Rutgers Quotes

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses

So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008)

In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.

But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’ 3

If a political party or a religious sect had even a fraction of the influence that the advertising industry has on us and our children, we’d be up in arms. But because it’s the market, we remain “neutral.”27

You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.

Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization'......That drug is the news.

It's when crisis hits - when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise - that we humans become our best selves.

It is easy to make things hard, but hard to make them easy

I watched commercial ave. slide past and there in the distance were the lights of route 18. that was one of those moments that would always be Rutgers for me.

Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.

In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.

Van de mooiste dingen in het leven krijg je alleen maar meer als je ze weggeeft: vertrouwen, vriendschap, vrede.

Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering. Gridlock, drug abuse, adultery? Goldmines for gas stations, rehab centers, and divorce attorneys. If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday. Environmental pollution even does double duty: One company makes a mint by cutting corners while another is paid to clean up the mess. By contrast, a centuries-old tree doesn’t count until you chop it down and sell it as lumber.

Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.

It seems we have to face a painful fact. ‘The mechanism that makes us the kindest species,’ says Brian Hare, puppy expert, ‘also makes us the cruelest species on the planet.’1 People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.

Whose side are you on? The side of not getting killed. For future reference, that's the side I'm always on.

Ga nu maar liggen liefste in de tuin, de lege plekken in het hoge gras, ik heb altijd gewild dat ik dat was, een lege plek voor iemand, om te blijven.

Not coincidentally, the countries with the shortest workweeks also have the largest number of volunteers and the most social capital.

what seems unreasonable, unrealistic and impossible today can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.

Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries.

If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get.

It empowers people,” one of the social workers said about the personalized budget. “It gives choices. I think it can make a difference.” After decades of fruitless pushing, pulling, pampering, penalizing, prosecuting, and protecting, nine notorious vagrants had finally been brought in from the streets. The cost? Some £50,000 a year, including the social workers’ wages. In other words, not only did the project help thirteen people, it also cut costs considerably.5 Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.

The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace. Not so very long ago, democracy still seemed a glorious utopia. Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interest” would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.

I’m heartened by our dissatisfaction, because dissatisfaction is a world away from indifference. The widespread nostalgia, the yearning for a past that never really was, suggests that we still have ideals, even if we have buried them alive. True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.

The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. None, nothing, nada. Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities.

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good.

Is it any wonder that the cultural archetype of my generation is the Nerd, whose apps and gadgets symbolize the hope of economic growth? “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.

Nobody gets through life without being an asshole...Once in a while you're going to dig in over something and get it wrong and make a scratch on the world you'll never polish off. Those scratches will define you more than anything else.

Instead, we should be posing a different question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipating and adapting, we’d be focusing on steering and creating. Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living. This is a question no trend watcher can answer. How could they? They only follow the trends, they don’t make them. That part is up to us.

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30

Boredom may be the wellspring of creativity.

If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

Dictators and despots, governors and generals-they all to often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

Even utopias need a tax clause. For example, we could start with a transactions tax to rein in the financial industry. Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; forty years later, it’s a mere five days.21 If we imposed a transactions tax – where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock – those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets. In

Whether we’re searching for new dreams or rediscovering old ones, we can’t move forward without looking to the past. It’s the only place where the abstract becomes concrete, where we can see that we’re already living in the Land of Plenty. The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: Things could be different. The way our world is organized is not the result of some axiomatic evolution. Our current status quo could just as easily be the result of the trivial yet critical twists and turns of history.

People in power literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centred, reckless, arrogant and rude than average, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives. They’re also more shameless,

The news, according to dozens of studies, is a mental health hazard.

Greater flexibility in the workplace demands that we also create greater security. Globalization is

We are trained to see selfishness everywhere.

One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy.

Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.

One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies.37 The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.38

Free money works. Already, research has correlated unconditional cash disbursements with reductions in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and truancy, and with improved school performance, economic growth, and gender equality.13 “The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.

In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hyper complex financial products that are ultimately only destructive.

Take a Somalian toddler. She has a 20% probability of dying before reaching the age of five. Now compare: American frontline soldiers had a mortality rate of 6.7% in the Civil War, 1.8% in World War II, and 0.5% in the Vietnam War.30 Yet we won’t hesitate to send that Somalian toddler back if it turns out her mother isn’t a “real” refugee. Back to the Somalian child-mortality front.

Weggaan is iets anders dan het huis uitsluipen zacht de deur dichttrekken achter je bestaan en niet terugkeren. Je blijft iemand op wie wordt gewacht. Weggaan kun je beschrijven als een soort van blijven. Niemand wacht want je bent er nog. Niemand neemt afscheid want je gaat niet weg.

Wake me up, make me think, or buy me a drink. Otherwise, fuck off.

I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job but for a life well lived.

The past is full of if-onlys and they're all bullshit.

Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.

The world benefits more from continuity than from continual change,’ he asserts.

People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.

Last and best of all, we’ve entered the most peaceful age ever.

But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not the impossibility of change.

In his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon considered his plan to “place a floor under the income of every family with children in America” the most important item of legislation on his agenda.

know of no other debate with stakes as high, or ramifications as far-reaching. Harsher punishments versus better social services, art school versus reform school, top-down management versus empowered teams,

If there’s one thing that we capitalists have in common with the communists of old, it’s a pathological obsession with gainful employment. Just as Soviet-era shops employed “three clerks to sell a piece of meat,” we’ll force benefit claimants to perform pointless tasks, even if it bankrupts us.

If you’re an avid follower of the news, it’s easy to get trapped by hopelessness. What’s the point of recycling, paying taxes and donating to charities when others shirk their duty? If you’re tempted by such thoughts, remember that cynicism is just another word for laziness. It’s an excuse not to take responsibility. Because if you believe most people are rotten, you don’t need to get worked up about injustice. The world is going to hell either way.

Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’7

Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.

Toddlers don't need tests or grades to learn to walk or talk.

Any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.

On average, we spend one hour a day getting our news fix. Added up over a lifetime, that’s three years.28

Thirty-five is not the first draft of being a human. There are editorial marks in your margins.

La vanguardia de ayer es el sentido común de hoy.

This is a book about a radical idea. An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history. At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life.

When we hole up in our own trenches, we lose sight of reality. We’re lured into thinking that a small, hate-mongering minority reflects all humankind. Like the handful of anonymous internet trolls that are responsible for almost all the vitriol on Twitter and Facebook. And even the most caustic keyboard crusader may at other times be a thoughtful friend or loving caregiver.

True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.” We have to direct our minds to the future. To stop consuming our own discontent through polls and the relentlessly bad news media. To consider alternatives and form new collectives. To transcend this confining zeitgeist and recognize our shared idealism.

Frankly, there's almost no country on Earth where the American Dream is less likely to come true than in the U.S. of A. Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.

If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.

Precisely when we should be shouldering the historic task of investing this rich, safe, and healthy existence with meaning, we’ve buried utopia instead. There’s no new dream to replace it because we can’t imagine a better world than the one we’ve got. In fact, most people in wealthy countries believe children will actually be worse off than their parents.19 But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries. Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income,24 and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth.25 The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.26 From an international perspective, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty aren’t merely rich, but filthy rich. A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%.

Productive women, seniors, or immigrants won’t displace men, young adults, or hardworking citizens from their jobs. In fact, they create more employment opportunities. A bigger workforce means more consumption, more demand, more jobs.

It's never the world at large you want to prove yourself to. It's someone in particular. Doesn't matter how old you get, you're still hoping for Mom or Dad to kiss you on the head. And yes, that person should ideally be yourself, just as the answers to all our questions and the objects of our quests should most likely be found within our own souls. But they're not. We need more. Someone or something bigger than us. A magical other. And that's why we reach for the gods. Or for someone to love.

Giving away free housing, it turned out, was actually a windfall for the state budget. State economists calculated that a drifter living on the street cost the government $16,670 a year (for social services, police, courts, etc.). An apartment plus professional counseling, by contrast, cost a modest $11,000.30 The numbers are clear. Today, Utah is on course to eliminate chronic homelessness entirely, making it the first state in the U.S. to successfully address this problem. All while saving a fortune.

President Nixon presented a bill providing for a modest basic income, calling it “the most significant piece of social legislation in our nation’s history.” According to Nixon, the baby boomers would do two things deemed impossible by earlier generations. Besides putting a man on the moon (which had happened the month before), their generation would also, finally, eradicate poverty.

If there’s one place, then, where we can intervene in a way that will pay dividends for society down the road, it’s in the classroom. Yet that’s barely happening. All the big debates in education are about format. About delivery. About didactics. Education is consistently presented as a means of adaptation – as a lubricant to help you glide more effortlessly through life. On the education conference circuit, an endless parade of trend watchers prophesy about the future and essential twenty-first-century skills, the buzzwords being “creative,” “adaptable,” and “flexible.” The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving. Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market – the market of 2030? Which is precisely the wrong question. In 2030, there will likely be a high demand for savvy accountants untroubled by a conscience. If current trends hold, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland will become even bigger tax havens, enabling multinationals to dodge taxes even more effectively, leaving developing countries with an even shorter end of the stick. If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential twenty-first-century skill. Not

People lie for many reasons: to save themselves, to get out of trouble, to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Manipulators lie to get what they want. Narcissists lie to make themselves seem grand to others and themselves. Recovering alcoholics lie to safeguard their tattered reputations. And those who love us most lie to us most of all, because life is a bumpy ride and they want to smooth it out as much as possible. John Rutger lied because he was a scumbag. Nothing about his appearance said, Hey, I'm a despicable human being.

Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications – slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity. ... And driving it all is a force sometimes called “liberalism,” an ideology that has been all but hollowed out. ... Freedom may be our highest ideal, but ours has become an empty freedom. Our fear of moralizing in any form has made morality a taboo in the public debate. The public arena should be “neutral,” after all – yet never before has it been so paternalistic. On every street corner we’re baited to booze, binge, borrow, buy, toil, stress, and swindle. Whatever we may tell ourselves about freedom of speech, our values are suspiciously close to those touted by precisely the companies that can pay for prime-time advertising.

So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983)

Anybody who forays outside the “Overton window” faces a rocky road. He or she will quickly be branded as “unrealistic” or “unreasonable” by the media, the fearsome gatekeepers of the window. Television, for example, offers little time or space to present fundamentally different opinions. Instead, talk shows feed us an endless merry-go-round of the same people saying the same things. And yet, despite all this, a society can change completely in a few decades. The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.

Of course, there’s no clear line between who creates wealth and who shifts it. Lots of jobs do both. There’s no denying that the financial sector can contribute to our wealth and grease the wheels of other sectors in the process. Banks can help to spread risks and back people with bright ideas. And yet, these days, banks have become so big that much of what they do is merely shuffle wealth around, or even destroy it. Instead of growing the pie, the explosive expansion of the banking sector has increased the share it serves itself.4 Or take the legal profession. It goes without saying that the rule of law is necessary for a country to prosper. But now that the U.S. has seventeen times the number of lawyers per capita as Japan, does that make American rule of law seventeen times as effective?5 Or Americans seventeen times as protected? Far from it. Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for patent infringement. Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around – creating next to nothing of tangible value – that net the best salaries. It’s a fascinating, paradoxical state of affairs. How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity – the teachers, the police officers, the nurses – are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?

It was Joseph Overton, an American lawyer, who first explained the mechanisms of uppercase Politics in the 1990s. He began with a simple question: Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously? Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable. This window of acceptability is populated by schemes that are rubber-stamped by the experts, tallied up by statistics services, and have good odds of making it into the law books.

The idea that the GDP still serves as an accurate gauge of social welfare is one of the most widespread myths of our times. Even politicians who fight over everything else can always agree that the GDP must grow. Growth is good. It’s good for employment, it’s good for purchasing power, and it’s good for our government, giving it more to spend. Modern journalism would be all but lost without the GDP, wielding the latest national growth figures as a kind of government report card. A shrinking GDP spells recession and, if it really shrivels, depression. In fact, the GDP offers pretty much everything a journalist could want: hard figures, issued at regular intervals, and the chance to quote experts. Most importantly, the GDP offers a clear benchmark. Is the government doing its job? How do we as a country stack up? Has life gotten a little better? Never fear, we have the latest figures on the GDP, and they’ll tell us everything we need to know. Given our obsession with it, it’s hard to believe that just eighty years ago the GDP didn’t even exist.

In recent decades, our welfare states have come to look increasingly like surveillance states. Using Big Brother tactics, Big Government is forcing us into a Big Society. Lately, developed nations have been doubling down on this sort of “activating” policy for the jobless, which runs the gamut from job-application workshops to stints picking up trash, and from talk therapy to LinkedIn training. No matter if there are ten applicants for every job, the problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply. That is to say, to the unemployed, who haven’t developed their “employment skills” or simply haven’t given it their best shot.

In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’47 He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.48 And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her.49 ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?

You know this already. You'll have bodies stashed in tunnels of your own. Things you've done, mistakes you've made, secrets you hold—the guilt you carry for moments that stick out in your past like black stars in the firmament of your inner life. The outlier occurrences. The anomalies. The events you look back upon in disbelief, wondering how the hell they could have come to pass, and if they can be made to fit in a story you are prepared to own.

Countless aid organizations and governments are convinced that they know what poor people need, and invest in schools, solar panels, or cattle. And, granted, better a cow than no cow. But at what cost? A Rwandan study estimated that donating one pregnant cow costs around $3,000 (including a milking workshop). That’s five years’ wages for a Rwandan.17 Or take the patchwork of courses offered to the poor: Study after study has shown that they cost a lot but achieve little, whether the objective is learning to fish, read, or run a business.18 “Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”19 The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need. And, as it happens, there is one category of product which poor people do not spend their free money on, and that’s alcohol and tobacco. In fact, a major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.20

How recently have the sharks been fed?" the guy next to me asked. Alex and I were in a small room with a dry-erase board, a perky blonde aquarium emplyee, and three guys from Rutgers who'd won their fraternity Christmas prize. True to Alex's promise, no one had seen me in my miniscule jungle print. Another perky girl had handed me a wet suit and pointed me into a changing room. So as I listened to the basics of shark tank etiquette, I was fully encased in blue neoprene from ankle to jaw. The frat boys kept sneaking looks at me when they thought I-and Alex-wasn't looking. It made me feel just a little bit better. Alex's promise that I didn't have to get into the water if I really didn't want to helped, too. It had gotten me out of the car and into the aquarium. "You can do it," he'd coaxed. "Yes," I'd answered, thinking of the skateboarder a little and "fake it til you make it" more. "I can do it." "Yesterday." Perky Girl answered the feeding question. "Believe me. They're not hungry." I wanted to know exactly how she knew that.Did she ask the sharks? "Okay," she chirped. "Let's get snorkeling.

We’re indignant that men get paid more than women for doing the same work, and that white Americans earn more than black Americans. But even the 150% racial income gap of the 1930s pales in comparison to the injustices inflicted by our borders. A Mexican citizen living and working in the U.S. earns more than twice as much as a compatriot still living in Mexico. An American earns nearly three times as much for the same work as a Bolivian, even when they are of the same skill level, age, and sex. With a comparable Nigerian, the difference is a factor of 8.5 – and that’s adjusted for purchasing power in the two countries.

Rousseau saw the invention of farming as one big fiasco, and for this, too, we now have abundant scientific evidence. For one thing, anthropologists have discovered that hunter-gatherers led a fairly cushy life, with work weeks averaging twenty to thirty hours, tops. And why not? Nature provided everything they needed, leaving plenty of time to relax, hang out and hook up. Farmers, by contrast, had to toil in the fields and working the soil left little time for leisure. No pain, no grain. Some theologists even suspect that the story of the Fall alludes to the shift to organised agriculture, as starkly characterised by Genesis 3: ‘By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.’29 Settled life exacted an especially heavy toll on women. The rise of private property and farming brought the age of proto-feminism to an end. Sons stayed on the paternal plot to tend the land and livestock, which meant brides now had to be fetched for the family farm. Over centuries, marriageable daughters were reduced to little more than commodities, to be bartered like cows or sheep.30

When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism. Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything?

It was during the 1970s that statisticians decided it would be a good idea to measure banks’ “productivity” in terms of their risk-taking behavior. The more risk, the bigger their slice of the GDP.14 Hardly any wonder, then, that banks have continually upped their lending, egged on by politicians who have been convinced that the financial sector’s slice is every bit as valuable as the whole manufacturing industry. “If banking had been subtracted from the GDP, rather than added to it,” the Financial Times recently reported, “it is plausible to speculate that the financial crisis would never have happened.”15 The CEO who recklessly hawks mortgages and derivatives to lap up millions in bonuses currently contributes more to the GDP than a school packed with teachers or a factory full of car mechanics. We live in a world where the going rule seems to be that the more vital your occupation (cleaning, nursing, teaching), the lower you rate in the GDP. As the Nobel laureate James Tobin said back in 1984, “We are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”16

To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22 Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put. Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.23 More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.