The 9.9 Percent Quotes

“class does not make people smarter; it produces a small group of people who are deluded about the sources of their good fortune and a large group of people who are deceived about the sources of their misfortune.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The free market crowd monetizes the destruction of families and then shares some of the wealth with the holy rollers, who convert the resulting gender rage into their own political power, which they share back with their unlikely partners. It’s a win-win for everybody”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“who are deceived about the sources of their misfortune. All of this follows in a deductive way from the fact that all humans belong to the class of humans, which alone can provide the basis for rational”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“Market" is not the opposite of "regulation" or "government" any more than "swim meet" is the opposite of "swimming pool." Every market needs its rules, these rules necessarily come from outside the market itself, and they aren't always written down.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The human beings I know are mostly wonderful people, but they often fail to distinguish clearly between what they worked for and the good things that came their way. They also are not so good at seeing the difference between the character flaws of other people and bad things that happen to them.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“If wealth were the creation of individuals alone - even if it were the result of their ability to cheat and steal from one another - it would fall to earth in the shape of a bell curve. It would not land in the form of an insane ski slope.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“If individual merit considered in isolation were the source of wealth, then excluding more than half of the population from realizing their potential on account of their sex or skin color would be like sabotaging more than half of all factories or making more than half of all homes uninhabitable.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The lead partners of consulting firms, by the way, understand this self-subordination thing well. They are well into the “meta” level of this particular development in organizational psychology. To paraphrase a comment passed along from Roland Berger, a McKinsey alumnus who built up his own large consulting firm, consulting is really a branch of the lemonade business. You find anxious overachievers and bring them in with what they think is a lot of money and a few tokens of prestige. Then you squeeze them like lemons and toss out the rinds.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The rise of the 9.9 percent, I argue, accounts for the paradox of a nation where well-toned abs are an obsession even while pre-existing conditions multiply at pandemic levels, where billionaires look like fitness trainers while the average life expectancy declines. It is the fundamental reason why the nation with the most expensive health care system in the known universe is among the least able to protect its public health. Inequality disrupts progress by distorting our ideas about the only kind of well-being that actually matters, or about actual human prosperity.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“Disease and death directly attributable to massive health care policy failure was and remains a far more real danger to American lives than any military enemy.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“And self-delusion in the upper economic reaches of the left risks turning the Democratic Party into a home for an affluent, educated elite that seeks to correct every form of injustice except the inequality”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“This is the life of the mind in the twilight of the meritocracy: cliquish, careerist, and militantly committed to the mere appearance of objectivity.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The unity on the right is in fact prima facie evidence of its duplicity.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The hottest rage of those grieving their whiteness is reserved not for the members of another race but for the members of another social class.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The task of the 9.9 percent is to lubricate the machinery that administers the pain—and then to suggest by example that the 90 percent have a shot at the joining them in a life of ease, if only they would work just a little harder.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“Human beings are not built to function in a radically unequal world.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“Couldn’t everyone see that the point of merit is to hold power accountable, not to supply yet another excuse for unaccountable power?”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“It turns out that maybe breeding bonsai-tree children to become résumé zombies isn’t so good for their mental health.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture