“Nothing is a turnoff like a New York City housing authority kitchen. People want to hear about that once you're successful, not when you're living in it.”
Source: Notes from a Young Black Chef
“In societies of deep poverty, women are pushed to the margins. Women are outsiders. That’s not a coincidence. When any community pushes any group out, especially its women, it’s creating a crisis that can only be reversed by bringing the outsiders back in. That is the core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill—including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.”
Source: The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
“One of the longest-running public health studies dates from the 1970s, when half of the families in a number of villages in Bangladesh were given contraceptives and the other half were not. Twenty years later, the mothers who took contraceptives were healthier. Their children were better nourished. Their families had more wealth. The women had higher wages. Their sons and daughters had more schooling.
The reasons are simple: When the women were able to time and space their pregnancies, they were more likely to advance their education, earn an income, raise healthy children, and have the time and money to give each child the food, care, and education needed to thrive. When children reach their potential, they don’t end up poor. This is how families and countries get out of poverty. In fact, no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.”
Source: The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
“You just have to say to yourself, "I am not willing to accept anything less than what I deserve! I am smart! I am Beautiful! I am a good woman and I deserve to be happy!" It all starts with you.”
Source: Reflections of a Man
“People like her didn’t have homes, they had stones. Stones for beds, stones for food, stones for graves.”
Source: Squire Hayseed
“You can't help getting pale... if you've nothing to eat”
Source: Crime and Punishment
“Saving lives starts with bringing everyone in. Our societies will be healthiest when they have no outsiders. We should strive for that. We have to keep working to reduce poverty and disease. We have to help outsiders resist the power of people who want to keep them out. But we have to do our inner work as well: We have to wake up to the ways we exclude. We have to open our arms and our hearts to the people we’ve pushed to the margins. It’s not enough to help outsiders fight their way in—the real triumph will come when we no longer push anyone out.”
Source: The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
“The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible….Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up.”
Source: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
“...a UBI is not a salve for a world of technological unemployment, or a powerful antipoverty measure, or a form of social dividend, or a way to boost the earnings of the working poor. Rather, it is all those things and more: a paradigmatic shift that would free people from having to do more work that they did not want to do at all. A UBI would, in essence, lop off the bottom of the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs', where air, food, water, and shelter reside, with self-transcendence up at the other end. A UBI would give people the economic bandwidth to do what they wanted with their lives... Let the robots do the dirty work. Let the people do what they want.”
Source: Give People Money: The Simple Idea to Solve Inequality and Revolutionise Our Lives
“Se não tem escola, passa para a sacola”