Shiva Ayyadurai Quotes

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.

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.

It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

I really do think the things that make our society what it is are under threat. It should be about everyone having the potential to be what they're going to be.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

I was also pained to notice an institution which I certainly did not expect to find in this country – I mean caste. Your rich people are really Brahmins, and your poor people are Sudras.

Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

The financial rewards of economic change have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society.

In India, cast not class … is what counts most in popular life.

We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.

One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.

When people listen to Jay-Z, they're working all day or trying to work and pay their bills, and what they hear is someone who's free. Who doesn't have to worry about the electricity. But all we're taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us, or they're smarter.

If you're looking at a country like India, the basic subsistence in itself creates its own challenges. So I think that lends to a different level of innovation and a different level of entrepreneurship.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.