Noreena Hertz Quotes

The dirty little secret is that the pool man, who's making $30,000 a year, is subsidizing the million-dollar mortgage for the family whose pool he cleans. No wonder people want to get rid of tax breaks for corporate jets.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

Inequality is on the rise.

America's middle class is getting hammered, and Washington is rigged to work for the big guy.

There is a profound unfairness embedded in the economic system.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

The state grew fat, but the people grew lean.

Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today.

When we see the banks get bailed out with seemingly no consequences while ordinary people pay the price with job and wage cuts through austerity measures, who could blame a person for wondering where the loyalties of their elected leaders really lie?

We need to recognize that it is growing economic inequality that creates the conditions for hate to fester.

'Munmun' happened because the human world's dizzying inequality - of wealth and of power - had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.

After years of globalisation, disaffected populations have lost confidence that the system is fair.

I think, unfortunately, we've always lived in a world of massive inequality: inequality between the haves and the have-nots, inequality between men and women that not only exists temporally but geographically as well.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

It's morally wrong, and economically self-defeating, that so much wealth flows upwards towards the richest of Americans, while millions work full time but still can't provide for their families.

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America's wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.