Quotes About Inequality

Today we are once again living in an era of extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people, with the net worth of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent combined.

What Americans who support "socialism" actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: a market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

The answer is quite startling: 70 percent of the rise in average family income went to the top 1 percent.

Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill—and would create jobs in the process—are also among America's poorest.

Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings.

So I want to propose an alternative: first, we save globalization by ditching neoliberalism; then we save the planet – and rescue ourselves from turmoil and inequality – by moving beyond capitalism itself.

The root cause, simply put, is globalization, and the resulting monopolization of wealth by a global elite.

This whole fucking country's got it great and doesn't even know it. Why? Because the price for having it so great gets paid somewhere else, by somebody else, where you don't have to see it. Out of sight, out of mind. That's the fucking key to the whole shit system. Stay blind, stay deaf.

What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's.

city of twenty-three million. Half of this huge number of chilangos—as the Mexico City dwellers call themselves—are classified as enduring dire poverty, many enjoying extreme wealth, and an estimated fifteen thousand children live on the street.

A recent survey concluded that 55.3 million Mexicans can be described as poor or destitute, this in a population of 127 million.

It was soon clear as we ground through traffic that though Calexico, California, was a small town, Mexicali, on the other side of the thirty-foot fence, was a city of a million people, with an international airport, a large cathedral, a bullring, two museums, hospitals, four universities, a dental school, several public libraries, and industrial areas, sprawling in the desert of Baja

a laboratory of social and economic horror.

Fruit pickers here, lab technicians over there.

saw that a lack of money was not the problem in this country—but it seldom is in the hellholes of the world.

It was a poor town—the meagerly stocked market was proof of that.

there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico's prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms.

The next time you clap on your expensive Bose headphones or fire up your car stereo, you had to consider that they were put together a hundred yards from Arizona by someone living in a hut in the Sonoran Desert

crooked police, cruel soldiers, and a government indifferent to the plight of most citizens.

You can work hard here and still earn very little.

Here we have poor people, but poor because they have no opportunities. It's sad.

sweatshops in Juárez.

a city of poor housing and low spirits, of people living in the hovels Mexicans call jacales—workers' quarters, like plantation housing—and that none of the workers in the Oster factory had in their shack one of the coffee machines they toiled to make.