98 Quotes by Annie Lowrey

Of course, as the United States built a safety net that excluded and punished black families, it created a wealth-building apparatus to buoy and enrich white ones. It is not market forces and individual effort alone that determine who succeeds and prospers and who remains impoverished and excluded in the United States, but government policy and deep-seated cultural and societal mores.

Here, poverty in the United States is a choice. Stagnant middle-class incomes are a choice. Technology-fueled mass unemployment is a choice. Racism is a choice. The patriarchy is a choice. This is not to discount how deeply entrenched existing policies, interests, and tendencies are - but to recognize that while they might be entrenched, they are not immutable.

They were not charity cases. They were businesses waiting to start, individuals striving to prosper, families searching for a better life. The main thing they lacked was cash.

. . .cash is highly effective at slashing the poverty rate. Moreover, GiveDirectly argues that cash is more valuable to its recipients than in-kind gifts, such as food or bed nets or sports equipment. If you’re hungry, you cannot eat a bed net. If your village is suffering from endemic diarrhea, soccer balls won’t be worth much to you.

When I told my parents, John and Celine, that I was writing a book, my dad responded, “I always knew you’d write one!,” which was exactly what I needed to hear.

When economists talk about income, they talk about the money a household or a person earns in a given year. That's the salary you earned, the rent from a tenant above your garage and the bit of money you made by selling some stocks.

Student loans are delaying retirements. They're suppressing the housing market. They're suffocating new business formation. They're even leading young people to delay getting married and having children.

Plastic straws might be everything terrible about American consumerism, individually wrapped. But paper straws put the lie to the belief that we can consume our way out of the problems created by consumerism.

Numerous studies have shown income inequality growing since the late 1970s. Real earnings have fallen for many families, with globalization, the decline of unions and technological innovations eroding workers' wages.