Thomas Pogge Quotes

Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.

Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.

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

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.

The lower half of households by wealth held just 3% of wealth in 1989 and only 1% in 2013.

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

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

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

There's not a lot of wealth throughout all the country shared equally.

The Obama economy is great for rich people. It's terrible for everybody else.

Today we hear that the gains from economic growth accrue to the highest-income earners while the standard of living of the poor and middle America stagnates and the gap between the richest and the poorest grows ever wider. That portrait of the country is wrong.

I would say I'm a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, if that contradiction can make sense, because in Bolivia, we have a great problem, which is the inequity of income distribution. The rich aren't that rich, but the poor are very poor.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

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

The real scientific study of the distribution of wealth has, we must confess, scarcely begun. The conventional academic study of the so-called theory of distribution into rent, interest, wages, and profits is only remotely related to the subject. This subject, the causes and cures for the actual distribution of capital and income among real persons, is one of the many now in need of our best efforts as scientific students of society.

There were but two families in the world, Have-much and Have-little.

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

Poverty is not natural; it is man-made

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

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.