Quotes About Inequality

People rarely like the humanitarian plans of their social superiors.

They live in Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

Chief among these headwinds is the rise of inequality that since 1970 has steadily directed an ever larger share of the fruits of the American growth machine to the top of the income distribution.

This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our

Compared to Canada, Japan, or any nation in western Europe, the United States combines by far the most expensive system with the shortest life expectancy.

The new element in part III is the headwinds—inequality, education, demography, and debt repayment—that are buffeting the U.S. economy and pushing down the growth rate of the real disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution to little above zero.

If the stock market continues to advance, we know that inequality will increase, for capital gains on equities accrue disproportionately to the top income brackets.

The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past.

Inequality can be alleviated and productivity growth promoted by combating overly zealous and regressive regulations

Throughout American economic life, regulatory barriers to entry and competition limit innovation by providing excessive monopoly privileges through copyright and patent laws, restrict occupational choice by protecting incumbent service providers through occupational licensing restrictions, and create artificial scarcity through land-use regulation. They contribute to increased inequality while reducing productivity growth.

The inexorable rise of inequality can be countered at the top by higher taxes on the highest earners who have captured so much more of the income pie than was true forty years ago. At the bottom, an increase in the minimum wage and an expansion of the earned-income tax credit can divert more of the economic pie to those in the bottom half.

The various inequalities that define the contemporary world—imposed through white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism—all are based on this central feature of patriarchy, an attempt to make the domination/subordination dynamic appear to be a natural, and hence inevitable, feature of human societies.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it's a subject below their social standing.

Today, large numbers of citizens throughout the West are angry that the good life is being stolen from them. They are not quite sure whom to be angry at—immigrants, corporations, the government, politically correct liberals, the rich, the poor?

polity with extremes of wealth and poverty is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt. — ARISTOTLE

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

To make the Society Happy... , it is requisite that great numbers should be Ignorant as well as Poor," wrote Bernard Mandeville, the shrewdest and wickedest social commentator of the early eighteenth century.

Robert L. Heilbroner

It is that wealth is inextricably associated with inequality. This is an insight that we get from a most unlikely source, the first of the great philosophers of capitalism, who wrote that "wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. . . . The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many." It is Adam Smith speaking, not Karl Marx.11

As long as custom and command ruled the world, the problem of riches and poverty hardly struck the earlier philosophers at all, other than to be accepted with a sigh or railed at as another sign of man's inner worthlessness.

Because we were born of old country people in a new land, and, right or wrong, we had not felt equal to those around us, and had had to do a little more than they in everything we did.

When I crouch to my television set,the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

one human being judged groups of other human beings less worthy than his own. The