Thomas Pogge Quotes

The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.

The poorer is a family, the greater is the proportion of the total outgo which must be used for food... The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things being equal, is the best measure of the material standard of living of a population.

When the World Economic Forum was established in 1971, the global population was four billion, of which 50% lived in poverty.

The standard of living of the average American has to decline.

Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?

If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.

While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

And if you look at the reality in the United States, where you have more than 40 million people below the poverty line and 42 million on food stamps, and then you look at poverty around the world, clearly the way we're running the engine of capitalism is not serving us well.

A recession is predominantly for the middle class. Where I come from, the majority of people have always lived in a recession.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

Poorer people tend to watch more television because they can't afford other diversions.

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

One of the biggest challenges facing the globe is the gap that exists in the wealth and standards of living enjoyed by the world's nations.

Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.

Inequality makes everyone unhappy, the poor most of all, and that is well within the remit of the state. More money gives less extra happiness the richer we get, yet we are addicted to earning and spending more every year.

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

We are an impoverished society. It is a poor society indeed that can’t pay for … amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities

Nobody in America lives at the survival level, Most people in the world would love to live the way poor Americans live.

What we're saying is that if you are poor, you can die.

In the developed world, income inequality within the country is the most important determinant of health standards and life expectancy.

He who resides in the less fortunate regions of the Republic and earns a given annual income, but because of his situation has a more restricted enjoyment of it, will pay less than someone earning the same income in the better-off parts of the Republic.

I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.