The Price of Inequality Quotes

“There are two visions of America a half century from now. One is of a society more divided between the haves and the have-nots, a country in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools, and have access to first-rate medical care. Meanwhile, the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education, and in effect rationed health care―they hope and pray they don't get seriously sick. At the bottom are millions of young people alienated and without hope. I have seen that picture in many developing countries; economists have given it a name, a dual economy, two societies living side by side, but hardly knowing each other, hardly imagining what life is like for the other. Whether we will fall to the depths of some countries, where the gates grow higher and the societies split farther and farther apart, I do not know. It is, however, the nightmare towards which we are slowly marching.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.”
― Joseph Stiglitz, The Price Of Inequality

“The facts shouldn’t get in the way of a pleasant fantasy.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The same is true for the market economy: the power of markets is enormous, but they have no inherent moral character. We have to decide how to manage them... For all these reasons, it is plain that markets must be tamed and tempered to make sure they work to the benefit of most citizens. And that has to be done repeatedly, to ensure that they continue to do so.”
― Joseph Stiglitz, The Price Of Inequality

“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Part of the reason for this is that much of America’s inequality is the result of market distortions, with incentives directed not at creating new wealth but at taking it from others.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“In some circumstances, a focus on extrinsic rewards (money) can actually diminish effort. Most (or at least many) teachers enter their profession not because of the money but because of their love for children and their dedication to teaching. The best teachers could have earned far higher incomes if they had gone to banking. It is almost insulting to assume that they are not doing what they can to help their students learn, and that by paying them an extra $500 or $1,500, they would exert greater effort. Indeed, incentive pay can be corrosive: it reminds teachers of how bad their pay is, and those who are led thereby to focus on money may be induced to find a better paying job, leaving behind only those for whom teaching is the only alternative. (Of course, if teachers perceive themselves to be badly paid, that will undermine morale, and that will have adverse incentive effects)”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The U.S. incarceration rate is the world’s highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America’s legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the “rule of law,” but in today’s America the proud claim of “justice for all” is being replaced by the more modest claim of “justice for those who can afford it.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Ensuring that we have a well-informed public citizenry is important for a well-functioning democracy, and that in turn requires an active and diverse media.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The head of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made it perfectly clear: sophisticated investors don’t, or at least shouldn’t, rely on trust. Those who bought the products the banks sold were consenting adults who should have known better.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“it’s easy to get rich by getting a state asset at a deep discount.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Americans all benefit from the physical and institutional infrastructure that has developed from the country’s collective efforts over generations.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“If economic power in a country becomes too unevenly distributed, political consequences will follow. While we typically think of the rule of law as being designed to protect the weak against the strong, and ordinary citizens against the privileged, those with wealth will use their political power to shape the rule of law to provide a framework within which they can exploit others.9”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The success of an economy can be assessed only by looking at what is happening to the living standards—broadly defined—of most citizens over a sustained period of time.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“(a) Recent U.S. income growth primarily occurs at the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (b) As a result there is growing inequality. (c) And those at the bottom and in the middle are actually worse-off today than they were at the beginning of the century. (d) Inequalities in wealth are even greater than inequalities in income. (e) Inequalities are apparent not just in income but in a variety of other variables that reflect standards of living, such as insecurity and health. (f) Life is particularly harsh at the bottom—and the recession made it much worse. (g) There has been a hollowing out of the middle class. (h) There is little income mobility—the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth. (i) And America has more inequality than any other advanced industrialized country, it does less to correct these inequities, and inequality is growing more than in many other countries.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“As we look out at the world, the United States not only has the highest level of inequality among the advanced industrial countries, but the level of its inequality is increasing in absolute terms relative to that in other countries.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“aunque la economía de goteo hacia abajo no funciona, la economía de goteo hacia arriba sí puede funcionar: todo el mundo —incluso los de arriba— podría beneficiarse dando más a los de abajo y a los de en medio.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, El precio de la desigualdad. El 1 % de población tiene lo que el 99 % necesita

“Privatization, of course, is based on yet another myth: that government-run programs must be inefficient, and privatization accordingly must be better. In fact, as we noted in chapter 6, the transaction costs of Social Security and Medicare are much, much lower than those of private-sector firms providing comparable services. This should not come as a surprise. The objective of the private sector is to make profits—for private companies, transactions costs are a good thing; the difference between what they take in and what they pay out is what they want to maximize.31”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The powerful try to frame the discussion in a way that benefits their interests, realizing that, in a democracy, they cannot simply impose their rule on others. In one way or another, they have to “co-opt” the rest of society to advance their agenda. Here”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“What’s worrying is that those in the 1 percent, in attempting to claim for themselves an unjust proportion of the benefits of this system, may be willing to destroy the system itself to hold on to what they have. This”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“It’s expensive to keep 2.3 million people in prison.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The United States was the most unequal of the advanced industrial countries in the mid-1980s, and it has maintained that position.92 In fact, the gap between it and many other countries has increased: from the mid-1980s France, Hungary, and Belgium have seen no significant increase in inequality, while Turkey and Greece have actually seen a decrease in inequality. We are now approaching the level of inequality that marks dysfunctional societies—it is a club that we would distinctly not want to join, including Iran, Jamaica, Uganda, and the Philippines.93 Because we have so much inequality, and”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low-income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint. Perhaps most importantly, there is an absence of hope. In these countries, the poor know that their prospects of emerging from poverty, let along making it to the top, are minuscule. This is not something we should be striving for.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“If our economic system leads to so many people without jobs, or with jobs that do not pay a livable wage, dependent on the government for food, it means that our economic system has not worked in the way it should, and then government has to step in.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“The other vision is of a society where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been narrowed, where there is a sense of shared destiny, a common commitment to opportunity and fairness, where the words “liberty and justice for all” actually mean what they seem to mean, where we take seriously the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which emphasizes the importance not just of civil rights but of economic rights, and not just the rights of property but the economic rights of ordinary citizens. In this vision, we have an increasingly vibrant political system far different from the one in which 80 percent of the young are so alienated that they don’t even bother to vote. I believe that this second vision is the only one that is consistent with our heritage and our values. In it the well-being of our citizens—and even our economic growth, especially if properly measured—will be much higher than what we can achieve if our society remains deeply divided. I believe it is still not too late for this country to change course, and to recover the fundamental principles of fairness and opportunity on which it was founded. Time, however, may be running out. Four years ago there was a moment where most Americans had the audacity to hope. Trends more than a quarter of the century in the making might have been reversed. Instead, they have worsened. Today that hope is flickering.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

“Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.62 Such expenditures are not the hallmarks of a well-performing economy and society. Money that is spent on “security”—protecting lives and property—doesn’t add to well-being; it simply prevents things from getting worse.”
― Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future