Wildland Quotes

“On a per-capita basis, Americans from small towns were more than twice as likely to die at war in the years after September 11 than Americans in big cities were.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“Over the centuries, Americans have tacked between sanctifying the individual and celebrating community, between self-interest and social obligation, between the imagined ideals of the lone cowboy on the frontier and of the wagon train that relies on mutual aid. Alexis de Tocqueville took note of that tension and saw their coexistence as an American talent, which he called “self-interest rightly understood.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“Winston Churchill, who said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“the United States entered the twenty-first century with more prisoners than farmers.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“Americans had been attacked more than twice as many times by far-right terrorists as they had by Islamic terrorists, yet when researchers in 2016 asked people to estimate the share of Muslims in the country, Americans, on average, estimated one in six. The real number was one in a hundred.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“As I traveled between Clarksburg and Chicago in that year of election, I was sometimes struck that, for all their differences, Black Chicagoans and white Appalachians had come to share a sensation that was calcifying in America’s political culture—a feeling of being trapped by an undertow of economics and history, of being ill-served by institutions, of being estranged from a political machinery that was refined, above all, to serve itself.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In 1965, the CEO of an average large public company earned about 20 times as much as a frontline worker. By 2019, that figure was 278 times as much.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In 2013, the average white family in Washington was eighty-one times richer than the average Black family.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In 2013, the Stanford economist Raj Chetty unveiled a detailed map of opportunity that showed how the course of a person’s life was sharply defined by the zip codes in which they happened to grow up. In Salt Lake City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that. Such a lopsided distribution of wealth was actually hurting the long-term growth of the economy.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“As George Bernard Shaw put it in 1922, a man snatches bread “from the baker’s counter” and goes to jail; but if he “snatches bread from the table of hundreds of widows and orphans and similar credulous souls … he is run into Parliament.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In 1982, Wall Street had taken home 6 percent of America’s corporate profits. In 2017, it took home 23 percent. With so much money going to trading and bonuses, banks spent far less on lending to create new jobs and businesses. Between 1978 and 2012, the percentage of American businesses that qualified as new declined by 44 percent, according to an analysis of census data. In all, the stock-option revolution transformed corporate behavior so radically that Michael Jensen, the professor who launched it, eventually lamented that it had become, as he put it, “managerial heroin.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“1982, shortly after John Shad, a banker who was inspired by the Chicago economists, became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, he loosened a limit that had been in place since the 1930s, which prevented companies from boosting their stock price by buying stock off the open market. Shad instituted esoteric-sounding Rule 10b-18, which cleared the way for stock “buybacks.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“like training and wages. And inequality has exploded.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“in 1969, the stock exchange, pressured by firms that wanted to grow and modernize, scrapped the requirement for partnerships, and the banks began a transformation. Over the next thirty years, all the largest banks in America went public, which eliminated the old restraint on risk by unlocking vast stores of other people’s money.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“But in McDonnell’s fall, one could see a test of the fragile boundary between the conduct that sends a man to jail and the behavior that helps him get reelected. McDonnell faced prison for promoting a nutritional supplement in return for gifts, while members of Congress were legally entitled to accept tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from the nutritional-and-dietary-supplement industry.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“The root of the problem, in Lessig’s view, lay in the tendency of powerful Americans to make quiet compromises every day, shrugging off destructive behavior and gradually corrupting the core institutions in economic, social, and political life.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“documented, with precision, that donors and companies who made contributions to members of Congress effectively purchased greater access to them.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“For all the pride and inspiration wrapped up in notions of the American Dream, the World Bank had calculated that, by 2018, the United States had a lower level of intergenerational mobility than China.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“By the 2010s, the share of income held by the top 1 percent was the largest it had been since 1928. In the CIA’s measurements of income inequality, America’s disparities were akin to those in Kenya and Iran. The effects of such dramatic inequality were manifest”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“If the trend continued, he wrote, it would “allow the big winners to feed their pets better than the losers can feed their children.” In the next three decades, from 1979 to 2009, the average worker’s pay rose by just 8 percent.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In the intervening decades, American unity had given way to bitter rivalries - and a contempt for leaders and their institutions, who had marched the country into Iraq and the Great Recession. Older workers had been gutted by debt, and younger people would never make up for the years of lost earnings. As Americans hunted for the origins of their pain they carved themselves up into rival tribes - Republicans and Democrats; city-dwellers and country people; white, Black, Latino, and Asian; Christian, Muslim, and Jewish; and centrally, those will college degrees and those without - the winners and losers of the meritocratic hustle.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“It's not as simple as "this guy is with us on everything - or he's not!" she said. "I think the left imagines that in order for us to make progress, everyone has to agree about everything. I don't think that's true. I think in order to make progress we have to build alignment around things that we want to advance, and let there be complexity - and move forward, anyhow." -Katey Lauer in Wildland”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In all, just 158 American families had donated half of all the money to candidates on the ballot [in the 2016 election].”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“You've got your CEOs pulling four hundred or five hundred times what the American man does. Is there any man worth four hundred or five hundred other men? I've never met one. Have you?" -David Efaw in Wildland”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“After residents had secured the major markers of wealth - the home, the right schools, the serenity of private aviation - they turned their attention to the real game in town: the refining of advantage, the expansion of the margins, the hedging against trouble, real and imagined. If you knew where to look you could hone every edge of your life - from your life expectancy to your tax avoidance to your child's performance on the SATs. You could, in other words, make sure that the winners keep winning.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“In 2012, super PACs spent a billion dollars; 73 percent of the money came from just a hundred people.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“The country was entering one of the most rapid diversifications in history. In the 1970s, about 5 percent of the people in America had been born abroad; by 2018, that figure was 14 percent, nearly surpassing the record set in 1890, when 15 percent of the population had been born abroad.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“Research showed that, as early as preschool, an atmosphere of danger imposed a level of background stress that hampered verbal development by the equivalent of a full year of schooling.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

“writing honestly about a place—any place—means writing about power, who has it and who does not, and what some people will do to get it or deprive others of it.”
― Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury