Quotes About Inequality

In a world of globalization, creating market value had become entirely separated from creating employment. There was no reason to believe that giving more money to America's wealthy would lead to more investment in the United States:

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.

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

For now, we simply note that the marked reduction in inequality in the period between 1950 and 1970, was due partly to developments in the markets but even more to government policies, such as the increased access to higher education provided by the GI Bill and the highly progressive tax system enacted during World War II.

there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others.

Trump doesn't have a plan to help the country; he has a plan to continue the robbery of the majority by those at the top.

as the "good" middle-class jobs—requiring a moderate level of skills, like autoworkers' jobs—seemed to be disappearing relative to those at the bottom, requiring few skills, and those at the top, requiring greater skill levels. Economists refer to this as the "polarization" of the labor force.

If one group's economic opportunities leave it much poorer than other groups, then the interactions of the first group with people from other groups will be limited, and it is likely to develop a different culture. Then ideas about intrinsic differences of the poor group are more likely to take root and to persist.

we have designed a legal system that is an arms race: the two protagonists work hard to out-lawyer each other, which is to say outspend each other, since good and clever lawyers are expensive. The outcome is often determined less by the merits of the case or issue than by the depth of the pockets. In the process, there is massive distortion of resources, not just in the litigation but in actions taken to affect the outcome of litigation and to prevent litigation in the first place.

There is another way for moneyed interests to get what they want out of government: convince the 99 percent that they have shared interests. This strategy requires an impressive sleight of hand; in many respects the interests of the 1 percent and the 99 percent differ markedly. The fact that the 1 percent has so successfully shaped public perception testifies to the malleability of beliefs. When others engage in it, we call it "brainwashing" and "propaganda."1

The American economy today is characterized, to too great an extent, by underregulated, monopolistic markets, where wealth creation has been replaced by exploitation.

A central thesis of chapters 2 and 3 is that market failures—and the failure of government to circumscribe them—play a key role in explaining inequality in America. At the top there are rents (such as monopoly rents); at the bottom there is underinvestment in human capital. Hidden subsidies that distort the market and rules of the game that give an upper hand to those at the top have compounded the problems.

Oxfam found that the top 1 percent of the world now owned nearly half the world's wealth— and are on track to own as much of the rest of the 99 percent combined by 2016.

If globalization left many behind, if Reagan's reforms led to more people in poverty and income stagnation for large fractions of the population, the trick was to stop gathering data about poverty and stop talking about inequality.

El aumento de las desigualdades corroe la confianza; tiene un impacto económico similar al de un disolvente universal. Crea un mundo económico en el que hasta los ganadores son precavidos. Y los perdedores… En toda transacción, en todo contacto con un jefe, una empresa o un burócrata, ven la mano de alguien que quiere aprovecharse de ellos.

nuestros fracasos económicos: al gestionar adecuadamente la transición de una economía industrial a otra de servicios, al controlar el sector financiero, al manejar como es debido la globalización y sus consecuencias y, lo más importante, al responder a la desigualdad creciente. Parece que evolucionamos de manera resuelta hacia una economía y una democracia del 1 por ciento, por el 1 por ciento y para el 1 por ciento.

during the 2008 crisis, corporate welfare reached new heights. In the great bailout of the Great Recession, one corporation alone, AIG, got more than $180 billion—more than was spent on welfare to the poor from 1990 to 2006.68 As

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.

It shouldn't, of course, come as a big surprise that some of the wealthiest Americans are promoting an economic fantasy in which their further enrichment benefits everyone. It is, perhaps, a surprise that they've done such a good job of selling these fantasies to so many Americans. The

Throughout its history, America has struggled with inequality. But with the tax policies and regulations that existed in the post–World War II war period—and the heavy investments in education, like the GI Bill—matters were improving. The tax cuts at the top and deregulation that began in the Reagan years reversed that trend. There

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

The economic elite have pushed for a framework that benefits them at the expense of the rest, but it is an economic system that is neither efficient nor fair. I explain how our inequality gets reflected in every important decision that we make as a nation—from our budget to our monetary policy, even to our system of justice—and show how these decisions themselves help perpetuate and exacerbate this inequality.13 Given

from 2007 to 2010, median wealth—the wealth of those in the middle—fell by almost 40 percent