Quotes About Inequality

Quienes condenan a las modernas sociedades capitalistas por su insensibilidad hacia los pobres probablemente ignoran lo poco que las sociedades precapitalistas del pasado invertían en el alivio de la pobreza.

As impressive as the conquest of infectious disease in Europe and America was, the ongoing progress among the global poor is even more astonishing.

Either way, I suspect that it's less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on.

Gloria Steinem: "There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone.

We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor.

The only way [people] can end up equal is if they are treated unequally.

In the richest country two centuries ago (the Netherlands), life expectancy was just forty, and in no country was it above forty-five. Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.

Though the United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.

In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world's people have become better off.

The pattern remains—globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries—but the differences are less extreme.

The middle class is being hollowed out in part because so many Americans are becoming affluent. Inequality undoubtedly increased—the rich got richer faster than the poor and middle class got richer—but everyone (on average) got richer.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.

In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.

The fickle effects of inequality on well-being bring up another common confusion in these discussions: the conflation of inequality with unfairness

that children or adults possess any general aversion to inequality." People are content with economic inequality as long as they feel that the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn't.

inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.

Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men)

I love rich people. Any time I needed a job, I went to a rich person. I like poor people, but they never had a job for me.

Today people are suffering from poverty, but also from lack of love

The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.