Quotes About Resources

First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.

The entrepreneur,' said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, 'shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.' But Say's definition does not tell us who this 'entrepreneur' is. And since Say coined the term almost two hundred years ago, there has been total confusion over the definitions of 'entrepreneur' and

Population growth is not a reason against giving aid but a reason for reconsidering the kind of aid to give.

The world does produce enough to feed its inhabitants Ã¢â'¬â€œ in fact we waste vast quantities of grain and soybeans by feeding them to animals, getting back from the animals only a small fraction of the nutritional value of the plant foods we put into them.

These windows were dedicated to the patron saints of the guilds and often showed the donors at work: furriers displaying a fur robe, money-changers testing their coin, butchers killing oxen. Even the common laborers, who somehow managed to pool their meager resources, donated a window, which was dedicated to Adam, "who first dug the earth by the sweat of his brow."5

When resources become relatively scarce and relatively costly, it suddenly does make sense to invest in coaching and training in order to extract the maximum value from "medium-grade ore.

woodland, cranberry bogs, hunting grounds, fishing spots, clay deposits, berry bushes, and medicinal plants were available to everyone. The people sometimes gathered as a community to harvest and sell these resources in bulk to fund public services like poor relief. One Massachusetts official, assuming that jealousy and selfishness were naturally the dominant features of all human societies, marveled that these places were "almost realizing the wildest dreams of the communists."48

War is both intensely horrible and exquisitely pleasurable. It is horrible because of the danger and suffering that soldiers and civilians endure, and the unavoidable guilt that comes with killing. It is pleasurable because -like all pleasures- it is something that benefited our ancient ancestors who were victors in the bloddy struggle for resources.

A woman's happiness increases when the man brings more economic resources to the union and shows kindness, affection, and commitment. A man's happiness increases when the woman is more physically attractive than he is, and when she shows kindness, affection, and commitment.

Modern men have inherited from their ancestors psychological mechanisms that not only give priority to resources and status but also lead men to make great sacrifices and take great risks to attain resources and status.

Women past and present face the adaptive problem of choosing men who not only have the necessary resources but also show a willingness to commit those resources specifically to them. This problem may be more difficult than it seems at first. Although resources can often be directly observed, commitment cannot. Instead, gauging commitment requires looking for probabilistic cues. Love is one of the most important cues to commitment.

Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources.

The mate value of a man does not necessarily decline from age twenty to forty, as it does for a woman, because his capacity to accrue resources often increases with age. Thus, the intensity of a woman's efforts to retain a mate should be linked less to a man's age than to his effectiveness at providing her with valuable resources.

The mate attraction studies confirm the power of displaying commitment in the long-term mating market. Discussing cohabitation or marriage signals that a man would like to integrate the woman into his social and family life, commit his resources to her, and perhaps have children with her. Offering to convert to her religion shows a willingness to accommodate to her needs. Showing a deep concern for her problems communicates emotional support and a commitment to be there in times of need.

While women's desirability as mates declines predictably with age, the same does not apply to men's. The reason is that many of the key qualities that contribute to a man's value are not as closely or as predictably linked with age. These components include a man's intelligence, cooperativeness, parenting proclivities, political alliances, kin networks, coalitions, and, importantly, ability and willingness to provide resources to a woman and her children.

According to the sex role and structural powerlessness hypothesis, women who have a lot of personal access to resources are predicted not to value resources in a mate as much as women lacking resources. This hypothesis receives no support from the existing empirical data, however. Indeed, women with high incomes value a potential mate's income and education more, not less, than women with lower incomes.

To compound this problem, deception usually occurs in the domains that are most important—status, resources, and commitment for women, appearance and sexual fidelity for men, and personality qualities for both.

As a rule, throughout the animal kingdom, the more polygynous the mating system, the greater the differences between the sexes in terms of mortality. Polygynous mating selects for males who take risks—risks in competing with other males, risks in securing the resources desired by females, and risks in exposing themselves to dangers while pursuing and courting females.

Competition among men and selection by women of men high in status and resources are ultimately responsible for the evolution in males of risk-taking traits that lead to successful mating at the expense of a long life.

Fulfilling each other's evolved desires is one key to harmony between a man and woman. A woman's happiness increases when the man brings more economic resources to the union and shows kindness, affection, and commitment. A man's happiness increases when the woman is more physically attractive than he is, and when she shows kindness, affection, and commitment.

Men's jealousy is especially attuned to rivals who have status and resources; women's jealousy is especially attuned to rivals who are physically attractive.

Women's reproductive success has historically been limited not by the number of mates they can accumulate but, rather, by the genetic quality of a single mate, by his ability to accrue resources, and by his willingness to funnel those resources to her and her children. All modern women have inherited these mating desires from their successful maternal ancestors.

Men deceive women by feigning an interest in commitment to achieve a quick sexual score. They also feign confidence, status, kindness, and resources that they lack. Men try to abscond with the sexual benefit without paying the cost of commitment.

My argument was an old and stodgy one: the best thing you can do for the poor is avoid joining their ranks, thus competing with them for limited goods and services.