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Quote by Emily Griffin, All We Ever Wanted

“Looking back, I wonder if that may have explained my mom's preoccupation with money. It wasn't that she was impressed with it, but she could always tell you who had it and who did not, who was cheap and who was living beyond their means. Then again, my mom could pretty much tell you anything about anyone in Bristol. She wasn't a gossip-at least not a mean-spirited one-she was simply fascinated by other people's business, from their wealth and health to their politics and religion.”

Quote by Emily Griffin, All We Ever Wanted

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Emily Griffin, All We Ever Wanted

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“Yes, and I totally forgot about the ottoman when we went to Iris's apartment. She didn't have the room for it, so she must've brought it here." Aunt Barb shook her head when they reached the ottoman. "An ottoman is a rich-people thing, when you think about it. It requires room. Space. I'm not rich by any means, but I have room for an ottoman. I assumed she did too." Aunt Barb sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking. I've been so insensitive, living in my own little world." "That's not true. You didn't know." "Maybe I didn't want to know, or maybe I should have known. Isn't that the height of insensitivity? That you just didn't know, because you couldn't imagine that people lived a different life from the one you do?" Aunt Bard kept shaking her head. "Isn't that the very definition of insensitivity? Of selfishness?”

WealthImmigrantsInsensitivity
Book:Betrayed
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“For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful leveling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling. Just like their biblical counterparts, they went forth to “take peace from the earth” and “kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sometimes acting individually and sometimes in concert with one another, they produced outcomes that to contemporaries often seemed nothing short of apocalyptic. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake. And by the time the dust had settled, the gap between the haves and the have-nots had shrunk, sometimes dramatically.”

WarWealthRevolutionPandemicEconomic InequalityEconomic Redistribution
Book:The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
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