Quotes About Inequality

The evolution of income can be looked at from three different perspectives: growth, poverty, and inequality. Growth is about the average and how it changes, poverty about the bottom, and inequality about how widely incomes are spread across families or people. The

As we already know from the poverty numbers, the bottom fifth of families gained very little. The growth in their average incomes was less than 0.2 percent a year over the past forty-four years and, even before the recession, their real incomes were no higher than they had been in the late 1970s. Average incomes of the top fifth, by contrast, grew more quickly, at 1.6 percent a year, though not as quickly as those of the top 5 percent, whose average incomes grew at 2.1 percent a year. Once

The explanation for why progress should be so uneven differs from case to case; the reason why poor people are more likely to smoke is not the same as the reason why so many poor children are not vaccinated. These accounts are to come, but for now the point is simply that health progress creates gaps in health just as material progress creates gaps in living standards.

one careful study estimates that the average income of all the inhabitants of the world increased between seven and eight times from 1820 to 1992.

At the same time, the fraction of the world's population in extreme poverty fell from 84 to 24 percent. This

But on average over all the countries, rich or poor, a fourfold difference in incomes comes with a one-point increase in the evaluation of life.

Rising wage inequality is a by-product of this mechanism and plays a key role in raising the supply of skills. So while the inequality is not particularly welcome in its own right, it is part of a system that is raising living standards for everyone.

Economic growth has been the engine of international income inequality.

the top 10 percent of tax units in 2011 commanded 47 percent of all income, with an average income of $255,000. (A tax unit is not identical to a family, nor is income for tax purposes the same as other measures of income, but the overlaps are big enough that these trends are not misleading.)

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

You're saying that wealthy men can commit sins that would condemn a poor man.

The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.

The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks.

In the western world, you can go out, take a boat trip to the Caribbean and so forth, and buy good things with your own money. But the Russian people with rubles cannot do that.

Who is affected more when it's cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.

I grew up with pretty much nothing - in the hood, the ghetto - whatever you want to call it.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

When in doubt, mock the powerful, not the powerless.

Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security, and prestige, it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

I never had the help of money in the background - it could be the cherry on the top a little bit - whereas some others had that to offer.