Topic: Inequality

Quotes

Anthony De Jasay, The State (1985)

• The rule “to each in proportion to his wants” as a sufficient condition of utility maximization, does not simply translate into the equalization of incomes. People’s wants run to many things money can buy over and above bread and dripping, beer and pizza. It is preposterous to interpret their capacity for satisfaction in the physical sense of one man, one stomach. They are much too different for the levelling of their incomes to represent a plausible approximation to solving any maximum problem.#
• The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities.#
• One equality crowds out another and, as a corollary, the resulting inequality can always be said to have some equality as its reason and indeed its justification. . . . Further “dimensions” can always be invented so that symmetry in one implies asymmetry in some or all the others, #
• When one equality, symmetry, proportionality, can only prevail at the cost of upsetting another, equality itself is patently useless as a criterion for giving precedence to one or the other. Love of equality is no better as a guide for choosing between alternative equalities than love of children is for adopting a particular child. The appeal of rationality merely calls for some order and not for one particular order to the exclusion of another.#
• There is no other test of the equality, of people’s respective opportunities to make money, than the money they do make. For once inheritance of capital is abolished, everybody is made to go to the same school and every girl is given cosmetic surgery at eighteen, there are still ninety-nine well-known reasons why one person may be materially more successful than another.#

Aristotle, Politics (350 B.C.)

• All men believe that justice means equality in some sense…. The question we must keep in mind is, equality or inequality in what sort of thing.#Quoted in Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994)

Daron Acemoglu, “The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism” (2015)

• If the primary threat from the top 1 percent share is political, then the main response should be related to monitoring and containing the political implications of the increase in top-level inequality—not necessarily catch-all policies such as the wealth taxes advocated by Piketty. Such policies should be explicitly related to the institutional fault lines of the specific society and should be conceived in the context of strengthening institutional checks against any potential power grab.#

Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the point of equality?” (1999)

• People lay claim to the resources of egalitarian redistribution in virtue of their inferiority to others, not in virtue of their equality to others.#

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945)

• Who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• As long as the graduation is more or less continuous and all the steps in the income pyramid are reasonably occupied, it can scarcely be denied that those lower down profit materially from the fact that others are ahead.#

Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994)

• The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life—conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kinds of screenplays or newspaper feature stories that people choose to write—the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and—above all—truth.#