Wealth, Poverty and Politics Quotes

“Slippery use of the word “privilege” is part of a vogue of calling achievements “privileges”—a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“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. . . . . In many places and times, soft-subject students and intellectuals have inflamed hostility, and sometimes violence, against many other successful groups.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, just as much as differences in knowledge and skills—and such differences create differences in economic outcomes.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“The ideal of freedom behind the American Revolution had its effect in freeing thousands of people from slavery in the newly formed United States, something that was happening nowhere else in the world at that time. To call slavery “America’s original sin” is to turn reality upside down.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“isolation is a recurring factor in poverty and backwardness around the world, whether that is physical isolation or cultural isolation, for any number of particular reasons”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“While years of education are often used as a rough proxy for human capital in general, not only is much human capital gained outside of educational institutions,[...]some education even produces negative human capital, in the form of attitudes, expectations, and aversions that negatively impact the economy.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“The welfare state contributes to this disparity by (1) reducing the need for people at the bottom to earn income and (2) by penalizing their earning of income, since higher income leads to a reduction in eligibility for government benefits.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“Today, poverty in America means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“In contemporary America, many colleges and universities have whole departments devoted to promoting a sense of racial and ethnic grievances against others, while celebrating the isolation of group identities, epitomized by ethnically separate residences on campus and sometimes even ethnically separate graduation ceremonies.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective

“This mutual receptivity to each other’s culture in the Middle Ages is now very much part of a long gone past. One revealing sign of today’s lack of cultural receptivity to Western culture in the Middle East is that in today’s Arab world— about 300 million people in more than 20 countries23— the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million people.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“The presumption of equal outcomes in the absence of malign actions can lead to incorrect— and disastrous— conclusions in other circumstances.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“If white racism is the cause of lower educational and economic outcomes for black Americans, why are black Nigerians exempt?”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“Drawing up policy blueprints is a task for which there has never been a shortage of eager candidates. We can only hope that those policies will be based on hard facts about the real world, rather than on rhetoric or preconceptions.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“But the word “change” is not a blank check for self-indulgence— least of all self-indulgence in the notion that disparities imply villainy, which in turn implies a crusade on the side of the angels against the forces of evil, despite how self-flattering such a vision of the world might be.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“Those who have promoted the prevailing social vision, in which lags, gaps or disparities to the detriment of black people are the fault of white people, are trapped in the corollary that these lags, gaps or disparities should disappear, once those other people are constrained by civil rights laws and policies. But nothing of the sort has happened in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“One of the reasons for paying people for their productivity, rather than their merits, is that productivity is far easier to determine than merit.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“The strategic location of the intelligentsia, whether in the mass media or in educational institutions, enables them to filter what information gets through to the general public, protecting the welfare state vision and with it a flattering vision of themselves.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“In Hawaii, the most generous state, an unemployed single mother with two children has been eligible for welfare benefits worth more than $49,000 a year.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“In contrast to times past when low-income people lived packed into overcrowded housing, Americans living below the official poverty level today have more housing space per person than the average European— not poor Europeans, but the average European.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“As an international study noted: In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and commerce at every level of society. Global markets intensify this dominance: When foreign investors do business in the Philippines, they deal almost exclusively with Chinese. Apart from a handful of corrupt politicians and a few aristocratic Spanish mestizo families, all of the Philippines’ billionaires are of Chinese descent. By contrast, all menial jobs in the Philippines are filled by Filipinos. All peasants are Filipinos. All domestic servants and squatters are Filipinos.34 The same study also noted: “Hundreds of Chinese in the Philippines are kidnapped every year, almost invariably by ethnic Filipinos. Many victims, often children, are brutally murdered, even after ransom is paid.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“The Chinese in the Philippines are among the many productive groups whose economic success has led to violent backlashes.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“Individuals’ values and choices have more correlation with outcomes than various tangible factors within the scope of government, not only as regards educational outcomes but other outcomes as well. Despite the prevalence of poverty in many black communities, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994.53 In other words, those blacks whose behavior put them outside the pattern of the spreading ghetto culture escaped poverty to a far greater extent than other blacks.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics

“Political incentives are for government officials to supply public schools with things that are in demand from organized constituencies such as teachers’ unions that want smaller classes, better facilities and job protection.”
― Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics