Quotes About Inequality

Women are kind of screwed, in the world," Andrew says.

No human difference matters much until it becomes a privilege, until it becomes the basis for oppression. Power is the vector that turns minor into major.

Believers in liberal freedom should worry not whether their regime can prevail in competition with authoritarian ones, but whether they can prevail against their own forms of institutional entropy: elite capture, corruption, and inequality.

The more we regard our success as our own doing, the less responsibility we feel for those who fall behind.

The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.

I am thinking of the everyday ways that conscientious, well-to-do parents help their kids. Even the best, most inclusive educational system would be hard pressed to equip students from poor backgrounds to compete on equal terms with children from families that bestow copious amounts of attention, resources, and connections

The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.

After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.

Subprime mortgage lending was still a trivial fraction of the U.S. credit markets—a few tens of billions in loans each year—but its existence made sense, even to Steve Eisman. "I thought it was partly a response to growing income inequality," he said. "The distribution of income in this country was skewed and becoming more skewed, and the result was that you have more subprime customers.

BAFU. Billions and All Fucked Up.

Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.

As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended.

Post Katrina) . . . He was reminded of the first time he'd run on a track with spikes. You just fly on the track. The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren't. There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.

His experience with Household Finance had disabused him of any hope that the government would intercede to prevent rich corporations from doing bad things to poor people.

And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people—in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts.

How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

When, a few months later, Goldman Sachs announced it was setting aside $542,000 per employee for the 2006 bonus pool, he wrote again: "As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended." In

If you had asked Ali, before he went to New Orleans, what he thought of people who didn't help themselves, he would have said, "My parents had to start all over again. What's the big deal? Just suck it up." The sight of little kids post-Katrina jolted him. "It kind of blew my mind—if you are in kindergarten you should at least get a fair shot. It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.

There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

At the end of the day, what do I think they are going to do?" she said. "Take all the money and give it to their banker friends. Do things like privatize water—so people in rural Florida will be paying seventy-five dollars a month for it instead of twenty dollars.

One measure of poverty is how little you have. Another is how difficult you find it to take advantage of what others try to give you.