Ben Fountain Quotes

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

Social mobility is much less today in America than it historically has been, and it is almost as low as England, the lowest of the industrial countries of Europe.

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

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.

Economic growth doesn't mean anything if it leaves people out.

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own - nobody.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

The middle class is not a fact of nature. It is partly the product of social engineering by the government.

America is a young country, with small inequalities of property, and without manufactures. Few people are here dependent on the rich, for every man has an opportunity of becoming rich himself…the people of New England enjoy an equality of condition unknown in any other part of the world.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

Most Americans seem to be stuck in the economic strata to which they were born.

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

Political power is now widely diffused; and whatever may be the evils of democracy, this good has come of it, that it has forced men to open their eyes to the misery of the masses, and to inquire more zealously as to the possibility of a better distribution of wealth.

As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.

Rising inequality has changed family dynamics for all socioeconomic groups.

Labour ministers often look puzzled when reports show that Britain has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world. They just don't get it. They see poverty, inequality, fairness, as all about income. For the past 12 years, they have relied on tax credits to solve this. But tax credits do not solve poverty: they mask it.

Inequality is partly a marker of success.