Quotes About Inequality

Never has the chasm between progress and poverty been so hauntingly large in this country as it is today. We are in the clutches of an economic depression so carnivorous and insatiable, it's eating the very fabric of our lives. We are sacrificing our children to it, our future. And no one, it seems, is listening.

We cannot allow the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. How can we call ourselves the land of the free when people are living on the streets and dying of hunger?

the wrong skin color. Sadly, that ugliness was a part of life

They passed a small dark-haired woman wearing spectacles who paced as she dictated to another woman, who was typing. "We cannot allow the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. How can we call ourselves the land of the free when people are living on the streets and dying of hunger? Radical change requires radical methods…

All my life I've been told to make no noise, don't want too much, be grateful for any scrap that came my way. And I've done that. I thought if I just did what women are supposed to do and played by the rules, it would Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I don't know Ã¢â'¬Â¦ change. But the way we're treated…" "It's unfair," he said. "It's wrong," she said.

Big growers helped elect FDR. He's beholden to them. Ever wonder why his policies help almost all workers except farmworkers? I want to make it better.

MIT economist David Autor has written, "but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution

MIT economist David Autor has written, "but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution, not scarcity.

For Greenspan, however, the problem isn't extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor.

the choice isn't between automation and non-automation," says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. "It's between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.

If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn't just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger.

averages: a few times I've been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person's net worth in those rooms

A note on averages: a few times I've been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person's net worth in those rooms was nearly $1 billion.

From the 1940s through the '70s—when our richest citizens were paying rates of 70 and 80 and 90 percent on the millionth dollars they earned each year—U.S. productivity and GDP per person and median household income after inflation all doubled.

As the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity; economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that's a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.

Of all American workers making less than $40,000 a year, one in eight are bound by noncompete agreements.

States without any legal minimum wage, or with one below the federal minimum, are Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America's lowest-paid workers.

more than half of all houses in Mexico City are located in unhealthy, unsafe areas.

If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.

In all conditions of life a poor man is a near neighbor to an honest one, and a rich man is as little removed from a knave.

The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

Race, it turns out, is above all a politically useful fiction.