of values toward more materialism and more selfishness. The failure of his approach to yield the fruits that had been promised did not result in the course correction that one would have hoped. It led only to a doubling down on a flawed set of ideas.

Americans like to think of wealth inequality here as being different from that in old Europe, based on a landed aristocracy of a bygone era. But we have been evolving into a twenty-first-century inherited plutocracy.

Primero, por sí solos los mercados no logran la prosperidad compartida y duradera.

In America the share of national income going to the top .01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top .01% got in the Gilded Age."9

The failures in politics and economics are related, and they reinforce each other. A political system that amplifies the voice of the wealthy provides ample opportunity for laws and regulations—and the administration of them—to be designed in ways that not only fail to protect the ordinary citizens against the wealthy but also further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the rest of society. This

Trickle-up economics can work, even when trickle-down economics doesn't. Even

Comrade" was a word much in vogue under Communism, which tried to foist equality even on friendship by making all men and women equally one's friend in the forthcoming (it hasn't quite arrived yet) just society. But in the social sense friendship isn't about equality. Quite the reverse. By its nature friendship is preferential: one chooses one person over another to draw closer to; an element of exclusivity is implied in the word "friend.

the so-called sexual revolution, for example, "rather a prim term for the lurid carnival that actually took place.

that, when it comes to humanity, "the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society.

They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?" "Who else will go?

In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure.

Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Change Is for the Worse' should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

Unii se nasc mediocri, altii devin mediocri, iar altora li se impune mediocritatea.