Michael Lewis Quotes

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

Poor people always pay back their loans. [...] It is us, the designers of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.

The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.

The way to turn our economy around is not by making rich people poorer, it's by making poor people richer.

I have committed my life to helping the poor, and I believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart's lead in providing opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans battling poverty would realize the American dream.

Ten years ago I said, you know, my goal is to be able to get food on the table. What I'm trying to say by that is trying to create a vibrant, capable and effective middle class. The quicker and stronger that we can be able to do this, the easier it is for political reform to move forward.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

We are one of the richest countries in the world, and there is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to live in poverty.

Before the arrival of the Credit Union, people who were from the poor background or a working class background couldn't borrow from banks.

You must not embark on programs to curb economic growth without placing a priority on maintaining income, so that the poorest people won’t simply be further depressed in their condition but will have a share, and be able to live decently.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

I'm not sure there's another way to help move more people out of poverty than to raise the minimum wage.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

A lot of the people that are poor take advantage of loopholes and pay no taxes.

We need a better strategy for poor people...because what we're doing isn't working.

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.

The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth.

A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.

When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth, giving opportunities to other people, it's only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.

It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence.

In a world of massive wealth and income inequality, Europe must support Greece’s efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.

In this country, people are concerned about their economic future. They're very concerned about it. And they wonder whether somebody is getting something to - keeping them from getting it. That's not the America that I've ever known.

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.