Quotes About Wealth

People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors. If you tell a poor American in a Detroit slum that he has access to much better healthcare than his great-grandparents did a century ago, it is unlikely to cheer him up. Indeed, such talk will sound terribly smug and condescending. 'Why should I compare myself to nineteenth-century factory workers or peasants?

A pirate who loots a Spanish treasure fleet and buries a chest full of glittering coins on the beach of some Caribbean island is not a capitalist.

The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion.7 More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers.

In the Afro-Asian world from which the Spaniards came, the obsession for gold was indeed an epidemic.

Those unable to afford the new miracle treatments – the vast majority of people – will be beside themselves with rage. Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even-handed – that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor will not be comfortable with the thought that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful for ever.

Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today's chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else, but because they have very narrow aims.

Chemists discovered aluminium only in the 1820s, but separating the metal from its ore was extremely difficult and costly. For decades, aluminium was much more expensive than gold. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminium cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold knives and forks.

Dinheiro gera dinheiro, e pobreza gera pobreza. Educação gera educação, e ignorância gera ignorância. Os que foram vítimas da história uma vez tendem a ser vitimados novamente. E aqueles que a história privilegiou tendem a ser privilegiados novamente.

buying more stuff will make us happy, because we saw the capitalist paradise with our own eyes on television.

Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. The social order has been completely transformed, as have politics, daily life and human psychology. But are we happier? Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a new-found contentment? Did the discovery of inexhaustible energy resources open before us inexhaustible stores of bliss?

Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.

when a landlord, a weaver, or a shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants, in order to further increase his profits. The more profits he has, the more assistants he can employ. It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity.

Hammurabi's Code was based on the premise that if the king's subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and acted accordingly, the empire's million inhabitants would be able to cooperate effectively. Their society could then produce enough food for its members, distribute it efficiently, protect itself against its enemies, and expand its territory so as to acquire more wealth and better security.

Cooperation' sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the burgeoning cooperation networks with their precious food surpluses, despairing when the tax collector wiped out an entire year of hard labour with a single stroke of his imperial pen. The famed Roman amphitheatres were often built by slaves so that wealthy and idle Romans

All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse - irrelevance.

In the eighth chapter of its first volume, Smith made the following novel argument: when a landlord, a weaver, or a shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants, in order to further increase his profits.

The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This

What Rwanda earned from an entire year of looting Congolese coltan, the Chinese earn in a single day of peaceful commerce.

Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.

These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples.

Everyone always wants money because everyone else also always wants money,

At first the rebels seemed to play the role of Don Quixote, courageously tilting at invincible windmills. Yet within eighty years the Dutch had not only secured their independence from Spain, but had managed to replace the Spaniards and their Portuguese allies as masters of the ocean highways, build a global Dutch empire, and become the richest state in Europe. The secret of Dutch success was credit. The

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.

Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance.