Quotes About Inequality

America is the biggest gang in the world.

Pass on the priveleged, piss on the rest.

They were poor thin little undernourished creatures with only a few blue teeth among them, though young: they had been taken up for combining with others to ask for higher wages and sentenced to transportation; but as they were somewhat less criminal than those who had actually made the demand they were allowed to join the Navy instead.

There's something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.

The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one. The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers? Bertolt Brecht, On Violence

Should the frenzied quest for access to power and wealth be regarded as serving a social good simply because those who were historically underrepresented in the past are now filling roles that involve replicating inequality?

Increasingly, what people with AIDS share are not personal or psychological attributes. They do not share culture or language or a certain racial identity. They do not share sexual preference or an absolute income bracket. What they share, rather, is a social position—the bottom rung of the ladder in inegalitarian societies.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich.

Brand is the residue left as the substantive differences between rich and poor evaporate.

Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist.

Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to decrease other gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses full of servants, wore elaborately uncomfortable clothes, and travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of horses which themselves required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person.

Too often, however, tree planting requires taking over land in the South to offset emissions created by a more affluent and industrialized North. In this sense, it is no different from prior colonization visited upon Africa, South America, and Asia over the centuries.

Yet a third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere each year—roughly 8 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Krugman calculation" that 70 percent of the rise in average family income has gone to the top 1 percent of families.

All it takes are a few billionaires willing to spend a small fraction of their wealth supporting politicians, think tanks—or actually "think" tanks—and partisan media willing to spread the tax-cut virus. That's easily enough to keep the zombies lurching along.

And the decline of unions has made a huge difference. Consider the case of trucking, which used to be a good job but now pays a third less than it did in the 1970s, with terrible working conditions. What made the difference? De-unionization was a big part of the story.

To put this in international perspective, Mississippi now is about as poor relative to the coastal states as Sicily is relative to northern Italy.

Incentives aren't the only thing that matter for economic growth. Opportunity is also crucial, and extreme inequality deprives many people of the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and government programs that reduce inequality can make the nation as a whole richer by reducing that waste.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe—and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

The basic proposition that the "Krugman calculation" was meant to convey is that income inequality has been increasing so rapidly that most families have failed to get much benefit out of long-term growth. This proposition stands. One need not take seriously the efforts by supply-siders to chop the past fifteen years into little slices, and claim the good ones while disclaiming the bad ones.

It is important," said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, "to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes"—some of them, he declared, "swollen beyond all healthy limits.