B Atkinson Quotes

if the wealthiest fraction of a society feel that they can afford to insulate themselves from the common fate and buy their way out of the common institutions, that is also a form of social isolation.

what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice a problem of riches.

Inequality of outcome among today’s generation is the source of the unfair advantage received by the next generation. If we are concerned about equality of opportunity tomorrow, we need to be concerned about inequality of outcome today.

One of the remarkable things about Life After Life is the way that this formal experimentation is combined with a consistently involving plot. It is as if the writing of B. S. Johnson had been crossed with the better novels of Anthony Trollope. An entire world emerges but shows itself again and again in different lights. It’s an unusual book in many ways: in part a tribute to England and to the resilience of the English character revealed under the stress of wartime; in part a book about love that doesn’t contain a love story but instead celebrates the bond between siblings. It’s a book full of horror vividly described, as in the repeated image of a dress with human arms still inside it, seen in a bombed building. Yet the most memorable passages are those which describe the prewar English countryside before suburbia encroached upon “the flowers that grew in the meadow beyond the copse—flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and oxeye daisies.” Above all, it’s a book about the act of reading itself. As you read it, it asks you to think about your expectations of plot and outcome. The reader desires happiness for certain characters, and Atkinson both challenges and rewards that tendency.

Her name was Mildred Atkinson and she had led a very stupid life. Grade school, high school—Hollywood High but she was no beauty queen—business college and a job in an insurance office. She was twenty-six years old and she was a good girl, her parents sobbed. She played bridge with girl friends and she once taught a Sunday-school class. She didn’t have any particular gentleman friend, she went out with several. Not often, you could bet. The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered. Even then she’d only been subbing for someone else.

it is wrong to see today’s high inequality as the product of forces over which we have no control,

In 1960 the US Census reported that 9 per cent of children lived in a family with one parent; by 2010 this had increased to 27 per cent. In the UK today, there is a similar proportion:

As we saw earlier, over half of UK ordinary shares are owned by “rest of the world” investors. The notion of “social responsibility” applies to a particular society, and it is not clear that overseas shareholders have a long-term commitment to the country in which they are investing.

competition policy should embody explicit distributional concerns. It

Charles B. MacDonald, the author of the Army’s official account, described the retreat:

Salvation appeared to be rising from the sea off beaches Omaha and Gold, where a pair of gigantic “synthetic harbors” took shape after two years of planning under excruciating secrecy. In one of the most ambitious construction projects ever essayed in Britain, twenty thousand workers at a cost of $100 million had labored on the components; another ten thousand now bullied the pieces across the Channel and into position with huge tow bridles, hawsers, and 160 tugs. Each artificial harbor, Mulberry A and Mulberry B—American and British, respectively—would have the port capacity of Gibraltar or Dover.

Indeed, in many OECD countries unemployment was very low. One prime minister of New Zealand claimed to know personally all the unemployed in his country; this may well have been true, since according to International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics, in 1955 there were only fifty-five unemployed people in his country.

less inequality is associated with greater macroeconomic stability and more sustainable growth.

On a standard-of-living approach it may be legitimate to set different poverty lines for men and women, on the grounds that women have on average smaller nutritional needs, and this was indeed the case with the US official poverty line in its early years. The poverty line for 1963 set by Mollie Orshansky for non-farmers under the age of sixty-five was $1,650 a year for a single man but only $1,525 for a single woman.

Plato, who expressed the view that no one should be more than four times richer than the poorest member of the society.

Finally, the third reason for concern about inequality of outcome is that it directly affects equality of opportunity—for the next generation. Today’s ex-post outcomes shape tomorrow’s ex ante playing field: the beneficiaries of inequality of outcome today can transmit an unfair advantage to their children tomorrow. Concern about unequal opportunity, and about limited social mobility, has intensified as the distributions of income and wealth have become more unequal. This is because the impact of family background on outcome depends both on the strength of the relationship between background and outcome and on the extent of inequality among family backgrounds. Inequality of outcome among today’s generation is the source of the unfair advantage received by the next generation. If we are concerned about equality of opportunity tomorrow, we need to be concerned about inequality of outcome today.