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For most of history, almost everyone was poor. Power and wealth belonged to only a few.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don't matter is not quite the way our history would define it.

Of the 22 industrialized nations of the world, we're dead last in per capita giving to poor people.

There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.