Quotes About Inequality

As in the general society, fertility tends to be greatest where people are poorest: "The rich get richer, and the poor have children." In

Seldom is the claim made that black Americans alive at this moment are worse off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa. Any attempt to make that case with statistics on income, life expectancy, or numerous other variables would collapse like a house of cards.

At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful.

One of the most central—and most controversial—premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by "society.

Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.

The welfare state contributes to this disparity by (1) reducing the need for people at the bottom to earn income and (2) by penalizing their earning of income, since higher income leads to a reduction in eligibility for government benefits.

The fact that work is cheaper in Dubai than in Japan is not just a fluke. Work is more productive in richer countries. That is one of the reasons these countries are generally more prosperous. Selling used equipment from rich countries to poor countries can be an efficient way to handle the situation for both types of countries.

Piketty's crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions.

Geography is not egalitarian.

With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.

Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it. Nor is human

Here the poor are a means to an end. These kinds of leftists show remarkably little interest in the creation of wealth, which has raised living standards for the poor, as compared to their obsession with redistribution, which has not. These kinds of leftists concentrate on inequalities that can be dealt with by turning money and power over to people like themselves. These kinds of leftists will never desert the cause that serves them so well, no matter how badly it serves others.

If white racism is the cause of lower educational and economic outcomes for black Americans, why are black Nigerians exempt?

when the monetary value of output per capita in Nigeria is less than 2 percent of that in the United States-and in Tanzania less than 1 percent°~-that clearly cannot all be due to exchange rates.

As world prices fell during the Great Depression, the poll tax imposed on Africans remained the same in money terms, which is to say, it increased in real terms. To ensure the payment of this tax, the colonial official pressured African farmers into growing larger export crops, even at the expense of food. Thus Africans had to depend on government famine relief when local food crops were disappointing.

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, The world has never been a level playing field.

Not only were the Ibos a poorer group from a less fertile region of Nigeria, those who migrated to the northern region were treated as outsiders and forced to live in separate residential areas, and to send their children to separate schools, by order of the local

The dire poverty of the early nineteenth century Irish may be indicated by their average life expectancy of 19 years-compared to 36 years for contemporary American slaves-and the fact that slaves in the United States typically lived in houses a little larger than the unventilated huts of the Irish and slept on mattresses, while the Irish slept in piles of

Many rubber estates kept records of the daily output of each tapper, and distinguished between the output of Chinese and Indian workers. The output of the Chinese was usually more than double that of the Indians, with all of them using the same simple equipment of tapping knife, latex cup and latex bucket. There were similar or even wider differences between Chinese, Indian and Malay smallholders. .

In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally. Fernand Braudel

For it is thrilling to be aligned with the victor, to be held up like a prize, exalted and desired, while the weak are left to gesture in the dirt.

Just 'cause she's farting through silk doesn't mean she can shit on people who don't have any money.

Stopping at a red light, Chris picks up his Bible and turns to the Old Testament book of Amos. "Here, for instance, in chapter five, the prophet says, 'You, Israel, you were supposed to take care of the poor and you're not doing it,' " Chris says. " 'You're using power and wealth to tilt the system in your favor.

In America today, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the financial pathways that lead from the public coffers to mega-preachers' lives of bounty.