David Korten Quotes

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

The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.

You've got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right.

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 matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

Elvis Presley's estate is making 30 million a year, and they say that Marley shouldn't be, but he is from a much poorer part of the world, and a lot more people need the money.

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

Our family's fortune is growing faster than ever. We're a part of a small number of American families that own most of the country's wealth. But having so much in the hands of so few can't be good for America.

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

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers

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

Welfare for the wealthy simply can no longer be afforded.

The top 1 percent in the state increased its share of the income from 10 to 22 percent. The bottom 80 percent of the state is declining. That’s just a fairness fact.

The superrich have grown worldwide. But America is at the head of the pack.

By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.

The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.

Wealth is used to entrench inequality, not to trickle down and solve it.

Wealth inequality has increased.

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

1% of the population has all the money and the other 99% have nothing.

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.

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.

Let some people get rich first.

In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer.