From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It's sad that we don't immediately see the profound injustices embedded in climate change. It is precisely those people who have no responsibility for having caused climate change who are the most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate.
causality runs from the latter to the former: in more unequal societies, the return to committing a crime increases, since there is more wealth to be taken away at each crime
Consider a car with malfunctioning brakes; it's unsafe to let it on the street, as it could cause harm. You'd need to confine it, but you wouldn't punish it or moralize its malfunction. Instead, you'd seek to understand why its brakes failed.
CSR does not help with me as a buyer, why? Because I'm cynical about it now, I don't believe it. After the success of Toms Shoes, every 23 year old told me they're starting an umbrella company and giving an umbrella to the people that need it in the Amazon. CSR has clearly become a tactic. Every strategy of every company and human being should come from a truth.
Upon experiencing my first miscarriage, I was incredulously told I'd need to endure three consecutive miscarriages before further action would be taken. The idea itself was staggering to me. You wouldn't ask someone to undergo multiple heart attacks or even endure recurrent minor injuries like broken fingers before intervening. Yet, the system requires women to face the trauma of three successive miscarriages. This policy is an absolute miscarriage of justice.
Crime itself can increase inequality. A doubling in crime increases the Gini coefficient by 3% to 4%. When crime increases twofold the share of the rich tercile drops by 1.3%, and the share of the population in the poorest tercile increases.
The real tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to injustice that we no longer recognize it when we see it. We've normalized inequality, normalized discrimination, normalized the idea that some people matter less than others.
The guards hung me by my wrists from the ceiling for eight days…. After a few days of hanging, being denied sleep, it felt like my brain stopped working. I was imagining things. My feet got swollen on the third day. I felt pain that I have never felt in my entire life.
Looking back, there were two things that made change possible for me. Firstly, I lived the change. My company was a way of, as they say, 'scratching my own itch.' I wanted to be able to go on working myself, and I realised that a lot of other women would have had comparable aims and desires.
First and foremost was the consolidation of democracy. Second was the stabilisation of the economy. Thirdly- and probably most importantly- was the ability of Brazil to deal with a problem we inherited from colonial times- inequality.
rates of homicides and violent crime were strongly associated with income inequality. In addition, unemployment was found to be associated with income inequality.
We believed, and took on board the promise of growth, that it would even things up again, that it would clean up after itself, and that actually was a panacea to many of our economic ills. Yet, all the evidence has shown us that growth does not even things up- some of the richest countries in the world are becoming immensely unequal and we have seen that growth certainly doesn't clean-up after itself.