~ "Purposeful human activities are seldom random in themselves or in their consequences."
~ Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell statements in his book 'Wealth, Poverty and Politics' found below:
~ "To ask "Why Nations Fail" is to treat our conception of success as a norm, rather than the rare exception that it is in the long history of human beings. It may be an understandable human tendency for us to regard whatever we happen to be used to, immediately around us, as usual or natural. But that does not make it so. In pre-Civil War America, slavery was referred to as a "peculiar institution" because slavery was so inconsistent with the principles and practices in the rest of American society. But the tragic fact is that slavery was a pervasive institution, among innumerable peoples around the world, for thousands of years.
of relatively recent vintage as history is measured - and still in jeopardy in many countries, even today, as well as being utterly suppressed in some other countries." page 176
- It is freedom for ordinary people that has been a peculiar institution,
of relatively recent vintage as history is measured - and still in jeopardy in many countries, even today, as well as being utterly suppressed in some other countries." page 176
~ "People do not behave randomly but purposefully. They do not, for example immigrate randomly, either in terms of locations they come from in the country they leave or the locations where they settle in the countries they go to. They do not raise their children the same, as shown by the large differences in the number of words people at different socioeconomic levels speak to their children.
Purposeful human activities are seldom random in themselves or in their consequences. Nor are they the same among different groups, whether different by race, sex, religion, birth order or innumerable other variables." page 186
- How we define 'environment' is crucial.
~ "It is not simply a matter of semantic preferences. If we define environment as simply the surrounding circumstances, then we are left unable to account for different cultural groups having very different outcomes in the same environment, creating among other things disparities in income and wealth.
To account for radical differences in income and wealth among groups living in the same society, environment can be defined as what is going on around a group, while culture means what is going on within each group. If we choose instead to define environment as all non-genetic factors, then the various cultures of different groups in a given society are included in the environment of that society. But what we cannot do is go back and forth between different conceptions of what environment means - not if we expect to reach consistent or rational conclusions." page 57
~ The above is from the book "Wealth, Poverty and Politics," by Thomas Sowell
