Quotes About Inequality

The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them. the American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It's between democracy and oligarchy.

It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007—the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

Yet the notion that you're paid what you're "worth" is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it's their own fault.

The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003—and extended for two years in 2010—in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America's 140.89 million taxpayers received in total income.

we still haven't learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: when the economy becomes too lopsided—disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives vis-à-vis average workers—it tips over.

For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven't experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can't, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.

If you think that someone is out to steal everything you have, you're either paranoid or a member of the middle class.

The prime source of accumulation was the "scissors" between town and countryside: charging the peasant high prices for manufactured goods while paying him low ones for farm products. Avoiding Preobrazhensky's impolitic term "exploitation," Stalin called this "something on the order of 'tribute,' something on the order of a supertax.

As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts

One of the tenants here has a tumor on his face. It covers most of his right eye. Where I come from, it would have been treated and removed. So I find myself thinking, what if I get sick? Something as simple as appendicitis could kill me. I've had all the shots, but what happens when the vaccines wear off? As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal.

More important, such events share a second feature, one that is absent from an increase in taxes: they reduce our own incomes while leaving others' incomes unaffected. Higher taxes, in contrast, reduce all incomes in tandem. This difference holds the key to understanding the mother of all cognitive illusions.

La ley es tan cara! -comentó Clodio con una sonrisa-. El pobre Catilina ha tenido que vender las reliquias de la familia para poder estar seguro de la justicia. Realmente, es un escándalo. No sé cómo se las arregla la gente.

She supposed it was one way to find money for the poor. Simply rob anyone who was not poor. Of course, that would just make everyone poor in the end, but it might work for a time.

the inequality of values is constant. Gold simply is not brass or iron;

if you want to increase your chances of avoiding stress-related diseases, make sure you don't inadvertently allow yourself to be born poor.

The more income inequality, the less likely people are to help someone (in an experimental setting) and the less generous and cooperative they are in economic games.

These differing emphases explain a lot—for example, the classical liberal view is that everyone has equal rights to happiness; rightists instead discount fairness in favor of expedient authority, generating the classical conservative view that some socioeconomic inequality is a tolerable price for things running smoothly.

The health risk of poverty turns out to be a huge effect, the biggest risk factor there is in all of behavioral medicine—in other words, if you have a bunch of people of the same gender, age, and ethnicity and you want to make some predictions about who is going to live how long, the single most useful fact to know is each person's SES.

Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality—it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it's having simpler answers, unburdened by motivated correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and the Left increases.