Quotes About Inequality

Aisha was ten and didn't understand half of what Colson said, up there on the stage, dressed in purple velvet like he was Prince. She couldn't follow the words, but she didn't have any problem making sense of the way Juliet looked at him. Aisha didn't have any problem figuring out why Juliet's cousin hated Romeo either. Tybalt didn't want some smooth-talking black kid crowding in on any white girl, let alone someone in his family.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

The projects looked like a place where dreams went to commit suicide and hope got screwed in the ass.

We were in our broken-down Buick that had come from a time when cars were big and the American dream lay well within reach for just about anyone white and male and straight who wanted to reach for it. All others, take a number and wait.

The Philippines has no indigenous, value-added manufacturing capacity. At the end of the Second World War only Japan and Malaysia had higher incomes per capita in Asia. Then Korea and Taiwan overtook the Philippines in the 1950s. The country slid down past Thailand in the 1980s, and Indonesia more recently. From having been in a position near the top of the Asian pile, the Philippines today is an authentic, technology-less Third World state with poverty rates to match.

Deininger's two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. —HERMAN MELVILLE

Not so much a trickle down as a dragging-along.

A few years ago, kids from poor areas in France were asked to draw items of food. For a chicken, they drew a drumstick. For a fish, they drew a fish stick. Those are extremes, but there is a lot that needs to be done to help children discover good food.

When civilisation declined, it was the women who always suffered most.

Galima gauti saul?s sm?g?, bet m?nulio sm?gio negausi.

It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.

Disempowerment," Michael told me, "is at the heart of poor health"—physical, mental, and emotional.

If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

It's the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake." Let them be present.

I had learned there is overwhelming evidence that depression, anxiety, and addiction are responses to deep social forces that are rising around us. For example: the less control you have over your work, the more likely you are to despair. Or to name another: as your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to feel insecure and humiliated, and therefore more likely to become depressed or anxious.

The 1993 National Household Survey10 on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it.

It was more comforting to believe that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees once again.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level

The main reason given for banning drugs—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically16—and found the higher the inequality, the higher the depression.

When you have a society with huge gaps in income and status, Richard told me, it creates the sense that "some people seem supremely important, and others seem of no importance at all." This doesn't affect only people at the bottom. In a highly unequal society, everyone has to think about their status a lot. Am I maintaining my position? Who's threatening me? How far can I fall?

Watch TV and you'll be told the only people who count in the world are celebrities and the rich—and you already know your chances of joining either group are vanishingly small. Flick through an Instagram feed or a glossy magazine, and your normal-shaped body will feel disgusting to you. Go to work and you'll have to obey the whims of a distant boss earning hundreds of times more than you.

Cuanta más desigualdad hay en una sociedad, más extendida está toda suerte de enfermedades mentales.