192 Quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof

One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don’t have the funds to pay for social services – but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.

Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.

The first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people’s struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.