“The central theme of this paper is the character and causes of long-term changes in the personal distribution of income. Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth? What factors determine the secular level and trends of income inequalities?”

— Simon Kuznets

Source: "Economic growth and income inequality," 1955, p. 1

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Simon Kuznets 11

economist 1901–1985

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“Income inequality is increasing, and you might ask yourself: 'Why is that?' Well, that's what income does.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

“An invariable accompaniment of growth in developed countries is the shift away from agriculture, a process usually referred to as industrialization and urbanization. The income distribution of the total population, in the simplest model, may therefore be viewed as a combination of the income distributions of the rural and of the urban populations. What little we know of the structures of these two component income distributions reveals that: (a) the average per capita income of the rural population is usually lower than that of the urban;' (b) inequality in the percentage shares within the distribution for the rural population is somewhat narrower than in that for the urban population… Operating with this simple model, what conclusions do we reach? First, all other conditions being equal, the increasing weight of urban population means an increasing share for the more unequal of the two component distributions. Second, the relative difference in per capita income between the rural and urban populations does not necessarily drift downward in the process of economic growth: indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that it is stable at best, and tends to widen because per capita productivity in urban pursuits increases more rapidly than in agriculture. If this is so, inequality in the total income distribution should increase”

Simon Kuznets (1901–1985) economist

Source: "Economic growth and income inequality," 1955, p. 7 as cited in: Anthony Barnes Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Vol. 1. Elsevier, 2000 p. 799

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

“some evidence is available to indicate that, in India, an increase in the income of the poorer people leads to an increase in the size of the family; and also that this tapers off after a certain critical level of income is attained, and is followed by a reduction in the size of the family at higher levels of living When a sufﬁcient number of people reach the critical income, there would be a gradual decrease in the average birth rate with further increase in income.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

“Marx rejects as “absurd” the contention made by John Stuart Mill, and many of the political economists, that while production is governed by definite laws, distribution is controlled by (malleable) human institutions. Such a view underlies the assumption that classes are merely inequalities in the distribution of income, and therefore that class conflict can be alleviated or even eliminated altogether by the introduction of measures which minimize discrepancies between incomes.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), p. 37.

“Making the rich poorer does not make the poor richer, but it does make the state stronger—and it does increase the power of officials and politicians, power more menacing, more permanent and less useful than market power within the rule of law. Inequality of income can only be eliminated at the cost of freedom. The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum.”

Keith Joseph (1918–1994) British barrister and politician

Keith Joseph, Stranded on the Middle Ground? Reflections on Circumstances and Policies (Centre for Policy Studies, 1976).
1970s

“I have stressed inequalities in wealth and incomes because they reveal how far this country falls short not only of an ideal but of an actual condition of equality that was taken for granted by democrats like Jefferson and Madison in the early years of the Republic. But there is another important reason for particularly stressing incomes. When we attempt to compensate for gross inequalities in incomes by means other than providing income itself, the result is likely to be a patchwork of irritating regulations enforced by bureaucratic agencies.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 4 : From Principles to Problems

“What we have seen is that while the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, we have seen a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, which is now reaching obscene levels. This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans … You know, this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

[Staff, Bernie Sanders confirms presidential run and damns America's inequities, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/30/bernie-sanders-confirms-presidential-run-and-damns-americas-inequities, 29 April 2015, the Guardian, 2 May 2015]
2010s, 2015

“Now a value judgment on the distribution of income would show the required impersonality to the highest degree if the person who made this judgment had to choose a particular income distribution in complete ignorance of what his own relative position… would be within the system chosen. This would be the case if he had exactly the same chance of obtaining the ﬁrst position (corresponding to the highest income) or the second or the third, etc. up to the last position (corresponding to the lowest income) available within that scheme.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Harsanyi, J. C. (1953). "Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-taking". J. Polit. Economy 61 (5): 434–5.

“Over short periods, the relation between growth in money and growth in nominal income is often hard to see, partly because the relation is less close for short than for long periods, but mostly because it takes time for changes in monetary growth to affect income. And how long a time is itself variable. Today's income growth is not closely related to today's monetary growth; it depends on what has been happening to money in the past. What happens to money today affects what is going to happen to income in the future”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: Money Mischief (1992), Ch. 2 The Mystery of Money

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