Economic Inequality Quotes

“Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.”
― Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism

“The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.”
― Charles Moore

“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It's a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling. Just like their biblical counterparts, they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sometimes acting individually and sometimes in concert with one another, they produced outcomes that to contemporaries often seemed nothing short of apocalyptic. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.”
― Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

“Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But the Negro knows that these two evils have a malignant kinship. He knows this because he has worked in shops that employ him exclusively because the pay is below a living standard. He knows it is not an accident of geography that wage rates in the South are significantly lower than those in the North. He knows that the spotlight recently focused on the growth in the number of women who work is not a phenomenon in Negro life. The average Negro woman has always had to work to help keep her family in food and clothes.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“… our nation's truly critical problems are built into the very structure of the economic and political system; they are not something passing in the night that will go away even when we elect forward-looking leaders and actively pressure them to move in a different direction.”
― Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution

“A CEO shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the janitor is paid. An athlete shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the waterboy is paid. A filmstar shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the crew at the bottom are paid.

I understand if you are not yet civilized enough to flatten the field completely – for you are an infantile species after all. But at the very least, do your best to reduce the gap - that is, if you intend to be human someday.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“It's difficult to cross from one economic class to another. You'll drown in champaigne.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“American society places tremendous importance upon egocentric behavior. Americans are encouraged to set ourselves apart from the group. Whereas in some societies it is an aberration to go against the whole, Americans celebrate the individual over the group. Public schools teach American grade school children that they are the captains of their destiny. American schools and society inculcate schoolchildren to measure their level of success in terms of individual accomplishments. A winner versus loser mentality prevails in American culture. Winners are the recipients of life’s economic awards. We are taught that possessing financial wherewithal will assist us attain exalted social status. Social status in turn allows select people to wield the power of influence. The silent audience consists of the economically deprived, the societal castaways whom we are taught to shun for lacking the temperament to succeed. A strong sense of self not only helps a person survive, but American society keeps score of a person’s economic victories and defeats. Americans measure the intrinsic value of our lives and recognize other people’s status principally in terms of each person’s relative economic resources.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Inclusive and sustainable economic growth can drive progress and generate the means to implement the Sustainable Development Goals.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“What is a just society? For the purposes of this book, I propose the following imperfect definition. A just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. A just society organizes socioeconomic relations, property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth in such a way as to allow its least advantaged members to enjoy the highest possible life conditions. A just society in no way requires absolute uniformity or equality. To the extent that income and wealth inequalities are the result of different aspirations and distinct life choices or permit improvement of the standard of living and expansion of the opportunities available to the disadvantaged, they may be considered just. But this must be demonstrated, not assumed, and this argument cannot be invoked to justify any degree of inequality whatsoever, as it too often is.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“Today, corporate campaigns continue to locate the fight in the economic arena by threatening to disrupt profit making, but not through workers withholding their labor. Instead, a new army of college-educated professional union staff bypass the strike and devise other tactics to attack the employer’s bottom line. New Labor’s over-reliance on corporate campaigns has resulted in a war waged between labor professionals and business elites. Works are no longer essential to their own liberation.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts

“The combination of economic inequality and economic segregation is deadly. It reinforces the advantages of those at the top while exacerbating and perpetuating the disadvantages of those at the bottom. Taken together, they shape not just inequality of economic resources, but also a more permanent and dysfunctional inequality of opportunity.”
― Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It

“It may seem paradoxical that innovation should increase both the share of income of the richest 1 percent (top income inequality) and social mobility. Yet the comparison among different American states suggests that this is indeed the case. For example, if we compare California, currently among the most innovative states in the United States, with Alabama, which is among the least innovative, we find that the share of the state’s total income that goes to the top 1 percent is significantly higher in California than in Alabama. At the same time, social mobility is substantially higher in California than in Alabama.”
― Philippe Aghion, The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations

“The United States incarnates a more cutthroat form of capitalism, while the Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent Germany, are the representatives of a more cuddly capitalism. According to this view, insofar as innovation at the technological frontier relies on strong monetary incentives, the countries that aim for frontier innovation should forgo the goals of insurance and equality: in other words, they should renounce “cuddly capitalism” in favor of a “cutthroat” form of capitalism. As for the countries who choose cuddly capitalism, they would have no alternative but growth by imitation of technologies invented by the frontier countries. The “cuddly” countries provide their citizens with greater equality and insurance, but their growth depends ultimately on the growth of the “cutthroat” countries, which, one might say, work for the benefit of the rest of the world.”
― Philippe Aghion, The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations

“It’s a strange world we live in, some people's trash contains more food than some people's stomach. Things won't change until we renounce all luxury.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Girl Over God: The Novel

“Inequality is much cited for its baleful impacts. In this book, we see inequality as a consequence as much as a cause; if the rich are allowed to enrich themselves through unfair processes that hold down wages, and raise prices, then inequality will certainly rise. But not everyone gets rich that way. Some people invent new tools, drugs, or gadgets, or new ways of doing things, and benefit many, not just themselves. They profit from improving and extending other people’s lives. It is good for great innovators to get rich. Making is not the same as taking. It is not inequality itself that is unfair but rather the process that generates it.”
― Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

“Trying to build a disparity-free economy pursuing revenue is like trying to achieve pregnancy through vasectomy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“Better all head back to the jungle
than some fly in private jets
while others cry of hunger.
Better have no progress whatsoever,
than the rich get richer, and the poor poorer.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“At the same time that the Mayor and City Council acted courageously and progressively in ridding the city of those monuments to a loathsome past, the new regime that removal celebrates, as some skeptics note, rests on commitments to policies that intensify economic inequality on a scale that makes New Orleans one of the most unequal cities in the United States. ... Local government contributes to this deepening inequality through such means as cuts to the public sector, privatization of public goods and services, and support of upward redistribution through shifting public resources from service provision to subsidy for private, rent-intensifying redevelopment (commonly but too ambiguously called "gentrification"). These processes, often summarized as neoliberalization, do not target blacks as blacks, and, as in other cities, coincided with the emergence of black public officialdom in and after the elder Landrieu's mayoralty and continued unabated through thirty-two years of black-led local government between two Landrieus and into the black-led administration that succeeded Mitch.

Both the processes of neoliberalization and racial integration of the city's governing elite accelerated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It may seem ironic because of how the visual imagery of dispossession and displacement after Katrina came universally to signify the persistence of racial injustice, but a generally unrecognized feature of the post-Katrina political landscape is that the city's governing class is now more seamlessly interracial than ever. That is, or should be, an unsurprising outcome four decades after racial transition in local government and the emergence and consolidation of a strong black political and business class, increasingly well incorporated into the structures of governing. It has been encouraged as well by the city's commitment to cultural and heritage tourism, which, as comes through in Mayor Landrieu's remarks on the monuments, is anchored to a discourse of multiculturalism and diversity. And generational succession has brought to prominence cohorts among black and white elites who increasingly have attended the same schools; lived in the same neighborhoods; participated in the same voluntary associations; and share cultural and consumer tastes, worldviews, and political and economic priorities.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“David saw the AI Revolution and online stock trading as potential solutions to the economic challenges faced by Black women and Black men. He genuinely believed that the reparations sought by Black people for the injustices of slavery and other crimes against their humanity are waiting patiently to be claimed in one place: Wall Street.”
― David L. Wadley

“If we cared more about social responsibility than social etiquette, we wouldn't have such drastic paradoxes of disparity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Being charged for basic needs that society already possesses and refuses to give remains the world’s most obvious problem.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“There is no time to question the world. Rent is due. You will drown. The perfect thing about forcing people to pay for their lives is it’s too urgent to wonder why they’re doing it.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Being paid a wage as an employee is essentially like transferring your boss’s money to your landlord.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Exhaustion and being overworked are treated as expected, ordinary experiences. A person’s value is tied to what they produce rather than intrinsic equality. Your very heartbeat is governed by the command: “Produce economic value, or lose access to safety.” That detachment from society quietly teaches us that our existence must first be justified before it can be sustained. Is that not dehumanizing? No singular person is trying to violently hurt or hate you, but we are far from mercy. This is abandonment.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“If (1) no one consents to being born, and (2) basic needs are mandatory, and (3) access to those needs is owned by others and contingent upon labor and money, then we are renting back our own right to remain alive.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“When existence is universal, but the ability to sustain it is not, we are met with a critical failure.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“The world stands on an inconsistent position. It says shelter is a human right, but then charges people for it. Yet why is it that “shelter is a human right” sounds palatable, but “give everyone a free place to live” shocks us? They are the same thing. One isn’t more revolutionary than the other. To say humans deserve free shelter is to mean they should all have it.

The phenomenon here is that the phrase “human right” sounds philanthropic and “free homes” just feels reckless. Ensuring every person on the planet has a free place to live sounds like a science-fiction film, but providing material support to human rights we praise in theory is how promises are practically fulfilled. One of the priority pursuits of society is to do what it promises. What possibly could be more necessary, or more interesting?”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human