Quotes About Socioeconomic

You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

Because a lot of people are hurting economically and being shafted by the very wealthy, it's been possible here in the United States of America to organize them and persuade them that to elect a nincompoop like Donald Trump is actually in their best interest. When clearly it isn't.

Death, disease, and divorce affect wealthy suburbs as well as the inner city.

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

You go to Europe, and they have their very wealthy elites, and then everybody else is, you know, a couple of steps above a peasant, basically.

The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It's just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

The ability to live for five hundred years would be an incredible gift. But I greatly fear it would be a gift only for the wealthy - one that might greatly widen the gap between those with access and those without.

I try to deal with the poverty gap - to do policies for all of us rather than only for the wealthy.

It is a country that professes to care for babies. But in the United States, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries. Premature birth and low birth weight are common ailments, with lifelong and even intergenerational effects.

We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction.

So, when you see a kid with ratty jeans on, wearing sneakers that aren't clean, you know they're in a certain place economically. I was interested in that experience.

What I do know is that liberal Democrat policies in our big cities are not helping anybody, especially our big cities.

Obama's economic policies widened the gap between the rich and the poor.

If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

One big mistake that we made in Delhi is that we made it a low-rise city which means that rich people have nice green colonies while the poor live in dusty areas.

Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world's poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor.

Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

The more time I spent in developing countries, and the more time I spent talking to poor people, I realized what they want more than anything is a good job.

Poor people can't cut their emissions - they don't make them.

If the country's poorer, it's got less money.