Socioeconomic Stratification Quotes

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.

I believe our society has fell into a pyramid system where there's people relegated to the bottom of that pyramid and there's people that feel like they're entitled to the top of that pyramid.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.

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.

The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).

The correct relationship between the higher and lower classes, the appropriate mutual interaction between the two is, as such, the true underlying support on which the improvement of the human species rests. The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs; the former are the thinking and designing [ Entwerfende ] part, the latter the executive part.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world's finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.

Everything in Louisiana is about layers. There are layers of race, layers of class, layers of survival, layers of death, and layers of rebirth. To live with these layers is to be a true Louisianian. This state has a depth that is simultaneously beyond words and yet as natural as breathing. How can a place be both other-worldly and completely pedestrian is beyond me; however, Louisiana manages to do it. Louisiana is spooky that way.

I think the identity politics that have been played, particularly the class-warfare version of identity politics that has been played, has put America into a class-based society - more so than at any point in my lifetime.

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.

In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.

The increasing segregation we have in our country geographically and culturally has led to these pretty monolithic views of different classes of people, and because of that, we've lost a certain amount of cultural cohesion.

The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.

In Chicago, integrated neighborhoods do not stay integrated for long.

Remember, the Democrats want illegal migrants as voters. The Democrats need a permanent underclass. Donald Trump is looking at all of this. Every bit of his agenda as aimed at making America great again. It's not just a slogan with him.

Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.

Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.

Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.