Quotes About Wealth

Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.

Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.

The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital

Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world's population have decided to give up on the pretense that "progress" or "development" or "prosperity" can be achieved for all eight billion of the world's people.

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet's wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world's wealth. For them it wasn't so bad.

capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid

The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made

when you are a small minority and you own the majority's wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration.

the name for a certain kind of fiscal decapitation is called taking a haircut, which clarifies just how minor and even trivial are most of the financial limitations on wealth that get considered in the neoliberal hegemony.

Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent. And

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility

Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s.

We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money.

What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one's options, and reduce one's freedom. One became a servant of one's wealth or power, constrained to spend all one's time protecting it.

the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it's another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes.

Era como si todos los ideales y los valores se fundieran bajo el peso del dinero, disolvente universal. Dinero, dinero, dinero. La falsa fungibilidad del dinero, la idea de que se puede comprar el sentido, o la vida.

But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs—in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.

And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time

Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise.

There was scientifically supported evidence to show that if the Earth's available resources were divided up equally among all eight billion humans, everyone would be fine. They would all be at adequacy, and the scientific evidence very robustly supported the contention that people living at adequacy, and confident they would stay there (a crucial point), were healthier and thus happier than rich people.