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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2484e95 | dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who--what was he working for anymore? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 4857e82 | Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| f4e9792 | PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE) It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a, I was lost, in a maze . . . Lysol breezes perfumed the air, I'd been searching for days. I found you, in a cul-de-sac, As bewildered as I-- We touched noses, and suddenly My heart learned how to fly! So, together, we found our way, Shared a pellet, or two . . . Like an evening in some cafe, Wanting nothing, but you . . . Autumn's come, to Pavlovia-a-a, Once again, I'm alone-- Finding sor.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 920d5d4 | Reader, she bit him. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| e3c5f3f | C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1048743 | Thomas Pynchon ("V"): "Everyone has an Antarctic." | its-hold-on-one | Michael Warr | |
| 3f60a72 | All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich. | Affectation | ||
| 0298233 | If our economic system leads to so many people without jobs, or with jobs that do not pay a livable wage, dependent on the government for food, it means that our economic system has not worked in the way it should, and then government has to step in. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 71c019c | Those at the top have managed to design a tax system in which they pay less than their fair share--they pay a lower fraction of their income than do those who are much poorer. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 1471c83 | For now, we simply note that the marked reduction in inequality in the period between 1950 and 1970, was due partly to developments in the markets but even more to government policies, such as the increased access to higher education provided by the GI Bill and the highly progressive tax system enacted during World War II. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 9343b77 | In America the share of national income going to the top .01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now--an even bigger slice than the top .01% got in the Gilded Age."9" | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 04b8154 | Affectation hides three times as many virtues as Charity does sins. | Affectation | ||
| e26aa7d | Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics today, as we've seen, suggest otherwise: the chances that a poor or even a middle-class American wi.. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 0d40af9 | The wealth given to the elites and to the bankers seemed to arise out of their ability and willingness to take advantage of others. One | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| e615d8b | especially in the United States, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote." | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 10b25d3 | we have a system that has been working overtime to move money from the bottom and middle to the top, but the system is so inefficient that the gains to the top are far less than the losses to the middle and bottom. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 5c3e631 | The rule of law is supposed to protect the weak against the strong and ensure fair treatment for all. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| c7eb7c0 | The irony is that just as markets started delivering more unequal outcomes, tax policy asked less of the top. The top marginal tax rate was lowered from 70 percent under Carter to 28 percent under Reagan; it went up to 39.6 percent under Clinton and down finally to 35 percent under George W. Bush.54 This reduction was supposed to lead to more work and savings, but it didn't.55 | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| d1240d4 | Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low-income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 5b28f6d | Some thirty years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners received only 12 percent of the nation's income.13 | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 7d1adbc | What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21 | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| a38d66a | over the last three decades those with low wages (in the bottom 90 percent) have seen a growth of only around 15 percent in their wages, while those in the top 1 percent have seen an increase of almost 150 percent and the top 0.1 percent of more than 300 percent.27 Meanwhile, | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 43b23a1 | the six heirs to the Wal-Mart empire command wealth of $69.7 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 2ce11a0 | recent research has shown that by far the largest fraction of personal bankruptcies involve the illness of a family member.38 | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 06a19bd | We are now approaching the level of inequality that marks dysfunctional societies--it is a club that we would distinctly not want to join, including Iran, Jamaica, Uganda, and the Philippines.93 | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 425d336 | In other advanced industrial countries, families don't have to worry about how they will pay the doctor's bill, or whether they can afford to pay for their parent's health care. Access to decent health care is taken as a basic human right. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 9cc571b | Economists have a name for these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 7266be9 | there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 7500302 | as the "good" middle-class jobs--requiring a moderate level of skills, like autoworkers' jobs--seemed to be disappearing relative to those at the bottom, requiring few skills, and those at the top, requiring greater skill levels. Economists refer to this as the "polarization" of the labor force." | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| ae49a6a | The success of an economy can be assessed only by looking at what is happening to the living standards--broadly defined--of most citizens over a sustained period of time. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 1140ac1 | University of California professor Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, and Stefanie Stantcheva of the MIT Department of Economics, carefully taking into account the incentive effects of higher taxation and the societal benefits of reducing inequality, have estimated that the tax rate at the top should be around 70 percent--what it was before President Reagan started his campaign for the rich.68 But | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 936447c | Borrowers were told not to worry about paying the ever-mounting debt, because house prices would keep rising and they could refinance, taking out some of the capital gains to buy a car or pay for a vacation. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 95da61d | Loose money and light regulation were a toxic mixture. It exploded. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| b031785 | Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for schoolchildren, and free health care - including heart surgery - for all. You might suspect that a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 8000ccf | Economists have a name for these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort. (We'll give a fuller definition of the concept of rent seeking | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 4933bd3 | A lot of things went wrong in the nineties, and the footprints of the banks can be found at the scene of one suspicious deed after another. Investment banks are supposed to provide information that leads to a better allocation of resources. Instead, all too often, they trafficked in distorted or inaccurate information, and participated in schemes that helped others distort the information they provided and enriched others at shareholders' e.. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 2d7b3fd | To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| fc8dfdd | The magnitude of the underfunding was astronomical. One study of just the 348 companies in the S&P 500 with defined benefit pension programs concluded that this underfunding amounted to between $184 and $323 billion (if non-pension benefits, such as health benefits, are included, the deficit is in the range of $458 to $638 billion). A Merrill Lynch study showed that companies with off-balance-sheet pension liabilities that exceed their tota.. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 1fa80ca | Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, "I have found a flaw." Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it wasn't working." "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan said." | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 820321f | there is always a worry that voters will be attracted to populists and extremists who attack the establishment that has created this unfair system21 and who make unrealistic promises of change. Distrust, | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 642c32d | The most important "endowment," from our perspective, is a society's learning capacities (which in turn is affected by the knowledge that it has; its knowledge about learning itself; and its knowledge about its own learning capacities)," | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| e94cd6e | Already, data showed that the American dream of rags to riches, the Horatio Alger story, was largely a myth. Economic mobility was extremely limited. The abolition of the estate tax could solidify these changes, creating a new "class" society, based not on ancient nobility as in Europe, but on the bonanza of the Roaring Nineties. The" | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 0083421 | The abolition occurred just as it became clear that much of the wealth that had been seemingly created in the Roaring Nineties was nothing more than a phantasm, that much of the wealth was "stolen" property, acquired through misleading accounting and tax scams, in an economy where corporate governance had failed, and failed badly. But for the lucky few who had cashed in, there was the basis to found a new set of dynasties. At least the rail.. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 3a54b30 | Most importantly, it became clear that the name "free trade agreement" was itself a matter of deceptive advertising: it was really a managed trade agreement, managed especially for special corporate interests, particularly in the United States." | Joseph E. Stiglitz |