Quotes About Society

Piketty's crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions.

People who have acquired academic degrees, without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger, especially when they lash out at economically successful minorities and ethnically polarize the whole society they live in.

With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.

Hard cases make bad law" is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

The massive ethnic communities that make up the mosaic of American society cannot be adequately described as "minorities." There is no "majority.

The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, "leaders" and "spokesmen"—in contrast to Hispanic parents—is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, "leaders" and "spokesmen," who benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society.

When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that 'society' can 'arrange,' these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people's mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinctions.

In other words, the loss of freedom as the reach and power of the government are increasingly extended is an issue kept off the agenda by redefining words. Moreover, government-provided benefits are not net benefits to society, because the government simply transfers wealth, rather than creating it.

What is called "social" planning are in fact government orders over-riding the plans and mutual accommodations of millions of people subject to those orders.

Why the transfer of…decisions from the individuals and organizations directly involved – often depicted collectively and impersonally as "the market" – to third parties who pay no price for being wrong should be expected to produce better results for society at large is a question seldom asked, much less answered.

We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.

Often, it is precisely the lure of a chance to hit the jackpot which causes all the producers to gamble on untried ventures, out of which some prove to be beneficial to the public. To insist on a closer approximation to merit would reduce the incentives and the benefits to society that flow from these incentives.

Definitions being what they are, young people who waste their time around the house or on street corners are called "unemployed," while those who waste their time in classrooms are called "students.

The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society, except their constant criticisms, can feel both intellectually and morally superior.

The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantages and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggests hubris.

the Britons that Julius Caesar saw were to him primitive exotics with long hair, dyed bodies, and living in a society of shared wives.

When laws and policies make honesty increasingly costly, then government is, in effect, promoting dishonesty. Such dishonesty can then extend beyond the particular laws and policies in question to a more general habit of disobeying laws, to the detriment of the whole economy and society.

If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.

The civil rights vision tends to view group characteristics as mere "stereotypes" and concentrates on changing the public's "perceptions" or raising the public's "consciousness." Yet the reality of group patterns that transcend any given society cannot be denied.

Given the scarcity of mental resources, an economy in which knowledge and vision have such a decisive advantage in market competition is an economy that has great advantages in creating a high standard of living for the general population. A society in which only members of a hereditary aristocracy, a military junta or a single political party in power can make great decisions is a society that wastes much of the knowledge, vision and talent of the majority of its members. own people.

In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally. Fernand Braudel

Una sociedad que puede aprovechar todo tipo de talentos de todos los segmentos de su población tiene obvias ventajas sobre sociedades donde sólo se permite que los talentos de los pocos preseleccionados determinen su destino.

Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society. Just as you don't find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don't find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.

Es que no puede haber una forma de manifestarlo sin parecer "beodo o trastornado"? La civilización es una estupidez. ¿Para qué se nos ha dado un cuerpo, si hemos de mantenerlo encerrado en un estuche como si fuera algún valioso Stradivarius?