Quotes About Inequality

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

most people since the dawn of human time have been simply programmed by their birth to a short and brutish life that is not shaped by them or anyone else.

The measure of a country's prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.

Junk Economics is the cover story for all this. Claiming to be scientific, it is sponsored by financial interests to redistribute income and wealth upward, reversing the policies urged by the 19th-century classical economists and Progressive Era reformers. Instead of progressive taxation, this ideology advocates shifting taxes off the One Percent onto the 99 Percent.

So we are brought back to the fact that compound interest does not merely increase the flow of income to the rentier One Percent, but also transfers property into its hands.

History of the Great American Fortunes uncovered how many family fortunes were taken from the public domain by colonial land grants, bribery and insider dealing – and how such fortunes quickly take a financial form.

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth.

He recognizes that the inherent tendency of history is for the wealthy to win out and make society increasingly unequal. This argument also has been made by Thomas Piketty and based largely on the inheritance of great fortunes

The wealthy and powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their privilege; the professional classes have figured out how to pass their advantages on to their children, converting the meritocracy into a hereditary aristocracy; colleges that claim to select students on merit give an edge to the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to this complaint, meritocracy is a myth, a distant promise yet to be redeemed.14

If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities

They resented meritocratic elites, experts, and professional classes, who had celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and who seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.

Consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters.

greed that preys on human misery (...)

leaving poor whites without "the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were.

What matters for a meritocracy is that everyone has an equal chance to climb the ladder of success; it has nothing to say about how far apart the rungs on the ladder should be. The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.

Frank's mention of a "moral judgment handed down by the successful" touched on something important. Encouraging more people to go to college is a good thing. Making college more accessible to those of modest means is even better. But as a solution to inequality and the plight of workers who lost out in the decades of globalization, the single-minded focus on education had a damaging side effect: eroding the social esteem accorded those who had not gone to college.

Tone-deaf to the mounting resentments of those who had not shared in the bounty of globalization, they missed the mood of discontent. The populist backlash caught them by surprise.

Of those born poor in America, few make it to the top. In fact, most do not even make it to the middle class.

C??ng b?c là d?u hi?u ch? không ph?i ngu?n g?c c?a b?t công.

The "less educated are seen as responsible and blameworthy for their situation, even by the less-educated themselves.

al igual que ocurrió con el triunfo del Brexit en Reino Unido, la elección de Donald Trump en 2016 fue una airada condena a décadas de desigualdad en aumento y de extensión de una versión de la globalización que beneficia a quienes ya están en la cima pero deja a los ciudadanos corrientes sumidos en una sensación de desamparo.

The United States, we tell ourselves, can afford to worry less about inequality than the class-bound societies of Europe because here, it is possible to rise. Seventy percent of Americans believe the poor can make it out of poverty on their own, while only 35 percent of Europeans think so. This faith in mobility may explain why the U.S. has a less-generous welfare state than most major European countries.

de que esos agravios no son solo económicos, sino también morales y culturales; de que no tienen que ver únicamente con los salarios y los puestos de trabajo, sino que atañen asimismo a la estima social.

En una sociedad desigual, quienes aterrizan en la cima quieren creer que su éxito tiene una justificación moral. En una sociedad meritocrática, eso significa que los ganadores deben creer que se han «ganado» el éxito gracias a su propio talento y esfuerzo.