Quotes About Socioeconomic

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

I often say that poverty needs no passport to travel.

I always considered myself working class, because I was brought up on a council estate. I still do, really. I mean, I might have a bit more money now than I did then, but it's in your head, class, I think. It's how you feel in there.

It's not enough to tackle just the symptoms of poverty. You have to tackle the causes of poverty.

Economic development and poverty alleviation are so complicated that I don't think there's a single background or a single discipline that is sufficient to tackle these great human problems.

My perspective is never gonna change on that... We've got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods, send them to bad schools, and say, 'Good luck in life.' That's just not right.

People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

The challenge is more difficult because low-income African Americans today confront not only segregation but also the income stagnation and blocked mobility faced by all Americans in families with low or moderate incomes.

The existence of black ghettos is a visible reminder of our inequalities and history, a reminder whose implications are so uncomfortable that we find ways to avoid them.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren't you almost certain to become a proletarian too?

C.H. Douglas presented a graph to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 showing that as the interest rate rises, the suicide rate rises; as the interest rate drops, the suicide rate drops. His graph was from 1812 to 1932. Psychologists who don't think about factors like that are ignoring the context of their own science.

In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.

Our contemporary public debate recognizes this problem but assumes it is largely a "schools problem." On the contrary, we have seen that most of the challenges facing poor kids are not caused by schools.

Schooling—unequal as it is in America—plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

there's no denying that rich and poor kids in this country attend vastly different schools nowadays, which seems hard to square with the notion that schools are innocent bystanders in the growing youth class gap.

Parents with less than a high school education endorse obedience over self-reliance, 65 percent to 18 percent, whereas parents with a graduate education make exactly the opposite choice, 70 percent to 19 percent.

we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy.

The achievement gap between children from high income and low income families is roughly 30-40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years ago. The class gap among students entering kindergarten was two to three times higher than the racial gap.

He lived in a mansion, but in a shrunken world.

I'll put it on my table where I keep my drawings, Hassan said. His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.

Most of our neighbors in Fremont were bus drivers, policemen, gas station attendants, and unwed mothers collecting welfare, exactly the sort of blue-collar people who would soon suffocate under the pillow Reganomics pressed to their faces.

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.