Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on December 22, 2018
… is from Paul Krugman’s excellent April 22, 2001, New York Times essay, “Hearts And Heads“:
At a conference last week I heard paeans to the superiority of traditional rural lifestyles over modern, urban life – a claim that not only flies in the face of the clear fact that many peasants flee to urban jobs as soon as they can, but that (it seems to me) has a disagreeable element of cultural condescension, especially given the overwhelming preponderance of white faces in the crowds of demonstrators. (Would you want to live in a pre-industrial village?)
DBx: An astonishingly large number of people regard the relative poverty of some people in modern, dynamic, commercial societies to be an unmitigated curse that should be eradicated, yet celebrate the absolute poverty of all people in primitive, static, and non-commercial societies as a splendid blessing that should be enjoyed more widely.
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