Angus Deaton Quotes

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

In the United States you have socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor.

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.

We need to recognize that it is growing economic inequality that creates the conditions for hate to fester.

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.