Quotes About Society

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That

the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.

Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones?

if commercial behaviour might make people more moral.

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.

In civilized society,' wrote Adam Smith, an individual 'stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.

What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

Men should not care less what women wear so long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy and generally nubile.

Or, as one economist put it: 'The hippies were right all along'.

Richard Dawkins that 'money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism' –

At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer.

That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Getting richer is not the only or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality and so on.

Friedrich Hayek argued, knowledge is dispersed throughout society, because each person has a special perspective. Knowledge can never be gathered together in one place. It is collective, not individual.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

I just don't understand why being vegetarian makes you any better than anyone else. What's with the big statements? It's just a choice, in a free society. I think so long as you know where your food's coming from, and you're happy with that, then you should be able to live your life without being judged.

Scientists now tell us that evolution has been supplanted on this planet by culture. Human culture moves at so rapid a pace that it has far outrun and outstripped the natural processes of change and adaptation. This