1. Home
  2.  › 
  3. Quotes tagged “Poverty”

Quotes tagged “Poverty”

“What’s really misleading about neoliberal analysis of globalized capitalism is the idea everything works out because conditions for many are gradually improving. For any criticism you have of exploitation and imperialism, they have a chart showing gradual improvement in some communities.

Without more knowledge about the situation, you’d be inclined to agree. What’s wrong with capitalism if, over time, X amount of people left poverty?

That’s the argument for globalized capitalism.

The problem is, such a response is misleading. There is no taking into account how many people around the world remain in poverty (over a billion), how many deaths can be prevented.

Another problem is that it implies such conditions (extreme poverty, exploitation) are necessary in modern society. They are, of course, not.

Nike isn’t forced to use sweatshops instead of fairly paying workers and keeping them in safe conditions, they are driven to do it by the profit motive. The fact that such enormous wealth exists and neglects to ‘trickle down’ to people working constantly is an obvious problem.

So in the end the argument for globalized capitalism is misleading–not because the facts presented are incorrect, but because these desperate living conditions, in the modern world, are not necessary in the first place. Why would the corporation pay so little and allow disasters to happen in the workplace? Profit.

Instead of further questioning the system, we stop at a single graph.”

About The Authors

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.