Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes

I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress.

The War on Poverty did not work because it was a war on shame … a war on the family and a war on God.

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

On our toughest estates, generations pass with the same experience of worklessness and educational failure.

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.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.

There is a triangular relationship between poverty, child labour and illiteracy who have a cause and consequence relationship. We will have to break this vicious circle.

The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

Social inequality kills. It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disease and disease, and cuts short their lives.

It's not an underclass anymore; it's an outer class.

Poor people do not cause poverty. Poverty is thrust upon them.

In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling against nature, ... or by relentless labor; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible...

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

The children of those people [long term unemployed] have less education, earn less, have higher unemployment. The problems are visited upon the children

Austerity policies can ironically end up entrenching the structural problems they were intended to address, as unemployed workers drop out of the workforce altogether and their skills degrade.

The chaos of poverty feeds on itself.

At the core of conservative social policy about race are old ideas that link racial inequality to non-traditional family formation and its attendant culture of poverty.

In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.

Poverty on both a personal and worldwide level is supported by our collective belief in scarcity.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

Heaven be their resource who have no other but the charity of the world, the stock of which, I fear, is no way sufficient for the many great claims which are hourly made upon it.

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.