Branko Milanovic Quotes

One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

A capitalist is someone who derives a substantial share of his income from his equity in producing companies. On this scale the figures are discouraging. Approximately ninety percent of the capital of this country is owned by five or less percent of the American people.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

The financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households in the U.S. exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.

Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I?

There's a wealth gap that is happening, and that is all over the world, you know? The rich are getting richer and holding a higher percentage of money or wealth that's out there.

If one man in the country could take all the money, what was the use of passing any bills about it?

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

Research suggests that large divisions of income and wealth weaken demand and generate economic imbalances that create instability and undermine growth.

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.

If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do.

We absolutely have to restrain concentrations of wealth in industry from spoiling the situation for everybody.

The combined Gross Domestic Product of forty-eight countries is less than the wealth of the three richest people in the world. Fifteen billionaires have assets greater than the total national income of Africa, south of the Sahara. Thirty-two people own more than the annual income of everyone who lives in South Asia.

No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.

It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few ...

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.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

If, in a country, the wealth is concentrated in the hands of only the few, it cannot witness harmony and stability.

As liberty can never subsist without equality, nor equality be long preserved without an agrarian law, or something like it; so when men’s riches are become immeasurably or surprisingly great, a people, who regard their own security, ought to make a strict enquiry how they came by them, and oblige them to take down their own size, for fear of terrifying the community, or mastering it.

Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.

Since 2009, 95 percent of all gains in the economy went to the top 1 percent. That didn’t leave very much for the rest of us.

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

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.