A Quote by Noam Chomsky

Through much of its history, the US did not have high inequality as compared with Europe. Less so, in fact. That began to change in the industrial age, reaching a peak in 1928, after the forceful destruction of the labor movement and crushing of independent thought. Largely as a result of labor mobilization, inequality declined during the Great Depression, a tendency continuing through the great growth period of regulated capitalism in the early postwar decades.

Noam Chomsky

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After Age Began Capitalism Change Compared Continuing Decades Depression Destruction Did Early Europe Fact Forceful Great Great Depression Growth High History In Fact Independent Independent Thought Industrial Inequality Labor Labor Movement Largely Less Mobilization Movement Much Peak Period Reaching Result Tendency Thought Through Us

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Noam Chomsky
American - Activist
Born: December 7, 1928

What we've undergone in recent decades worldwide has been totally insane, and all of this is a result of capitalism. The workforce in Latin America was treated as a vulgar instrument for capital accumulation. Mechanisms of exploitation were imposed, such as outsourcing, labor mediation, and the like.The results are plain to see: greater inequality in Latin America; unemployment is higher than in previous decades; we haven't resolved the problem of poverty; we've lost a great deal of sovereignty.

Rafael Correa

Capitalism is a system that's ultimately predicated on and depends on some form of inequality. Feminism has always intersected with capitalism in terms of women's labor and gendered divisions of labor.

Andi Zeisler

History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We're living through an era of higher income inequality than the country has experienced since before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, most people are running in place, and those in the bottom quintile of the economy are being swept backward year in and year out. A worker with a high school education today is likely to earn less in real terms than did their parents and grandparents in the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, while overall life expectancy is increasing in America, for those with low levels of education it's actually declining.

Sasha Abramsky

Through private investment capitalism kept raising the productivity of labor to new heights. Parents were able to earn enough so their offspring did not have to join the work force at an early age. This produced something unique in history: Childhood, a time when the young could experience the innocence of play and opportunity of schooling before entering the world of work.

Richard Ebeling

In less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement! The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason to believe we are done?

Holly Near

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

Angela Davis

I was at the World Bank and a commission reviewed our work on inequality for the U.S. Congress or somebody, and the head of the commission said to us: "You are spending taxpayer money to study issues like inequality? Which goes directly against capitalism and growth." That was the perception, that it should not be studied.

Branko Milanovic

The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system.

Milton Friedman

This kind of inequality - a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression - hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling...it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity... That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars he made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

Barack Obama

Labor, no matter how inexpensive, will become a less important asset for growth and employment expansion, with labor-intensive, process-oriented manufacturing becoming a less effective way for early-stage developing countries to enter the global economy.

Michael Spence

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

Angela Davis

In the Great Depression, employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial polices changed.

Edward C. Prescott

What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?

Thomas Piketty

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.

Felix Schelling

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

Thomas Piketty

A Quote by Noam Chomsky

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