Wisdom on the Topic of equality
Quotations
Accidents of birth
Today Americans still feel that by and large, every individual is responsible for constructing his or her own fate – the classic pursuit of happiness – and there is still much debate in the United States about the extent to which, if at all, an individual’s success or failure is also shaped by accidents of birth. Nordic people have long ago moved beyond this debate. To most Nordics it’s completely obvious that an accident of birth, like being born into poverty or a neighborhood without a good school, can severely disadvantage an individual and destroy any chances of success, no matter what he or she does.
All must be held valuable, or none
“But none of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates,” Fen added dryly, “suggest that our judgments are scarcely infallible… And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn’t a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.”
Any Love for Justice
Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person – ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
The Arc of History
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
By Gifts One Makes Slaves
‘Up in our country we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.’
Capitalism works best in societies where there are high levels of trust
Adam Smith, the great theorist of free trade economics, is revered for his The Wealth of Nations. His companion work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is mostly forgotten. Yet it is the more important of the two. In it, Smith sets out why capitalism works best in societies where there are high levels of trust between its participants. When social trust falls, the cost of doing business rises. Even in the late eighteenth century, at the dawn of modern growth, Smith grasped the psychological importance of possessing faith in a better future.
A Coke is a Coke
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
The Columbia Disaster
Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a member of the investigating board, believes that the Columbia tragedy and the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster resulted from the same mindset, saying: ‘(NASA) managers…did not grab onto this problem and insist on an answer. It was really quite the opposite. They assumed they knew the answer. They assumed the foam was not going to be a problem. And they were insisting that people disprove the preconception they had.’
Conscious Improvement for the Masses
In the newly created Germany, Otto von Bismarck set up the world’s first social insurance system for the working classes in the late nineteenth century. Britian followed suit under Lloyd George in the early twentieth century. America distributed small parcels of freeholdings to first-comers in the feverish westwards push that came after the Civil War. Had America instead chosen to auction the undivided land to the highest bidders, the US would now have a Latin America-style hacienda economy. The railroad barons would have gobbled up most of the land and converted it into vast estates. America also made public land grants to set up new universities across its rapidly opening landscape. Each of the big Western countries consciously opted to spread skills and assets to its poor. For the first time in history, governments exended public education, moving the school leaving age upwards as the factory clock supplanted the farm day as the timekeeper of the new age. The gilded age was an era of spectacular new wealth. It was also a time of conscious improvement for the masses. They were no longer unlettered. As China and India are discovering, the rise of mass literacy changes everything. Though the Towntrees and the Carnegies became richer than God, their workers could read and write.
Democracy is Worst Form of Government
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.
Equals
Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger? Instead of going for an individual thing we went for the strongest format — equals.
ESPN president meets Steve Jobs
The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.
— Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller
The Eternal Struggle for Human Rights
The existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men toward each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted from historical experience, from the craving for beauty and harmony, have been readily accepted in theory by man – and at all times, have been trampled upon by the same people under the pressure of their animal instincts. A large part of history is therefore replete with the struggle for those human rights, an eternal struggle in which a final victory can never be won. But to tire in that struggle would mean the ruin of society.
First they came...
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Generosity is the robust strategy
It is deeply unfortunate how difficult it is for humans to practice foresight. In his wise and insightful book, The Wealth of Humans, senior editor for the Economist Ryan Avent traces the lessons that we could and should take from the centuries of economic and political struggle that led from the innovations of the industrial revolution to the successful economies of the second half of the twentieth century. Prosperity came when the fruits of productivity were widely shared; enmity, political turmoil, and even outright warfare were the harvest of rampant inequality. It is obvious that generosity is the robust strategy.
Good Management is Like The Beatles
My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies.
They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts.
Guided missiles and misguided men
When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly maximize the minimum and minimize the maximum, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and the exploitation which creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth.
A hereditary meritocracy
The golden decades of the post-war era bore out the theory of declining inequality. But over the last thirty years that has gone into reverse. During those decades, the share of the US economic pie divided between labour and capital was roughly 70:30. Capital’s share – the flows taken up by returns on financial assets rather than wages and salaries – has since risen to a level not seen since the days of The Great Gatsby. The gap between the pay of the average chief executive and their employees has risen tenfold since the lat 1970s to around four hundred. Europe has seen varying rates of rising inequality, with Britain and Spain recording the fastest-rising Gini coefficient – the measure of inequality – and Germany and Scandinavia the least. But all have been moving in the same way. In contrast to the industrial era, however, today’s inequality is accompanied by vanishing mobility. It is not just that people are staying physically put. They are also likelier to stay trapped in the same income group. America, in particular, which had traditionally shown the highest class mobility of any Western country, now has the lowest. Today it is rarer for a poor American to become rich than a poor Briton, which means the American dream is less likely to be realized in America. The meritocratic society has given way to a hereditary meritocracy. The children of the rich are overwhelmingly likely to stay rich.
History is not some self-driving car
But I have grave doubts about history’s long arc. History is not some self-driving car taking humanity to a pre-set destination. Whichever human is behind the wheel must ensure the others stay in the car. Telling some of the passengers they have no business in the driver’s seat because they are clueless about the destination will sooner or later result in a crash. ‘Take back control’ was the chant of Brexiteers and Trump voters alike. It is the war cry of populist backlashes across the Western world.
If you'll just rattle your jewelry
For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.
A law against private jets
If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.
Liberal democracy's strongest glue is economic growth
We are taught to think our democracies are held together by values. Our faith in history fuels that myth. But liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth. When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolised by a fortunate few, things turn nasty. History should have taught us that. The losers seek scapegoats. The politics of interest group management turn into a zero-sum battle over declining resources. The past also tells us to beware of the West at times of stark and growing inequality. It rarely ends well.
Liberalism is not Socialism
Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not a gulf of method, it is a gulf of principle. … Socialism seeks to pull down wealth. Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference … Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.
A multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority
The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved. We are engaged in a fight over whether to work together to build such a world.
No person in America should be too poor to live
For me, democratic socialism is about – really, the value for me is that I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.
Peace with Justice
We look upon this shaken Earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose: the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails. The building of such a peace is a bold and solemn purpose. To proclaim it is easy. To serve it will be hard. And to attain it, we must be aware of its full meaning — and ready to pay its full price. We know clearly what we seek, and why. We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. And now, as in no other age, we seek it because we have been warned, by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself. Yet this peace we seek cannot be born of fear alone: it must be rooted in the lives of nations. There must be justice, sensed and shared by all peoples, for, without justice the world can know only a tense and unstable truce. There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak. But the law of which we speak, comprehending the values of freedom, affirms the equality of all nations, great and small. Splendid as can be the blessings of such a peace, high will be its cost: in toil patiently sustained, in help honorably given, in sacrifice calmly borne.
The Philosophy of Jazz
Jazz is the most flexible art form ever because it believes in the good taste of individuals. It believes in our ability to make reasonable choices. It takes a chance on our decision-making skills instead of legislating our freedom away with written restrictions and restrictive hierarchies. In jazz, the size of your heart and your ability to play determine your position in the band. The philosophy of jazz is rooted in the elevation and enrichment of people, plain ol’ folks.
A Progressive Annual Tax on Capital
The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation…. This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. Historical experience shows, moreover, that such immense inequalities of wealth have little to do with the entrepreneurial spirit and are of no use in promoting growth. Nor are they of any ‘common utility,’ to borrow the nice expression from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with which I began this book.
Public morality
Moral guidance about what is right or decent can be found both in religious teachings and in our contemporary understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. As I have suggested, they overlap. A public morality that protects our democratic institutions, cherishes the truth, accepts our differences, ensures equal rights and equal opportunity, and invites passionate enagement in our civic life gives our own lives deeper meaning. It enlarges our capacities for attachment and love. It informs our sense of honor and shame. It equips us to be virtuous citizens.
Set off from the rest by a line drawn
Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn – they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
To live wisely and agreeably and well
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
The Trick in Keeping Bands Together
The trick in keeping bands together is always the same: ‘Hey, asshole, the guy standing next to you is more important than you think he is.’
Two ideas of government
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
The Ultimate Democracy
… we were the ultimate democracy. If one of us didn’t like a tune, we didn’t play it.
The US remains astonishingly backward when it comes to education
It’s an unfortunate fact that the United States remains astonishingly backward compared to almost all other advanced Western countries when it comes to education, because in America, what predicts how well a child will do in school is not a child’s aptitude or hard work, but the status of the child’s parents – which is to say, their own levels of education and wealth. Other countries suffer from this condition too, but the United States is especially anachronistic. And it’s getting worse: The influence of this wealth predictor in the United States today has only been growing stronger in recent years.
We All Derive From the Same Source
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
We have wonderful arguments
Jobs: What I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.
Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you you’re wrong?
Jobs: (laughs) Yeah.
Mossberg: I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean people that work for…
Jobs: Oh, yeah, no we have wonderful arguments.
Mossberg: And do you win them all?
Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can’t. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.
Mossberg: But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings. You obviously contribute your own ideas.
Jobs: I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t?
We Must Respect the Other Fellow's Religion
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
What would a new social compact look like?
What would a new social compact look like? Since our crisis is political, the solutions must stretch far beyond economics. My own views do not always fit into twentieth-century pigeonholes. But I believe that protecting society’s weakest from arbitrary misfortune is the ultimate test of our civilisational worth. It seems blindingly obvious that universal healthcare ought to be a basic shield against the vicissitudes of an increasingly volatile labour market. Humane immigration laws should be enforced, and the link between public benefits and citizenship restored. Ours is an age of lawyers and accountants. Micro-regulation of the workplace ought to be replaced with broad guidelines; free speech, in whatever form it takes, must be upheld on campuses and in the media; the tax system should be ruthlessly simplified; governments must tax bad things, such as carbon, rather than good things, like jobs; companies should be taxed where they conduct their business. Governments must launch Marshall Plans to retrain their middle classes. The nature of representative democracy should be re-imagined. Above all, money’s stranglehold on the legistlative process has to be broken.
White people will have quite enough to do
I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.