A Quote by Thomas B. Edsall
America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.
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Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.
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.
Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.
Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.
You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.
In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.
I think I understand the relationships between different people within the company: people who are straightforward employees, people who can impact the bottom line, and people who share in the bottom line. I don't think you can understand inequality in America unless you understand what's driving profitability.
There have always been two theories about inequality. One is that it reflects just deserts. The other is that there are large elements of exploitation and inequality of opportunities. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the increase in inequality is associated with those negative factors. If it were all social contribution, then when the top did better, they would be contributing to everybody's well-being. That trickle-down hasn't happened. We've seen median income, people in the middle, actually worse off than they were 25 years ago.
Most people believe that inequality is rising - and indeed it has been rising for a while in a number of rich countries. And there is lots of talk and realization of this. It's harder to understand that at the same time, you can actually have global inequality going down. Technically speaking, national inequality can increase in every single country and yet global inequality can go down. And why it is going down is because very large, populous, and relatively poor countries like India and China are growing quite fast.
True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.
You have to be as light as you can be and not get weighed down and stuck in your emotion, stuck in your body, stuck in your head. You just want to always be trying to elevate somehow.
In the U.S. when people like me started writing things about inequality, the economic journals had no classification for inequality. I couldn't find where to submit my inequality papers because there was no such topic. There was welfare, there was health issues, there was trade obviously. Finance had hundreds of sub groups.
I like to go to parties if I know who's going to be there, and if it's people I want to be with. I don't just go to go. And I always drive myself, because I hate being stuck places - there's nothing worse that going out and then being stuck!
There are some people who say that they?re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don?t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability?having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.
In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there. We have 300 million poor in India.
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