Quotes About Income

I'd like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don't see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren't doing it, or (c) that they aren't getting paid for it.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to decrease other gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses full of servants, wore elaborately uncomfortable clothes, and travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of horses which themselves required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person.

open immigration can't exist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure healthcare and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

But public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the rich. One recent poll even found that 45 percent of self-identified Republicans support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion of a top rate of 70 percent.

Krugman calculation" that 70 percent of the rise in average family income has gone to the top 1 percent of families.

Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent.

The basic proposition that the "Krugman calculation" was meant to convey is that income inequality has been increasing so rapidly that most families have failed to get much benefit out of long-term growth. This proposition stands. One need not take seriously the efforts by supply-siders to chop the past fifteen years into little slices, and claim the good ones while disclaiming the bad ones.

Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent. That divergence was politics, pure and simple.

The answer is quite startling: 70 percent of the rise in average family income went to the top 1 percent.

Maintaining a positive cash flow (more money coming in than going out) helps you increase your net worth.

You can work hard here and still earn very little.

Families are only a means of exploitation,' he declared. 'Parents treat children as capital assests and children wait for parents to die so that they will have an unearned income.' 'So children spy on fathers,' Mercy put in, 'and sons are sent far from their parents--' 'That the young may not inherit the prejudices of the old.

My body is my art, and it's also the tool that I use to make money.

My first job in construction paid my way through art school. I was building to pay my bills.

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

I always had a fairly decent income, coming in just from the art.

Designers and free lance artists and editors can set their hourly rates by dividing their annual income needs by 1000.

The overall objective—net zero carbon by 2050—is a daunting ambition. How daunting is underscored by the estimate that, for Europe to achieve its target, per capita emissions will have to decline to the level of India, where the per capita income is about $2,000 a year, compared to Europe's $38,000.

In 2018, there were 867 cars for every thousand people in the United States, 520 in the European Union. Compare that to the 339 in Russia, the 208 in Brazil, the 160 in China—and just 37 in India. In other words, the world's auto population will grow substantially as incomes rise and the number of people increases from today's 7.8 billion to 9.5 or 10 billion.

She made a respectable living now

Economic institutions that create incentives for economic progress may simultaneously redistribute income and power in such a way that a predatory dictator and others with political power may become worse off.

Conflict over income and power, and indirectly over institutions, is a constant in all societies. This conflict often has a contingent outcome, even if the playing field over which it transpires is not level. The outcome of this conflict leads to institutional drift. But this is not necessarily a cumulative process. It does not imply that the small differences that emerge at some point will necessarily become larger over time.