Democracy depends on citizens who are able to recognize the truth, analyze and weigh alternatives, and civilly debate their future, just as it depends on citizens who have an equal voice and equal stake in it. Without an educated populace, a common good cannot even be discerned. This is fundamental.

It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 – the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

Bill Clinton was a great politician. Bill Clinton loved a fight. He was willing to fight. But he also wanted to be loved. He wanted to be admired.

I think the Obama Administration has done a lousy job marketing and selling and explaining this entire thing. And, as a result, all of these right-wing front organizations financed by the Koch brothers, are blanketing the airwaves with lies about Obamacare. And people are scared.

The economy exists to serve us. We do not exist to serve it.

They found that flights with a first-class section were nearly four times more likely to have incidents of “belligerent behavior” or “emotional outbursts” in their economy class. Such incidents were even more likely when economy passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats than when they entered through the middle of the plane and bypassed the first-class section.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for a different government – often one that favors them or their patrons.1.

But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don’t fit in – to ostracize them even further.

For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven’t experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.