Equality of Opportunity

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Equality of Opportunity

Parental income and university access, United States, 2014

Thomas Piketty (1971):
In 2014, the rate of access to higher education (percentage of individuals age 19–21 enrolled in a college, university, or other institution of higher education) was barely 30 percent for children of the poorest 10 percent in the United States and 90 percent for the richest 10 percent.
(Figure I.8, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Robert Putnam (1941):
The class gap in college completion, which was already substantial 30 to 40 years ago, has steadily expanded. …
Kids from low-income backgrounds … are working more or less diligently to improve their prospects in life, but no matter how talented and hardworking they are, at best they are improving their play at checkers, while upper-class kids are widening their lead at three-dimensional chess. …
As the twenty-first century opened, a family’s socioeconomic status had become even more important than test scores in predicting which eighth graders would graduate from college. …
[Academically] high-scoring poor kids are now slightly less likely (29%) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30%).
(Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, 2015, emphasis added)

The fall of the bottom 50 percent share of total income in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The share of the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution fell from about 20 percent of total income in the United States in the 1970s to 12–13 percent in the 2010s.
During the same period, the top centile share rose from 11 percent to 20–21 percent.
(Figure 11.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Low and high incomes in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
It is now well known that the explosion of inequality in the United States since 1980 was due to an unprecedented increase in very high incomes, especially the famous '1 percent'. …
In 1970, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $15,200 per year per adult, and that of the richest 1 percent was $403,000, for a ratio of 1 to 26.
In 2015, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $16,200 and that of the richest 1 percent was $1,305,000, for a ratio of 1 to 81.
All amounts are in 2015 dollars. …

[One] of the main consequences of the extremely high marginal rates (70–90 percent) on top incomes between 1930 and 1980, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, was to put an end to the most extravagant executive pay.
By contrast, the sharp reduction of top tax rates in the 1980s strongly contributed to the skyrocketing of executive pay.
Indeed, if one looks at the evolution of executive pay in listed companies in all the developed countries since 1980, one finds that variations in tax rates explain much of the variation in executive pay — much more than other factors such as sector of activity, firm size, or performance. …
In the 1950s and 1960s, the top executives of major British and American firms had little interest in fighting for huge raises … because 80–90 percent of any raise would have gone directly to the government.
In the 1980s, however, the nature of the game changed completely.
The evidence suggests that executives began to devote considerable effort to persuading others that enormous raises were warranted, which was not always difficult to do, since it is hard to measure how much any individual executive contributes to the firm’s success.
What is more, compensation committees were often constituted in a rather incestuous fashion.
This also explains why it is so difficult to find any statistically significant correlation between executive pay and firm performance (or productivity). …

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had by far the highest minimum wage in the world.
In 1968–1970 the federal minimum wage was more than $10 an hour in today’s dollars.
Since 1980, however, the failure to raise the minimum wage regularly gradually eroded its value in real terms: in 2019 it was only $7.20, representing a 30 percent decline in purchasing power over half a century — remarkable for a country at peace and growing economically. …
Many works have shown that the drop in the minimum wage in the United States contributed strongly to the declining position of low-wage workers since the 1980s in a general climate of decreased worker bargaining power.
(Figure 11.7, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Adam Smith (1723 – 90)

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between [masters and workers], whose interests are by no means the same.
The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible.
The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.
In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer.
A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired.
Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. …

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. …
Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.
These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution …

(The Wealth of Nations, 1776)


The Frontier

Murder in the Pacific

Trump Takes on the World

Bruce Powell

Sana Marin

A man who would be king

Wonderland

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Wonderland

John Tolkien (1892 – 1970):
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory.
I love only that which they defend.
(The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings, 1954)

John Kipling, 1897–1915

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
My son was killed whilst laughing at some jest.
I would I knew what it was, it might serve me in a time when jests are few.
(A Son, Epitaphs of the War, 1914–18)

Josephine Kipling, 1892–99

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In moccasins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far—oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!
(Merrow Down, Just So Stories, 1902)

Alan Milne (1882 – 1956):
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing.
Of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering. …

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. …

So, they went off together.
But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Christopher Milne, 1920–96

Eric Rauchway [Professor of History, University of California, Davis]:
When [Woodrow Wilson] was a university professor, he said that he feared that teaching woman was atrophying his mental muscles.

Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924):
We have made partners of the women in this war ...
Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?
(Appeal for Women's Suffrage, 1918)

(The American Presidency with Bill Clinton, 2022)

James Webb Space Telescope


The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, CNN, 2022

Rupert Murdoch (1931):
[There’s] a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks:

• to silence conversation,
• to stifle debate,
• to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.

This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility.
To many people have fought too hard, in too many places, for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy. …
There are many goals still to come and challenges to overcome.
Well, I'm far from done.
(Acceptance Speech, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australia Day Foundation UK, Australia House, 23 January 2021)

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Rawls' Theory of Justice

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Bruce Powell

The Road to Freedom

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Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919):
Leave it as it is.
You can not improve on it.
The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you …
(Grand Canyon, 6 May 1903)

We must handle the water, the wood, the grasses … so that we will hand them on to our children and children's children in better and not worse shape than we got them. …
(David Grubin, TR, PBS American Experience, 1996)


Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679):
In [the natural condition of mankind], there is

• no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently
• no Culture of the Earth;
• no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea;
• no commodious Building;
• no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force;
• no Knowledge of the face of the Earth;
• no account of Time;
• no Arts;
• no Letters;
• no Society; and which is worst of all,
• continuall feare, and danger of violent death;

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(Leviathan, 1651)


Silvia Federici is & Alice Markham-Cantor:
[The] following were the crimes of 65-year-old Margaret Harkett, who was hanged at Tyburn, England, in 1585:

Keith Thomas (1933):
She had picked a basket of peas in a neighbor’s field without permission.
Asked to return them, she flung them down in anger; since when, no peas would grow in the field.
Later, William Goodwin’s servants denied her yeast, whereupon his brewing-stand dried up.
She was struck by a bailiff who had caught her taking wood from his master’s ground; the bailiff went mad.
A neighbor refused her a horse; all his horses died.
Another paid her less for a pair of shoes than she asked; later he died.
A gentleman told his servants to refuse her buttermilk; after which they were unable to make butter or cheese.
(Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971)

(Witch Hunts, Scientific American, May 2023, p 48)

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Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.
If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.


The glorification of the State, and the doctrine that it is every citizen's duty to serve the State, are radically against progress and against liberty.
The State, though at present a source of much evil, is also a means to certain good things, and will be needed so long as violent and destructive impulses remain common.
But it is MERELY a means, and a means which needs to be very carefully and sparingly used if it is not to do more harm than good.
It is not the State, but the community, the worldwide community of all human beings present and future, that we ought to serve.
And a good community does not spring from the glory of the State, but

• from the unfettered development of individuals:
• from happiness in daily life,
• from congenial work giving opportunity for whatever constructiveness each man or woman may possess,
• from free personal relations embodying love and taking away the roots of envy in thwarted capacity from affection, and above all
• from the joy of life and its expression in the spontaneous creations of art and science.

It is these things that make an age or a nation worthy of existence, and these things are not to be secured by bowing down before the State.
It is the individual in whom all that is good must be realized, and the free growth of the individual must be the supreme end of a political system which is to re-fashion the world.

(Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1918 / 2014)


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The Psychologist from Hell

Non-Random Evolution

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Richard Dawkins (1941)

[Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) compared] the spontaneous formation by ‘chance’ of a working enzyme is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously having the luck to put together a Boeing 747. …


[To] invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation [for objects such as eyes and protein molecules], is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable’s steepest cliff in one bound.
And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain?
It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection.
The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height.
They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts.
It was Darwin’s great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain. …


Darwinism is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance. …
One stage in the Darwinian process is indeed a chance process—mutation.
Mutation is the process by which fresh genetic variation is offered up for selection and it is usually described as random.
But Darwinians make the fuss that they do about the ‘randomness’ of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection, the other side of the process.
It is not necessary that mutation should be random in order for natural selection to work.
Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not.
Emphasizing that mutation can be random is our way of calling attention to the crucial fact that, by contrast, selection is sublimely and quintessentially non-random.
It is ironic that this emphasis on the contrast between mutation and the non-randomness of selection has led people to think that the whole theory is a theory of chance. …


The Darwinian explanation for why living things are so good at doing what they do is very simple.
They are good because of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors.
But it is not wisdom that they have learned or acquired.
It is wisdom that they chanced upon by lucky random mutations, wisdom that was then selectively, non-randomly, recorded in the genetic database of the species.
In each generation the amount of luck was not very great …
But, because the luck has been accumulated over so many generations, we are eventually very impressed by the apparent improbability of the end product. …
[Heredity] the basic ingredient [of] Darwinism, and hence life, will follow, more or less inevitably, on any planet in the universe where something equivalent to heredity arises. …


The message from the mountain is threefold.
First is the message we have already introduced: there can be no sudden leaps upward—no precipitous increases in ordered complexity.
Second, there can be no going downhill—species can’t get worse as a prelude to getting better.
Third, there may be more than one peak—more than one way of solving the same problem, all flourishing in the world.

Take any part of any animal or plant, and … ask: how that part has been formed by gradual transformation from some other part of an earlier ancestor? …
A famous example is the gradual derivation of our mammalian ear bones …
Fossil evidence clearly shows that these three bones, called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup, are lineally descended from three corresponding bones that, in our reptile ancestors, formed the jaw joint.

(Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996)

Charles Darwin (1809 – 82)

Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved.
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.
Can we wonder, then,

• that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions;
• that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly:

• scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
• rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
• silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

(On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859)

The Final Victory

Christian Krause:
Where cities once bloomed, the ruins reach up to the sky.
The war is our destiny.
We must accept it.
And it is proof of our unique greatness that we are not prepared to give in to our enemies.
Better dead than a slave!
Our task is to mature for victory or death.
(1945)

Margarete Krause:
The Führer is there, where the danger is greatest.
He is true to himself.
Should we not be true to him, unto victory or ruin?
We have no choice!
We must fulfil the destiny he gies us with our bravest hearts, with the best we have, loyal, upright, without hesitating or wavering.
(1945)

Johannes Tuchal {German Resistance Memorial Centre]:
The people supported the dictatorship.
At no point did a majority of Germans ever turn against Hitler.
It was always a very, very small minority of the German people who turned against him and grasped what the dictatorship had done to Germany.

Claus von Stauffenberg (1907 – 44):
It is time for something to be done.
Anyone who dares to do something must accept that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor.
But if he fails to act, he would be a traitor to his own conscience.

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945):
However great the crisis of the moment may be, we will master it in the end through our unbreakable will.
(30 January 1945)


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