Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Thomas Pogge

Quote by Thomas Pogge

“The bottom half of humanity is living in severe poverty; not all of them are malnourished or severely deprived now, but they are extremely vulnerable to even small upsets in their income or in the prices they face of basic necessities, and when something like this happens, they can be thrown off kilter in terms of a disease of a family member or a change in food prices; anything like that can throw them into destitution.”

Quote by Thomas Pogge

Create image

Author

Thomas Pogge
Thomas Pogge

Thomas Pogge is a German-born American philosopher known for his contributions to ethics and political philosophy. His research focuses on issues of global justice, poverty, and inequality, particularly concerning human rights in developing countries. more

You May Also Like

“The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.”

PeopleWorldGivingHumansThreePovertyFiveHugePercentBottomAveragePopulationNineIncomeInequalityThirtyQuartersHouseholdAvoidedRatiosHuman Population
Author:Thomas Pogge
Create image

“Over the period from 1988 to 2005, the income share of the top five percent has grown by about 3.5 percent of global household income, and the shares of all the other groups have diminished. The greatest relative reduction was in the bottom quarter, which lost about one third of its share of global household income, declining from 1.155 to 0.775 percent, and now is even more marginalized.”

LostFiveGroupsSharePeriodsPercentThirdsBottomIncomeRelativeQuartersHouseholdReductionMarginalized
Author:Thomas Pogge
Create image

“I see a violation of human rights not in the mere fact that people don't have enough to eat and that they are very vulnerable, but I see it in the fact that the economic institutional order of the world is associated with this very persistent poverty and that different institutional arrangements at the supranational level could stop and even reverse the slide towards ever-greater income disparities.”

PeopleWorldHumansDifferentEnoughFactsOrderLevelsPovertyGreaterRightsEconomicMereHuman RightsIncomeVulnerableReverseArrangementsPersistentSlidesViolationDisparityViolation Of Human Rights
Author:Thomas Pogge
Create image

“The collective shortfall of the 3.08 billion people (47 percent of world population) who, in 2005, lived below $2.50 per day was $507 billion per annum, which indeed comes to about two-thirds of the present US military budget. This gives us a rough sense of how much the eradication of poverty would cost.”

PeopleWorldGivingTwoPovertyMilitaryCostPercentThirdsPopulationBillionsBudgetsCollectivesRoughWorld PopulationUs MilitaryMilitary Budget
Author:Thomas Pogge
Create image