Quotes About Inequality

Stella had seen his corduroy jacket and ostrich boots in the Neiman Marcus catalog, and together those two items cost more than her car.

He'll try again. With money to pay lawyers you can do a lot of dodging. That's one of the disadvantages of being poor, you don't dare kill anybody.

Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that's being earned? Do you think that's an accident? It's designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret.

With what? It's no coincidence that it was white male scientists

Así piensa el bogotano. Eso piensa. «Que, salvo mi casa de dos pisos, la ciudad siga siendo una cloaca». «Que todos, menos yo, cojan una neumonía de estas que están arrasando con la ciudad». «Que si finalmente se va a caer Bogotá, hoy lunes 31 de agosto, que entonces se les caiga sólo a ellos».

When you feed hungry people, you are showing mercy. The search for justice begins when you ask why the hungry are hungry.

The upward spiral was checked from the mid-1980s and reversed around 1990. For the last couple of decades, the G7 share has been torqueing downward at a mighty pace. Today it is back to the level that it first attained at the very beginning of the nineteen century.

To put it sharply, reducing the cost of moving goods while the cost of moving ideas remained high was the root cause of the "Great Divergence.

Capitalism – which in its purest form is entrepreneurism even among the poorest of the poor – does work; but those who make money from it should put back into society, not just sit on it as if they are hatching eggs.

Low-income students stuck in schools located in high-poverty areas are surrounded by peers who, because they have had less opportunity, are typically less academically engaged and more likely to act out than those in schools in higher-income neighborhoods.

Capitalism, Marx said, never went beyond those economic models where a few dominate a majority. Capitalism just replaced the dichotomies of master/slave and lord/serf with a new one. A dominating and exploiting minority was still there, but it had a new name: employers.

Socialism is a kind of yearning for a better life than what capitalism permits for most people. Socialist yearnings are as old as capitalism itself, because they are its products.

Richard D. Wolff

2,000 of the richest have more together than the bottom three and a half billion. That's a level of inequality that any system should be deeply ashamed of.

Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit.

The combination of economic inequality and economic segregation is deadly. It reinforces the advantages of those at the top while exacerbating and perpetuating the disadvantages of those at the bottom. Taken together, they shape not just inequality of economic resources, but also a more permanent and dysfunctional inequality of opportunity.

The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society.

You can predict a country's performance on one outcome from a knowledge of others. If – for instance – a country does badly on health, you can predict with some confidence that it will also imprison a larger proportion of its population, have more teenage pregnancies, lower literacy scores, more obesity, worse mental health, and so on. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes.

The truth is that modern inequality exists because democracy is excluded from the economic sphere. It needs therefore to be dealt with by an extension of democracy into the workplace. We need to experiment with every form of economic democracy – employee ownership, producer and consumer co-operatives, employee representatives on company boards and so on.

Studies in the USA often report even larger differences, such as a 28?year difference in life expectancy at age 16 between blacks and whites living in some of the poorest and some of the richest areas

Mariah put something useful in a nutshell when she said: If white person is lazy around here, it is because they have a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it's because they are black.

One would say that, instead of a tendency to equality in human beings, the tendency is to make the most of inequalities, natural or artificial.

The rich are so near the top that their reference group is likely to include people who are poorer that the are, while the poor are so near the bottom that their reference group is likely to include people who are richer than they are. That helps to explain why the rich are on average happier than the poor.

The rights of man are poor things beside the eyes of hungry children. Their hurts are keener than the soreness of injustice.