Quotes About Inequality

whenever there are some people calling for the elimination of the class that lives by collecting interest, there will be others to object that this will destroy the livelihood of widows and pensioners.

If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves.

The effect, though, is that American imperial power is based on a debt that will never—can never—be repaid.

The first thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning.

Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melts away into the background.

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

the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like 'inequality' sounds like it's practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It's possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it's not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean.

the economists' insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.

In fact, the terms 'equality' and 'inequality' only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe's discoveries in the New World.

It's those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong

Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity's original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state fo pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our 'complexity' and our enslavement. How did this ambivalent story of civilization come about?

The term 'inequality' is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others' suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

A wage-labor contract is, ostensibly, a free contract between equals—but an agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they won't be equals any more.

the factors that people actually object to about such 'unequal' social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth.

Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind

As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

Our civilization overflows with charity—which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of real help—just wages for honest labor—there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. She

Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century.

One percent of the population ruled—and they were all grafters—while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.

Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.

Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.

This translates into a hypothesis about actually existing capitalism: that the more it is structured and organized according to this utopian liberal or neoliberal vision, the greater the class inequalities. And there is, it goes without saying, plenty of evidence to support the view that the rhetoric of free markets and free trade and their supposed universal benefits to which we have been subjected these past thirty years have produced exactly the result that Marx would expect: