Rachel

“The Gini coefficient, devised by the Italian sociologist Corrado Gini in 1912, is a measure of income or wealth disparity in a population. It is usually expressed as a fraction between 0 and 1, and it seems easy to understand, because 0 is the coefficient if everyone owned an equal amount, while 1 would obtain if one person owned everything and everyone else nothing. In our real world of the mid-twenty-first century, countries with a low Gini coefficient, like the social democracies, are generally a bit below 0.3, while highly unequal countries are a bit above 0.6. The US, China, and many other countries have seen their Gini coefficients shoot up in the neoliberal era, from 0.3 or 0.4 up to 0.5 or 0.6, this with barely a squeak from the people losing the most in this increase in inequality, and indeed many of those harmed often vote for politicians who will increase their relative impoverishment. Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we’re patriots! At least we’re self-reliant and we can take care of ourselves, and so on, right into an early grave, as the average lifetimes of the poorer citizens in these countries are much shorter than those of the wealthy citizens. And average lifetimes overall are therefore decreasing for the first time since the eighteenth century. Don’t think that the Gini coefficient alone will describe the situation, however; this would be succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors. The”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“What Matters to Me"
1. What matters to me is my family and close friends. In this way, I am like almost everyone else in the world.
2. What matters to me is my work, no longer as a professor, but as a writer reaching out to readers within and beyond the academic circle,
3. What matters to me is Nature, another form of beauty and truth. Throughout my life the natural world has been a source of enjoyment, comfort, and inspiration.
4. And now I remember...the fourth...It has to do with moral impulse, with the search for meaning and human connection, and with our relation to Nature, that we now lump together under the word "spirituality.”
― Marilyn Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life

“So, is there energy enough for all? Yes. Is there food enough for all? Yes. Is there housing enough for all? There could be, there is no real problem there. Same for clothing. Is there health care enough for all? Not yet, but there could be; it’s a matter of training people and making small technological objects, there is no planetary constraint on that one. Same with education. So all the necessities for a good life are abundant enough that everyone alive could have them. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“It has been said that to teach is to touch the future. Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the world.

There is nothing more hopeful than that. I started this book with the questions, Is it better? My answer is: Not yet, but it could be. It's up to us to make sure it is. I remain hopeful.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?