Quotes About Inequality

BY EVEN A CONSERVATIVE COUNT, there are more than half a million homeless people in America at any one time, including nearly two hundred thousand living on the streets rather than in shelters. Homelessness has increased in the last forty years even as America has become much wealthier, because of a confluence of factors. After World

The United States has about 13 million children living in poverty. Of those, about 2 million may live in "extreme poverty" by global definitions (in households earning less than about $2 per person per day), when looking at their cash incomes. These kids would be considered extremely poor if they lived in Congo or Bangladesh, yet they're here in the United States.

It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his bootstraps. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking

Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done.

lifetime risk of maternal death is one thousand times higher in a poor country than in the West. That should be an international scandal. The gap, moreover, is getting wider.

In the United States, we rely on local property taxes to fund public schools, so rich suburbs enjoy first-rate public schools that are a pipeline to the best universities, and underprivileged children suffer in third-rate schools with, often, the worst teachers.

The problem is that capitalists typically don't know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don't know how to grow it well.

Not since the Great Depression has America experienced the kind of working-class stagnation that we've seen in recent decades, and it has fed polarization, racism and bigotry, gnawing away at our social fabric.

The gains in wealth and income have gone largely to a tiny share of the population, as is common knowledge by now. The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades.

There's a brittleness to life for about 150 million Americans, with a constant risk that sickness, layoffs or a car accident will cause everything to collapse. One in seven Americans lives below the poverty line, a substantially higher rate than in Canada or other OECD countries, and scholars estimate that half of all Americans will at some point slip below the line.

Since the end of the twentieth century, the United States has witnessed an ominous and growing divergence among three trends that should ordinarily move together: wealth, output, and employment.

There is no justice among men.

As if Misfortune made the throne her seat,And none could be unhappy but the great.

their fellow citizens was to deny them free health care, cut the taxes of the wealthy, privatize what few public assets remained and oppose any regulation of a rampant free market that was benefiting the few, rather than the many.

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

a God of ten-year-old boys, a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps. They worship – despite rhetoric about justice and compassion – a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.

You couldn't educate hate out of people who needed someone less than themselves, someone they could point at and measure their lives by. They

Rich people defeat obesity through gene therapy. It's a fairly simple procedure, adjusting the metabolism. Poor people are stuck with diet and exercise.

Instead of looking for explanations for the fact of inequality, anthropologists should look for the explanation for the notion of equality.

The two terms of the democratic alternative today—oppressive bureaucracy or repugnant plutocracy—are canceling each other out. Combining into a single term: opulent bureaucracy. At once repugnant and oppressive.

Egalitarian societies strangle the imagination without even satisfying envy.

We disapprove of capitalism not because it promotes inequality, but because it favors the rise of inferior human types.