Quotes About Society

No CEO in the world, therefore, is so delusional as to expect his employees to show up every day and work hard for no money. But there is one gigantic workforce asked to do exactly that. In the United States alone, they number nearly 60 million. Who is this massive, underpaid throng? Schoolchildren.

But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?

morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work

Se podría sugerir que la moral representa el modo en que a las personas les gustaría que funcionase el mundo, mientras que la economía representa cómo funciona éste en realidad.

As with most bad behaviors, drunk driving could probably be wiped out entirely if a strong-enough incentive were instituted—random roadblocks, for instance, where drunk drivers are executed on the spot—but our society probably doesn't have the appetite for that.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.

Los sesenta y setenta fueron, en retrospectiva, una época fabulosa para ser delincuente callejero en la mayor parte de las ciudades norteamericanas. Las probabilidades de recibir un castigo eran tan bajas —fue la época de auge de un sistema judicial liberal y el movimiento a favor de los derechos del delincuente— que cometer un delito sencillamente no resultaba difícil.

So if sumo wrestlers, schoolteachers, and day-care parents all cheat, are we to assume

If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work

What if, for instance, every Briton were also entitled to a free, unlimited, lifetime supply of transportation? That is, what if everyone were allowed to go down to the car dealership whenever they wanted and pick out any new model, free of charge, and drive it home?

But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'.

If asked how we'd behave in a situation that pits a private benefit against the greater good, most of us won't admit to favoring the private benefit. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

Gun murders are down? Well, you figure, that must be from all those tough new gun laws—until you examine the data and find that most people who commit crimes with guns are almost entirely unaffected by current gun laws.

If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.

Why has the prostitute's wage fallen so far? Because

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. —Abraham Lincoln

Capitalism set out as the opponent of privilege and the champion of freedom," Rauschenbusch wrote, "it has ended by being the defender of privilege and the intrenchment of autocracy.

But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.

The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that mass behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass.

Plagues and political unrest have a long history of following the same cycles.)

the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these serendipitous connections, on all the appropriate scales: in the private space of your own mind; within larger institutions; and across the information networks of society itself.

How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"?