Quotes About Inequality

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the "mudsill" class necessary to support every society.

Populism and elitism are the same thing. They are class prejudices, crude class prejudices that so-and-so, because they are uneducated, is less worthy, or so-and-so, because they are richer or more educated, is unworthy.

Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah ' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

the strongest predictor of students' success is related to their social circumstances. The social, intellectual, and fiscal resources, or "capital," students bring with them into schools, whether charter or traditional, are much more important than the structure of the school or even the quality of the teachers

Increasing global inequalities fueled resistance to Western values. In 1960 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world's population earned about thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent; in 1991 the wealthiest 20 percent earned sixty-one times as much. The successes of the most highly industrialized

as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.

We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Wars between classes might just replace one set of pigs with another, but they had some underlying point to them. Wars between nations, as far as Russell could see, had absolutely none. The

Part of the resistance of Westerners to becoming patrons is that they react negatively to the idea of participating in a society that is basically built on institutionalized inequality.121

Given the shortage of women in California during these early years of white settlement, "a likely young girl" might cost almost double that of a boy, because, as the Marysville Appeal phrased it, girls served the double duty "of labor and of lust.

I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't.

All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.

There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the free market" reflects what they think is useful or important.

It is much the same with the question of inequality. If we ask, not 'what are the origins of social inequality?' but 'what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?' (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Académie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies

Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They're just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it's just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.

In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling they might deserve anything else. This makes it especially difficult for younger people to complain about meaningless employment.

Money is not created to earn money.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds—or rather, where every day it's more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered "economic" and what is "political.

Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe's sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player.

Muslim ethicists did often enjoin merchants to drive a hard bargain with the rich so they could charge less, or pay more, when dealing with the less fortunate.88