It is deeply disturbing to stand at the edges of such extreme wealth, such extreme speculation – even when successful – and peer into the expanses of such unrelenting poverty:
poverty of abandoned building and abandoned village and field abandoned to mall,
poverty of slum and ghetto,
poverty of pollution,
poverty of congestion and sprawl,
poverty of cheapness and impermanence,
poverty of gated community and security system,
poverty as if ordained by an invisible hand,
poverty of the devalued and the overvalued,
poverty of entire populations who produce little but consume much,
poverty of the near and the real overtaken by the distant and the virtual,
poverty of empty calorie and long shelf life,
poverty of plastic,
poverty of divorce and displacement,
poverty of erosion,
poverty of proliferating portfolios,
poverty of market mania,
poverty of irrational exuberance,
poverty of affluence.
-Woody Tasch in Inquires into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered