Quotes About Poverty

Poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.

at the helm of the General Board of Health, Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, an ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.

2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.

Chris Rock observed, "This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.

Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.

Ending extreme poverty for all people everywhere! May I live to see the day. (Not even Jesus was that optimistic: he told a supplicant, "The poor you will always have with you.")

Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened

Poverty has no causes," wrote the economist Peter Bauer. "Wealth has causes.

Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world's wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy.

Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief. It's not just that they had less to spend in absolute terms; they spent a smaller proportion of their wealth. (2010s USA would be considered uber-socialist to 1960s USA).

The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty.

Quienes condenan a las modernas sociedades capitalistas por su insensibilidad hacia los pobres probablemente ignoran lo poco que las sociedades precapitalistas del pasado invertían en el alivio de la pobreza.

As impressive as the conquest of infectious disease in Europe and America was, the ongoing progress among the global poor is even more astonishing.

Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief.

Norberg, drawing on Braudel, offers vignettes of this era of misery, when the definition of poverty was simple: "if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor.

how low it has sunk—to 10 percent. In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.

It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.

We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor.

As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.54

Darwin's words, "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.