Period Poverty Quotes

Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty.

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

There's a story behind every "I don't believe in love" "Period

Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him.

To move from poverty to middle class or middle class to wealth, an individual must give up relationships for achievement (at least for some period of time). The issue is time. There is not enough time to have both.

A remarkable thing about new technologies in the Roman period is that their creation and spread seem to have been driven by the state. This is good news, until the government decides that it is not interested in technological development—and all-too-common occurrence due to the fear of creative destruction.

The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty—period.

I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.

Even that great poverty which had been and remains mine let up for a few days. I was not, as it happens, opposed to this poverty: I accepted to pay the price for not being a slave to life, to settle for the right I had assumed once and for all to not express any ideas but my own. We were not many in doing this… Poverty passed by in the distance, made lovelier and almost justified, a little like what has been called, in the case of a painter who was one of your first friends, the blue period. It seemed the almost inevitable consequence of my refusal to behave the way almost all the others did, whether on one side or another. This poverty, whether you had the time to dread it or not, imagine it was only the other side of the miraculous coin of your existence: the Night of the Sunflower would have been less radiant without it.

Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.

The goodness of the land favored the enrichment of particular individuals, and thus created faction which proved a fertile source of ruin. It also invited invasion. [5] Accordingly Attica,5a from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction, [6] never changed its inhabitants. And here is no minor example of my assertion that the migrations were the cause of there being no correspondent growth in other parts.

In periods when shallow speculation is rife, one might think that metaphysics would shine forth, at least, by the brilliance of its modest reserve. But the very age that is unaware of the majesty of metaphysics, likewise overlooks its poverty. Its majesty? It is wisdom. Its poverty? It is human science.

The greatest spiritual leaders in history have all preached love for others as the basis for all happiness, and never did they accompany such mandates with a list of unlovable actions or deeds. They never said, love everybody except for the gays. Love everybody except for the homeless. Love everybody except for the drug users. Love everybody except for the gang members, or those covered in ink, or the spouse abusers. They didn’t tell us it was okay to love everybody with the exception of the “trailer trash,” those living in poverty, or the illegal immigrants. They didn’t tell us it was okay to love everybody except for our ex-lovers, our lovers’ ex lovers, or our ex-lovers’ lovers. The mandate was pretty damn clear, wasn’t it? Love others. Period.

Yes, Doc, I'm not feeling too well.' Which was true enough, Kwang Meng considered. He had honestly not been feeling too well since he contracted poverty, loneliness, boredom, sexual frustration and periodic coughs and colds. Not to speak of his dreary job.

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day's edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the 'Dear Leader'—Little Boy's exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the 'hardship period' through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.

Accordingly Attica, from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction,

The American economy is less productive today than it was in the postwar period, when unions were at peak strength.

...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

A considerable period elapsed before I discovered one of the causes of the uneasiness of this amiable family: it was poverty, and they suffered that evil in a very distressing degree.

Many centuries ago, I discovered your world by accident. After a long and wonderful career of helping people (like Cinderella) achieve their dreams, I was only eager to do more. So one day I closed my eyes, waved my magic wand, and said, “I wish to go someplace where people need me the most.” When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the Land of Stories. When I first arrived, your world was enduring a time known as the Dark Ages, and there couldn’t be a better description. It was a period consumed with poverty, plague, and war. People were suffering and starving, and they were very doubtful that conditions would get any better.

There is no period in history when it would have been better to be alive than today. People who fantasise about a romantic past imagine themselves living in Pharaoh’s court, Caesar’s palace, Plato’s athenaeum, a medieval knight’s manor, a king’s castle, a queen’s château, an emperor’s citadel, a cardinal’s cathedral. But the cold, hard reality is that 99.99 per cent of all the people who ever lived existed in what we would today consider squalid poverty.

I anticipate with joy the approaching period when the stigmas of poverty and pride so liberally bestowed on the highlanders by our southern gentry will be as inapplicable to the inhabitants of that country as of any in the island.

Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression.

Industrial innovations are costly, and managers must justify their high cost by producing measurable proof of their superiority... [P]eriodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief that anything new will be proven better. This belief has become an integral part of the modern world view. It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants than it satisfies. If new things are made because they are better, then the things most people use are not quite good. New models constantly renovate poverty. The consumer feels the lag between what he has and what he ought to get. He believes that products can be made measurably more valuable and allows himself to be constantly re-educated for their consumption. The "better" replaces the "good" as the fundamental normative concept.

While the Goddess of Suffering took me in her arms, often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this will was victorious. I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still capable of being hard. And even more, I exalt it for tearing me away from the hollowness of comfortable life; for drawing the mother's darling out of his soft downy bed and giving him "Dame Care" for a new mother; for hurling me, despite all resistance, into a world of misery and poverty, thus making me acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.

While the Goddess of Suffering took me in her arms, often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this will was victorious. I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still capable of being hard. And even more, I exalt it for tearing me away from the hollowness of comfortable life; for drawing the mother's darling out of his soft downy bed and giving him "Dame Care" for a new mother; for hurling me, despite all resistance, into a world of misery and poverty, thus making me acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.

It’s true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor”—period. (Luke 6:20) In Luke’s Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of “in spirit” is omitted. In Luke, Jesus blesses the poor without reference to what kind of poverty it is. The truth is this: Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength. If we want to position ourselves to receive Christ’s blessing, we must identify an area of need and cry out for grace from there. If we think we have no area of weakness, need, or poverty, we essentially have no need for Jesus.

In 1997, 42 percent of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By 2017, in India, that share had dropped to 12 percent: there were 270 million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier. In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0.7 percent over the same period,

I had never felt that Egypt was really Africa, but now that our route had taken us across the Sahara, I could look down from my window seat and see trees, and bushes, rivers and dense forest. It all began here. The jumble of poverty-stricken children sleeping in rat-infested tenements or abandoned cars. The terrifying moan of my grandmother, ‘Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.’ The drugged days and alcoholic nights of men for whom hope had not been born. The loneliness of women who would never know appreciation or a mite’s share of honor. Here, there, along the banks of that river, someone was taken, tied with ropes, shackled with chains, forced to march for weeks carrying the double burden of neck irons and abysmal fear. In that large clump of trees, looking like wood moss from the plane’s great height, boys and girls had been hunted like beasts, caught and tethered together. Sacrificial lambs on the altar of greed. America’s period of orgiastic lynchings had begun on yonder broad savannah.

The assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Hyman Bookbinder, in a frank statement on December 29, 1966, declared that the long-range costs of adequately implementing programs to fight poverty, ignorance and slums will reach one trillion dollars. He was not awed or dismayed by this prospect but instead pointed out that the growth of the gross national product during the same period makes this expenditure comfortably possible. It is, he said, as simple as this: “The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.” Furthermore, he predicted that unless a “substantial sacrifice is made by the American people,” the nation can expect further deterioration of the cities, increased antagonisms between races and continued disorders in the streets. He asserted that people are not informed enough to give adequate support to antipoverty programs, and he leveled a share of the blame at the government because it “must do more to get people to understand the size of the problem.

About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time. This warming seems to have coincided with rapid increases in human populations as the global warming led to expanding animal populations and much greater availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put into rapid reverse at about 14,000 BC, by a period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 BC, global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius in less than a decade, and have since stayed high. Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer.

The reality being that they’d lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by. And it was just that: getting by. Barely, and no more. Because they’d also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty. Also without anyone noticing.

As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.

The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.

Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette.

Mr. Brock’s account of his adventure in London has given the reader some short notice of his friend, Mr Macshane. Neither the wits nor the principles of that worthy Ensign were particularly firm: for drink, poverty, and a crack on the skull at the battle of Steenkirk had served to injure the former; and the Ensign was not in his best days possessed of any share of the latter. He had really, at one period, held such a rank in the army, but pawned his half-pay for drink and play; and for many years past had lived, one of the hundred thousand miracles of our city, upon nothing that anybody knew of, or of which he himself could give any account. Who has not a catalogue of these men in his list? who can tell whence comes the occasional clean shirt, who supplies the continual means of drunkenness, who wards off the daily-impending starvation? Their life is a wonder from day to day: their breakfast a wonder; their dinner a miracle; their bed an interposition of Providence. If you and I, my dear sir, want a shilling tomorrow, who will give it us? Will OUR butchers give us mutton-chops? will OUR laundresses clothe us in clean linen? — not a bone or a rag. Standing as we do (may it be ever so) somewhat removed from want,[*] is there one of us who does not shudder at the thought of descending into the lists to combat with it, and

Lieutenant Robert’s story was similar to that of all the French; instead of making fun of the poverty of those fine soldiers, people were sorry for them, and became fond of them. This period of unexpected happiness and elation lasted but two short years; the delirium was so great and so universal that it would be impossible for me to convey any idea of it, other than by making the following factual and profound observation: these people had been living in boredom for a hundred years.

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation. It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the only inevitable, logical and justifiable return. To escape from ultimate democracy is as impossible as it is for ignorant poverty and crime to rule forever.

[A]t that time, my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but today I see in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate took me in her arms and often threatened to smash me; but my will grew stronger as the obstacles increased, and in the end, my will was triumphant... I'm thankful for that period in my life because it hardened me and enabled me to be as tough as I am now... Though I fought against it as too hard a fate, I'm grateful that I was thrust into a world of misery and poverty, and thus came to know the people for whom I was later to fight.

Measured in terms of the World Bank poverty standard, the number of poor people in China fell from 652 million to 135 million between 1981 and 2004 - in other words, more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty. The number of poor people in the developing world as a whole declined by only 400 million over the same period. In other words, but for China, there would have been an increase in the number of poor people in the developing world. No wonder a World Bank report said that "a fall in the number of poor of this magnitude over such a short period is without historical precedent.

The history of epidemics in human populations has always been closely connected to cities. From the Great Plague of Athens (430 BC) to the COVID-19 pandemic, cities have played a unique role in the lives of epidemics that affect human populations. The increased population density provides the pathogen with a vastly increased likelihood that during a given infectious period, an infected individual will make contact with a susceptible individual. Overcrowding and urban poverty also directly affect other epidemic processes, e.g. attracting vectors who thrive on the byproducts of urban human existence.

The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1900 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters. Between 2000 and 2012 alone, rents rose by 6 percent. During that same period, the real income of the middling renter in the United States fell 13 percent. What was once a fissure has become a wide chasm that often can't be bridged.

Two decades after its first democratic election, South Africa ranks as the most unequal country on Earth.1 A host of policy tools could patch each of South Africa’s ills in piecemeal fashion, yet one force would unquestionably improve them all: economic growth.2 Diminished growth lowers living standards. With 5 percent annual growth, it takes just fourteen years to double a country’s GDP; with 3 percent growth, it takes twenty-four years. In general, emerging economies with a low asset base need to grow faster and accumulate a stock of assets more quickly than more developed economies in which basic living standards are already largely met. Meaningfully increasing per capita income is a critical way to lift people’s living standards and take them out of poverty, thereby truly changing the developmental trajectory of the country. South Africa has managed to push growth above a mere 3 percent only four times since the transition from apartheid, and it has remained all but stalled under 5 percent since 2008. And the forecast for growth in years to come hovers around a paltry 1 percent. Because South Africa’s population has been growing around 1.5 percent per year since 2008, the country’s per capita income has been stagnant over the period.

A battery of laws that effectively criminalize homelessness is sweeping the nation, embraced by places like Orlando, Fla.; Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Manchester, N.H. By the end of 2014, 100 cities had made it a crime to sit on a sidewalk, a 43 percent increase over 2011, according to a survey of 187 major American cities by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. The number of cities that banned sleeping in cars jumped to 81 from 37 during that same period. The crackdown comes amid the gentrification that is transforming cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington and Honolulu, contributing to higher housing costs and increased homelessness.

words ‘ebed and doulos has been undertaken with particular attention to their meaning in each specific context. Thus in Old Testament times, one might enter slavery either voluntarily (e.g., to escape poverty or to pay off a debt) or involuntarily (e.g., by birth, by being captured in battle, or by judicial sentence). Protection for all in servitude in ancient Israel was provided by the Mosaic Law. In New Testament times, a doulos is often best described as a “bondservant”—that is, as someone bound to serve his master for a specific (usually lengthy) period of time, but also as someone who might nevertheless own property, achieve social advancement, and even be released or purchase his freedom. The ESV usage

I later learned from the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center that there were some seven hundred Confederate memorial monuments and statues erected well after the Civil War. According to its research, "two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African-Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second spike began in the 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.

Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.

Tight control over the alchemy of official “Staliniana” has created false and doubly majestic images of Stalin and his accomplishments.39 These images outlive the man himself and have an appeal even in contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the stresses of the transitional period, corruption, poverty, and glaring social inequality all feed the longing for a social utopia. A significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past. Popular images of the greatness of the Stalinist empire—of equality and the fight against corruption, of the joy and purity of this distant life undone by “enemies”—are exploited by unscrupulous commentators and politicians. How great is the danger that a blend of historical ignorance, bitterness, and social discontent will provide fertile ground for pro-Stalinist lies and distortions to take root?

Still, it became a big challenge to train our bank workers to overcome opposition from political and religious leaders without endangering their safety and that of the women they were serving. We tried a variety of techniques, and after a few years we learned that our staff members should quietly go about their business in one tiny corner of the village. If just a handful of desperate women make a leap of faith and join Grameen, everything changes. They get their money, start to earn additional income, and nothing terrible happens to them. Others begin to show interest. We find that borrowing groups form quickly after the initial period of resistance. When the ice finally breaks, women who originally said no to us begin to say, “Why not? I need money, too. In fact, I need the money more desperately than those who already joined. And I can make better use of it!” Gradually people come to accept us, and opposition dies off. But in every new village, it is a battle to begin. After

Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had settled on the Lower East Side of New York City after arriving at Ellis Island in the Upper New York Bay. Between 1881 and 1914, more than 2 million Jews—one third of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe—came to the United States in flight from poverty and persecution. At this point in America’s racial history, the Jewish immigrants were not considered white. To the contrary, as medical historian Sander Gilman notes, the “general consensus of the ethnological literature of the late nineteenth century was that the Jews were ‘black’ or, at least, ‘swarthy.’ ”27 One anthropologist of the period explained the “predominant mouth of some Jews being the result of the presence of black blood.” Most Americans viewed Jews as a biologically inferior race stricken by a host of hereditary diseases that resulted from “inbreeding” and “racial incest.”28 Tay-Sachs disease was highlighted as a racial illness demonstrating that Jews were innately degenerate. Jews were susceptible to developing Tay-Sachs, known as a “Hebraic debility,” because, according to Dr. Isador Coriat, “the Jew possesses certain racial characteristics of organic inferiority through which he differs from the non-Jew.”29 The inferior organ Coriat meant was the Jewish brain.

Base your understanding of the world on data, rather than journalism. Journalism is a highly non random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine, in the sense of Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic; namely - our sense of risk, danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes, images and narratives that are available in memory. A lot of good things are either things that "don't happen" (like a country at peace, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news), or things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year, and then compound (like the decline of extreme poverty). We can be unaware, out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many (although not all) things have gone better (not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better... and that paradoxically, as I've cheekily put it, progressives hate progress), but also that the best possible case for progress - that is, for striving for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive - is not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past; and that means: why should it stop now?

We are still in the Age of Rationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and is now rapidly nearing its close. We are all its creatures whether we know and wish it or not. The word is familiar enough, but who knows how much it implies? It is the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock. It is the period in which everyone can read and write and therefore must have his say and always "knows better." This type of mind is obsessed by concepts - the new gods of the Age - and it exercises its wits on the world as it sees it. "It is no good," it says; "we could make it better; here goes, let us set up a program for a better world!" Nothing could be easier for persons of intelligence, and no doubt seems to be felt that this world will then materialize of itself. It is given a label, "Human Progress," and now that it has a name, it is. Those who doubt it are narrow reactionaries, heretics, and, what is worse, persons devoid of democratic virtue: away with them! In this wise the fear of reality was overcome by intellectual arrogance, the darkness that comes from ignorance of all things of life, spiritual poverty, lack of reverence, and, finally, world-alien stupidity - for there is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

Freed slaves returned to Africa settled in a section of what was known as the “Pepper Coast” and on July 26, 1847, issued a Declaration of Independence and established a constitution based on the political principles denoted in the United States Constitution. In doing so they established the independent Republic of Liberia. Law and Order was something the ruling class of Liberians prided themselves on. The Americo Liberians, as they called themselves, were uber-Conservatives and had a glorified picture of what the American government was like. As Conservatives they saw themselves living a privileged lifestyle, sustained by their faith in God and the blessings that had been bestowed upon them by this deity. Amongst themselves there was much talk about the subjects of freedom, liberty, democracy and independence. They felt that these idealisms were deserved because of their exceptionalism. Taking a page from the concept of American exceptionalism, they fantasied of their very own Liberian exceptionalism, completely forgetting the indigenous natives living among them. Whereas the Americo Liberians lived an affluent lifestyle reflecting the antebellum era in the Southern tier of the United States, the local blacks, for the greatest part lived in squalor. In 1980, a violent military coup shattered the way of life in Liberia. Led by army Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, the country’s ruling group of Americo-Liberians were brutally overthrown and frequently executed. Doe's term as President of Liberia led to a period of civil wars, resulting in the devastation of Liberia’s economy. Liberia became one of the most impoverished nations in the world, in which most of the population still lives below the international poverty line.

Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest. I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much. Ressler’s theories on the childhoods of the worst killers in America have an unlikely ideological supporter, psychiatrist and child-advocate Alice Miller. Her emotionally evocative books (including The Drama Of The Gifted Child and The Untouched Key) make clear that if a child has some effective human contact at particularly significant periods, some recognition of his worth and value, some “witness” to his experience, this can make an extraordinary difference. I have learned that the kindness of a teacher, a coach, a policeman, a neighbor, the parent of a friend, is never wasted. These moments are likely to pass with neither the child nor the adult fully knowing the significance of the contribution. No ceremony attaches to the moment that a child sees his own worth reflected in the eyes of an encouraging adult. Though nothing apparent marks the occasion, inside that child a new view of self might take hold. He is not just a person deserving of neglect or violence, not just a person who is a burden to the sad adults in his life, not just a child who fails to solve his family’s problems, who fails to rescue them from pain or madness or addiction or poverty or unhappiness. No, this child might be someone else, someone whose appearance before this one adult revealed specialness or lovability, or value. This value might be revealed through appreciation of a child’s artistic talent, physical ability, humor, courage, patience, curiosity, scholarly skills, creativity, resourcefulness, responsibility, energy, or any of the many attributes that children bring us in such abundance.

It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects. If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects. The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms. Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used. When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth. Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use. The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride. Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time. The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty. Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it. As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate. The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West. Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan. Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ). The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ). Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment. The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.

Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught.

During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more. From the North Korean government’s point of view, their country desperately needed rebuilding after the Korean War. What could be more convenient than an influx of workers?

Commented Nirad Chaudhuri very appropriately: “…In the Indian nationalist movement there was not only a total absence of positive and constructive ideas, but even of thinking. These shortcomings were to have their disastrous consequence in 1947… The intellectual poverty of the nationalist movement gradually became intellectual bankruptcy, but nobody perceived that because the hatred of the British rule left no room for rational ideas… Over the whole period with which I am dealing [1921-52] none of them [Gandhi, Nehru…] put forth a single idea about what was to follow British rule… What was even more astonishing, none of these leaders were qualified to put forward any positive idea because none of them had any worthwhile knowledge of Indian history, life, and culture…”{NC/31-2}

In 1997, 42 percent of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By 2017, in India, that share had dropped to 12 percent: there were 270 million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier. In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0.7 percent over the same period

Lenin's difficulty with Marxian revisionism and those who accorded an important role to liberals is symptomatic of a doctrinal and psychological problem peculiar to Marxism and absent in the old narodnik creed. Marx had revealed the systematic necessity of class exploitation. Capitalism was by its very nature savagely unjust. Since most revolutionaries were not simply thinking machines looking for the most rational foundation for production and distribution but possessed of "religious" attitudes, or, in any case, of a sense of mission, they found in Marx and Engels the description of a morally intolerable system in which the wealth of the few could only be gotten at the expense of the poverty of the many. On the other hand, Marx posited the necessary contribution of each historical phase to economic and social progress. The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur. Capitalism was a necessary evil on the way to socialism. But Marx had no blueprint for its many historical variations, only his laws of capitalism and their consequences. Neither he nor Engels had a revolutionary timetable either, and it was possible for their followers to lapse into a purely "scientific" and morally slothful type of Marxism, an academic Marxism without a sense of urgency about revolutionary tasks to be performed. On the other hand, the most morally mobilized would find ways to hasten capitalism's final hour, even while separating themselves from the narodniki, whose revolutionism was "unscientific." Thus, during a period of mainly doctrinal debates and sectarianism, revolutionaries who were temperamentally quite close to each other engaged in combat; but when the real revolutionary moment arrived, they often found themselves working together.

During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more.

The negative impact chronic absenteeism has on school success is increased because students who are chronically absent in one year are often chronically absent in multiple years. As a result, particularly in high poverty areas, significant numbers of students are missing amounts of school that are staggering: on the order of six months to over a year, over a five year period.

Solitude is a time when you go into a determined period of making the best of your time.

Solitude time is a period when you actually turn your time into some treasure.

misery that is India” not on the Nehruvian socialistic poverty-perpetuating policies, not on the disastrous Dynasty-driven Congress rule for most of the period since independence, not on the abysmally poor political leadership, but on “Indian-ness; Indian characteristics”—a bizarre self-flagellating racist self-attack. And this tribe has much to admire in the British and the British colonial rule in India. Dictionary definition of a racist is “a person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others”. You have the racists like the “White Supremacists”. But, what do you call these “reverse racists” who believe “their race is inferior to others”—“brown inferiorists”!

A Phillips serial (in contrast to the jerky, obvious, and corny melodramas of the Hummerts) usually contained just one main scene in each installment, peopled by only two characters. Her scenes were sparse, the settings lean, the people clear without the endless repetition of names that filled a Hummert soap. Phillips was the first serial writer to effectively blend her soaps. Her popular Today’s Children was phased out of its first run in 1938 by having its characters sit around the radio and listen to The Woman in White, which replaced it. When three of her soaps were scheduled consecutively and sponsored by General Mills in 1944, Phillips expanded this idea of integrated storylines. The major characters of the resurrected Today’s Children drifted through The Guiding Light, and mutual visits with The Woman in White were also common. Ed Prentiss, who was then playing Ned Holden of The Guiding Light, was used as a “master of ceremonies” for the hour, a guide through the intricate framework of the three soaps. The fourth quarter-hour was filled with nondenominational religious music, Hymns of All Churches. At one time during this period, Phillips was considering breaking the traditional lengths, running stories of ten to 20 minutes each rather than the precise quarter-hours. After a season of this experimenting, the block was dismantled, and The Guiding Light went into its postwar phase. In the earliest phase, it followed the Ruthledge family. The Rev. John Ruthledge had come to Five Points two decades before, establishing himself and his church as the driving force in the community. This had not been easy. Five Points was a “melting pot of humanity,” as Phillips described it, with Poles, Slavs, Swedes, Germans, Irish, and Jews living in uneasy proximity. As one character described it, it was a neighborhood of “poverty, gossipy neighbors, sordid surroundings,” with “no chance to get ahead.” Ruthledge had run into stiff neighborhood opposition, but now he was accepted and even beloved. His Little Church of Five Points had become popularly known as the Church of the Good Samaritan:

Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest. I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much. Ressler’s theories on the childhoods of the worst killers in America have an unlikely ideological supporter, psychiatrist and child-advocate Alice Miller. Her emotionally evocative books (including The Drama Of The Gifted Child and The Untouched Key) make clear that if a child has some effective human contact at particularly significant periods, some recognition of his worth and value, some “witness” to his experience, this can make an extraordinary difference. I have learned that the kindness of a teacher, a coach, a policeman, a neighbor, the parent of a friend, is never wasted. These moments are likely to pass with neither the child nor the adult fully knowing the significance of the contribution. No ceremony attaches to the moment that a child sees his own worth reflected in the eyes of an encouraging adult. Though nothing apparent marks the occasion, inside that child a new view of self might take hold. He is not just a person deserving of neglect or violence, not just a person who is a burden to the sad adults in his life, not just a child who fails to solve his family’s problems, who fails to rescue them from pain or madness or addiction or poverty or unhappiness. No, this child might be someone else, someone whose appearance before this one adult revealed specialness or lovability, or value. This value might be revealed through appreciation of a child’s artistic talent, physical ability, humor, courage, patience, curiosity, scholarly skills, creativity, resourcefulness, responsibility, energy, or any of the many attributes that children bring us in such abundance. I had a fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Conway, who fought monsters in me. He showed kindness and recognized some talent in me at just the period when violence was consuming my family. He gave me some alternative designs for self-image, not just the one children logically deduce from mistreatment (“If this is how I am treated, then this is the treatment I am worthy of”). It might literally be a matter of a few hours with a person whose kindness reconnects the child to an earlier experience of self, a self that was loved and valued and encouraged.

Page 52-53: Classical Jewish society has no peasants, and in this it differs profoundly from earlier Jewish societies in the two centers, Palestine and Mesopotamia. It is difficult for us, in modern times, to understand what this means. We have to make an effort to imagine what serfdom was like; the enormous difference in literacy, let alone education, between village and town throughout this period; the incomparably greater freedom enjoyed by all the small minority who were not peasants – in order to realize that during the whole of the classical period [800-1790 AD.] the Jews, in spite of all the persecutions to which they were subjected, formed an integral part of the privileged classes. Jewish historiography, especially in English, is misleading on this point inasmuch as it tends to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish discrimination. Both were real enough at times; but the poorest Jewish craftsman, peddler, landlord’s steward or petty cleric was immeasurably better off than a serf. … [It is significant that] prior to the beginning of the great Jewish migration of modern times (around 1880), a large majority of all Jews were living in [areas [where serfdom persisted] and that their most important social function there was to mediate the oppression of the peasants on behalf of the nobility and the Crown. Everywhere, classical Judaism developed hatred and contempt for agriculture as an occupation and for peasants as a class, even more than for other Gentiles – a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies.

When a country just emerges from poverty, it possesses cheap labor; it's the best period for everyone, including the poor. This sweet spot occurs only once in a civilization. China was in that position two decades ago, and now it's India and Bangladesh. Enjoy this advantageous position as long as it lasts. The labor costs will soon rise, and we will face the same fate as the West. On paper, these countries may have higher GDP and better HDI, but in reality, people cannot afford basic necessities such as food, housing, healthcare, and education.

But Spain in the immediate post-war period remained a place of frighteningly separate social worlds. Alongside savage poverty and widespread terror, there existed other milieux of ease, security, and order regained. As Republican women were shaved and dosed with castor oil by the ‘victors’ of their villages, or transported with their children across Spain in cattletrucks, or raped in police stations, women of the southern landed aristocracy or from affluent provincial middle-class families in Spain’s conservative heartland celebrated the redemption of their private family sphere and revelled in the upsurge of public Catholic ceremonial. As one woman who had been close to the conservative Catholic party, CEDA, commented resonantly many decades later: there was an absence of freedom, but logically for those of us who had well-ordered lives, those of us who were professionals and saw things from the personal viewpoint only, we felt very much at ease and happy.

the lower classes were still plagued by poverty, and most of them still lived in rural villages

In 1955, government spending accounted for roughly 22 percent of the economy, and it stayed that way for years. But during the last quarter of the twentieth century, public investments began to decline. By 2021, government spending on all public goods—including national defense, transportation, health expenditures, and programs to ease the pain of poverty—made up just 17.6 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, personal consumption grew from about 60 percent of GDP to 69 percent over that same period.[

Bill weathered the slump because he had money in the bank, and he had money in the bank because he lived in fear of his past - the grim poverty that had meant plastering and wall painting. He had been married to Lucille then, and I noticed that as time went on Bill talked about that period in his life with increasing gloom, as if in hindsight it had grown darker and more painful than when he was actually living it. Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odours, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

For, apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature. Among other things my proof of this is, that I always instinctively select the proper remedy when my spiritual or bodily health is low; whereas the decadent, as such, invariably chooses those remedies which are bad for him. As a whole I was sound, but in certain details I was a decadent. That energy with which I sentenced myself to absolute solitude, and to a severance from all those conditions in life to which I had grown accustomed; my discipline of myself, and my refusal to allow myself to be pampered, to be tended hand and foot, and to be doctored—all this betrays the absolute certainty of my instincts respecting what at that time was most needful to me. I placed myself in my own hands, I restored myself to health: the first condition of success in such an undertaking, as every physiologist will admit, is that at bottom a man should be sound. An intrinsically morbid nature cannot become healthy. On the other hand, to an intrinsically sound nature, illness may even constitute a powerful stimulus to life, to a surplus of life. It is in this light that I now regard the long period of illness that I endured: it seemed as if I had discovered life afresh, my own self included. I tasted all good things and even trifles in a way in which it was not easy for others to taste them—out of my Will to Health and to Life I made my philosophy.... For this should be thoroughly understood; it was during those years in which my vitality reached its lowest point that I ceased from being a pessimist: the instinct of self-recovery forbade my holding to a philosophy of poverty and desperation. Now, by what signs are Nature's lucky strokes recognised among men? They are recognised by the fact that any such lucky stroke gladdens our senses; that he is carved from one integral block, which is hard, sweet, and fragrant as well. He enjoys that only which is good for him; his pleasure, his desire, ceases when the limits of that which is good for him are overstepped. He divines remedies for injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; that which does not kill him makes him stronger. He instinctively gathers his material from all he sees, hears, and experiences. He is a selective principle; he rejects much. He is always in his own company, whether his intercourse be with books, with men, or with natural scenery; he honours the things he chooses, the things he acknowledges, the things he trusts. He reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that tardiness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him—he tests the approaching stimulus; he would not dream of meeting it half-way. He believes neither in "ill-luck" nor "guilt"; he can digest himself and others; he knows how to forget—he is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage. Lo then! I am the very reverse of a decadent, for he whom I have just described is none other than myself.

The records of a relatively small bank, C. Hoare’s & Co. in London, which have survived intact from the period 1702–1724, illustrate this point. Though the bank did lend money to aristocrats and lords, fully two-thirds of the biggest borrowers from Hoare’s over this period were not from the privileged social classes.

Though the early growth in Botswana relied on meat exports, things changed dramatically when diamonds were discovered. The management of natural resources in Botswana also differed markedly from that in other African nations. During the colonial period, the Tswana chiefs had attempted to block prospecting for minerals in Bechuanaland because they knew that if Europeans discovered precious metals or stones, their autonomy would be over. The first big diamond discovery was under Ngwato land, Seretse Khama’s traditional homeland. Before the discovery was announced, Khama instigated a change in the law so that all subsoil mineral rights were vested in the nation, not the tribe. This ensured that diamond wealth would not create great inequities in Botswana. It also gave further impetus to the process of state centralization as diamond revenues could now be used for building a state bureaucracy and infrastructure and for investing in education. In Sierra Leone and many other sub-Saharan African nations, diamonds fueled conflict between different groups and helped to sustain civil wars, earning the label Blood Diamonds for the carnage brought about by the wars fought over their control. In Botswana, diamond revenues were managed for the good of the nation.

Consider the divergent paths of the United States and Mexico. Blaming this disparity on the ignorance of the leaders of the two nations is, at best, highly implausible. It wasn’t differences in knowledge or intentions between John Smith and Cortés that laid the seeds of divergence during the colonial period, and it wasn’t differences in knowledge between later U.S. presidents, such as Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, and Porfirio Díaz that made Mexico choose economic institutions that enriched elites at the expense of the rest of society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries while Roosevelt and Wilson did the opposite. Rather, it was the differences in the institutional constraints the countries’ presidents and elites were facing. Similarly, leaders of African nations that have languished over the last half century under insecure property rights and economic institutions, impoverishing much of their populations, did not allow this to happen because they thought it was good economics; they did so because they could get away with it and enrich themselves at the expense of the rest, or because they thought it was good politics, a way of keeping themselves in power by buying the support of crucial groups or elites. The

Research has linked such feelings of powerlessness to the kinds of health problems plaguing Bayview and many other communities around the world. This research shows that members of poor communities do not merely experience higher levels of violence; they are also more likely to have high blood pressure and frequent periods of increased heart rate, which contribute to a higher mortality rate. What’s more, similar health problems have been shown to afflict the least powerful members of nonhuman primate species. Taken together, these and other findings suggest that the psychology of powerlessness can wreak havoc on people who sit low on the totem pole of any social structure. “Poverty, and the poor health of the poor, is about much more than simply not having enough money,” says Robert M. Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University. “It’s about the stressors caused by a society that tolerates leaving so many of its members so far behind.

It’s still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty-year increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers—not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of infectious disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population living in poverty; number of rooms per person; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time—the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn’t restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years—twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth-century French infant4 would be at significantly greater risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read.

In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman Empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of adult males and 40 percent of adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write. Given

In the South Wollo zone of northeastern Ethiopia, 80 percent of rural farming households earn less than $50 per year, and periodic drought is one reason they remain trapped in deep poverty.

The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on humanitarian grounds. But in my opinion, what they were actually pursuing was opportunism of the most vile and cynical kind. Look at the facts. During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more.

It is a well-known fact that Henry Ford began his business career under the handicap of poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance. It is an equally well-known fact that, within the inconceivably short period of ten years, Mr. Ford mastered these three handicaps, and that within twenty-five years he made himself one of the richest men in America.

The first basic income pilot in a developing country was implemented in the small Namibian village of Otjivero-Omitara in 2008–9, covering about 1,000 people.40 The study was carried out by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition, with money raised from foundations and individual donations. Everyone in the village, including children but excluding over-sixties already receiving a social pension, was given a very small basic income of N$100 a month (worth US$12 at the time or about a third of the poverty line), and the outcomes compared with the previous situation. The results included better nutrition, particularly among children, improved health and greater use of the local primary healthcare centre, higher school attendance, increased economic activity and enhanced women’s status.41 The methodology would not have satisfied those favouring randomized control trials that were coming into vogue at the time. No control village was chosen to allow for the effects of external factors, in the country or economy, because those directing the pilot felt it was immoral to impose demands, in the form of lengthy surveys, on people who were being denied the benefit of the basic income grants. However, there were no reported changes in policy or outside interventions during the period covered by the pilot, and confidence in the results is justified both by the observed behaviour, and by recipients’ opinions in successive surveys. School attendance went up sharply, though there was no pressure on parents to send their children to school. The dynamics were revealing. Although the primary school was a state school, parents were required to pay a small fee for each child. Before the pilot, registration and attendance were low, and the school had too little income from fees to pay for basics, which made the school unattractive and lowered teachers’ morale. Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the morale and, probably, the capacity of its teachers. There was also a substantial fall in petty economic crime such as stealing vegetables and killing small livestock for food. This encouraged villagers to plant more vegetables, buy more fertilizer and rear more livestock. These dynamic community-wide economic effects are usually overlooked in conventional evaluations, and would not be spotted if cash was given only to a random selection of individuals or households and evaluated as a randomized control trial. Another outcome, unplanned and unanticipated, was that villagers voluntarily set up a Basic Income Advisory Committee, led by the local primary school teacher and the village nurse, to advise people on how to spend or save their basic income money. The universal basic income thus induced collective action, and there was no doubt that this community activism increased the effectiveness of the basic incomes.

In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes, and tense standoffs with company heads. Their efforts paid off. Worker pay climbed, CEO compensation was reined in, and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.

From 1990 to 2013 there was an astonishing 95 percent drop in East Asia’s extreme poverty, in a total population that grew from 1.6 billion to 2 billion during that period.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

... there is a difference between reading about the end of the world and actually seeing it with your own eyes. Watching a kingdom, drunk on sugar and youth culture and hippie nostalgia and reality TV and porno dreams and Hollywood lies, shrivel up and fall apart; it's like watching Alexandria and Constantinople and Rome and Athens all crumble to ash. Rising poverty. The annual migration inland, as the unemployment and homelessness and hopelessness on the West Coast spread like poison through a society that hadn't yet recovered from the pandemic. And on top of that, the forest fires that began earlier and ended later each year, meaning that a period that had once stretched from June to September now spanned April to November. Some parts of California were now more or less uninhabitable, there were places the insurance companies refused to cover, with homeowners unable to renew their existing policies, and I knew enough to understand that once the money starts leaving a place, the people follow.

Imbued still with the honour accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains why it is their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses, but their principal cause. So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of my childhood and youth, and also for many of my real-life heroes during the same period: they all gave the impression that, because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth that they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyse the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic licence to be paralysed.

Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it, too, expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth. For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world. The screen he projects over life is painful because life itself is painful. So it is, too, for the residents of Istanbul as they resign themselves to poverty and depression. Imbued still with the honour accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains why it is their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses, but their principal cause. So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of my childhood and youth, and also for many of my real-life heroes during the same period: they all gave the impression that, because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth that they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyse the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic licence to be paralysed.

Table manners were of importance to the higher classes, although the poorest were more concerned with survival than etiquette. In a book on manners, the Reverend John Trusler warned how to avoid appearing low class or impolite: ‘Eating quick, or very slow, at meals, is characteristic of the vulgar; the first infers poverty, that you have not had a good meal for some time; the last, if abroad [dining out], that you dislike your entertainment: if at home [and eating slowly], that you are rude enough to set before your friends what you cannot eat yourself.

Allied shipping repairs gave a great boost to South African steel manufacturing. By 1943, manufacturing had overtaken mining as the largest employer and producer of wealth in South Africa. With increasing land restrictions and poverty in the rural areas, black people were already pouring into the rising manufacturing centres of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. It was a major period of black urbanisation in South Africa, and a time of great opportunities for some. But it was also a time of growing black urban poverty and unemployment, as the numbers seeking work far outstripped the numbers of new jobs available. It was a situation already approaching crisis point when the 200,000 whites and 100,000 blacks serving in Allied armies overseas returned to South Africa after the war.

Misfortune prompts us to summon our utmost strength to oppose grief and recover tranquility, while prosperity hurries us away until we are overwhelmed by our passions. Queen Margot Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. La Rochefoucault We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears. I sometimes wonder is the esprit, gaiety, intellectual seriousness and serious stylishness of the earlier period was the reflex of poverty and shared hardship.

The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities. In other times, for example, lack of access to electric energy was not considered a sign of poverty, nor was it a source of hardship. Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period.

The Progressive Era, generally the period between 1890 and 1920, was in part a response to the inequities, abuses, and corruption born out of the Industrial Revolution. One historian called Progressivism “an extraordinary explosion of middle-class activism” where the middle and lower classes pushed against the boundaries that separated wealth and poverty in America.

[I]n Greece, the distinctive political situation that arose beginning around 800 BCE and persisted for at least the next half-millennium was the differentiator that enabled the world of the city-states to perform economically and culturally at a level much higher than the premodern normal, defined by conditions in the Late Bronze, Early Iron, and early modern periods of Greek history - and indeed, at a level that in some respects matched the exceptionally high-performing early modern societies of Holland and Britain. Those conclusions are important to us in modernity, not because Greece was the unique origin of the Western tradition or the spark that ignited a putative 'great divergence' between East and West but because classical Greece is the earliest documented case of 'democratic exceptionalism plus efflorescence' - a historically rare combination of economic, cultural, and political conditions pertaining among developed countries in the contemporary world. Insofar as we value democracy and prefer wealth to poverty, then we have good reason to care about explaining the rise of the society in which the wealth and democracy package is first documented. We have equally good reasons for wanting to explain why the major states within that society failed to maintain their full independence in the face of entrepreneurial authoritarians willing and able to appropriate institutions and technology. In the long run, the loss of city-state independence was coincident with a long economic decline. By the seventh century CE, core Greece had reverted to the relatively impoverished condition of the 'premodern normal.' The world of Greek antiquity was obviously very different from our own, and some of the factors that led to both the rise and fall of classical Greece are unlikely to be repeated. Yet for those who do recognize certain features of our modernity in the history of classical Greece, that history may serve as a cautionary tale.

The history of independent India has been a reasonable success in terms of integrating the castes. For example, the wage gap between the traditionally disadvantaged castes (SC/STs) and others dropped from 35 percent in 1983 to 29 percent in 2004. 14 This does not look so spectacular, but is more than the improvement in the wage gap between blacks and whites in the United States over a similar time period. In part this is the result of the affirmative action policies Ambedkar put into place, which gave historically discriminated groups privileged access to educational institutions, government jobs, and the various legislatures.

The Success to the Successful dynamic was spotted long before Monopoly and Sugarscape came along. Two thousand years ago, the notion that ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ was noted in the Bible and hence came to be known as ‘the Matthew Effect’. Its tell-tale pattern of accumulative advantage, coupled with spiralling disadvantage, can be seen in children’s educational outcomes, in adults’ employment opportunities, and of course in terms of income and wealth. And that financial dynamic is certainly alive today. Between 1988 and 2008, the majority of countries worldwide saw rising inequality within their borders, resulting in a hollowing out of their middle classes. Over those same 20 years, global inequality fell slightly overall (mostly thanks to falling poverty rates in China), but it increased significantly at the extremes. More than 50 percent of the total increase in global income over that period was captured by just the richest 5 percent of the world’s population, while the poorest 50 percent of people gained only 11 percent of it.38

Administrators of one of the largest hospitals in America cite loneliness as a major reason for overcrowded emergency rooms. Parkland Hospital of Dallas, Texas, made this startling discovery as they were looking for ways to unclog the system. They analyzed data and compiled a list of high utilizers. They identified eighty patients who went to four emergency rooms 5,139 times in a twelve-month period, costing the system more than $14 million. Once they identified the names of these repeat visitors, they commissioned teams to meet with them and determine the reason. Their conclusion? Loneliness. Poverty and food shortage were contributing factors, but the number one determinant was a sense of isolation. The ER provided attention, kindness, and care. Hence, the multiple return visits. They wanted to know that someone cares.2