Stephanie Coontz Quotes

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.

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

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

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

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

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

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.

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

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

If you look at European societies since the financial crisis began in 2008, with very, very few exceptions, the differences between rich and poor have increased, and sometimes hugely.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

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.

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

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.