Socioeconomic Factors Quotes

The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.

The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.

The greatest of all contraceptives is affluence.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

Students coming from father-present families score higher in math and science even when they come from weaker schools.

We're facing a crisis that we have not provoked, yet we are the main victims of the greatest crisis since the 1930s. It's not been generated by factors external to the system, but by factors that are of the very essence of the system: exacerbated individualism, deregulation, competition, and so on.

East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as "an inner city without an outer city"-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.

I can't name a single issue with roots in race that doesn't have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn't have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them out and choose one is a con.

Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.

Individual effort is almost relatively impossible to cope with the big problem of poverty as we see it.

If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

I think we are making a mistake, a very big mistake if we look at what we call the Arab Awakening only by looking at the whole dynamics in political and not in economic terms.

No one can prevent hurricanes, but prosperous communities are much better able to withstand them than poor ones.

Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is about jobs and employment, education, the environment, and all of those things that go into making us healthy.

It is more difficult to fight poverty in a rich country than in a poor one.

One wonders whether the ethnic categorization effort at finding solutions to problems that cross ethnic boundaries. Poverty is poverty is poverty. It does not have peculiar ethnic characteristics.

Beauty is . . . a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense.

Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy

Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair and hopelessness, where people see no future

When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

If your economy grows [by] 4 percent, you ought to reduce child mortality 4 percent.