Guy Standing Quotes

Beginning in 1981, when government policies began to undermine the liberal consensus of the previous generation, wealth began to diverge. It is more unevenly distributed than ever before.

Everybody in politics claims to want to get everybody out of poverty. What's the opposite? Wealth. And what is often criticized by the left? Wealth.

I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.

As income from work has become more concentrated in America, the super rich have invested in businesses, real estate, art, and other assets. The income from these assets is now concentrating even faster than income from work.

To see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, 'No, this has to stop.'

We have concentrated wealth and capital to such a degree that the vast majority of us don't have the discretionary dollars to make our economy go and grow.

Thomas Piketty assembles the facts to prove a central point about trickle-down economics: Doesn't work. Never did. He has cold, hard data showing how the rich keep getting richer and how the playing field is rigged against working families.

. As labor becomes a less important factor in production as compared to owning intellectual capital, a majority of citizens may find the value of their labor insufficient to pay for a socially acceptable standard of living. These changes will require a political, rather than a purely economic, response concerning what kind of social safety nets should be in place to protect people from large, structural shifts in the economy. Absent mitigating policies, the beneficiaries of these shifts may be a small group at the upper stratum of the society

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities, we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires. We add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention. Yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.

Tax breaks and other financial breaks that favor the wealthiest among us do not create greater prosperity for all; they simply siphon off more and more money to those who already have it, and more and more money away from those who do not.

The untold secret driving the obstruction to Obama's economic equality agenda is this: The opposition isn't really battling Big Government. The opposition is protecting an economic system that's putting more and more of the earned income out of reach for those aspiring to better themselves.

The problem is that when government controls the economy, those who can influence government keep winning, and everybody else just stays the same.

Barack Obama destroyed the middle class. Whatever you want to say about his rhetoric, the rich got richer, but the poor got poorer, and the middle class got wiped out. That's really what Trump appealed to and inspired in the forgotten man.

Historically, industrial revolutions haven't been kind to poor people. Despite the potential benefits technology can offer, the immediate impact on the lowest-paid members of society has often been negative.

The Obama economy is great for rich people. It's terrible for everybody else.

Misguided economic and tax policies have hampered growth, allowing the rich to become richer while turning the middle class into the working poor.

Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.

The people in Washington are getting rich with our money. Under President Barack Obama, the federal government swelled to record size, and it took more and more of our money to pay for it. Who benefitted? Not Missouri farmers or workers.

Globalization obviously has the potential to be good. That doesn't mean it's good for everybody. There's a very large number of people in India and China who benefited directly from globalization, but it doesn't mean everybody in America benefits from globalization.

The rich did well under Obama's policies; it was the working class that got creamed. This was because the economy just wouldn't grow as it usually does.

In the ideal world, philanthropy should be redundant or at least it should be at the edges, as innovation or risk capital. But it's far from an ideal world; the wealthy are cornering more and more opportunities and resources from this planet. So, the big challenge for philanthropy is... can it engage with the distribution of wealth itself?

The structural changes of globalization and automation that has created concentrated wealth among some people who have had the right skills and the right opportunities has also created extraordinary disruption and havoc among the American middle-class.

Offshoring manufacturing jobs left Americans with fewer high-value-added, well-paid jobs, and the U.S. middle class downsized. Ladders of upward mobility were taken down. Income and wealth distributions worsened.

Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.