Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 128 of David Schmidtz’s excellent 2023 book, Living Together (footnote deleted):

Robert Frank once reported being baffled that I would reject modest redistribution from rich to poor. Amartya Sen intervened at that moment and told Bob he needed to listen. Affluent scholars see a pie and see how they want to slice it, but Sen saw me starting in a different place – with the truism that power corrupts. Starting from that truism, what is baffling is that anyone could so cavalierly endorse concentrated power when we live in a world where concentrated power is so often used to redistribute not from rich to poor but from poor to rich. Sen went on to say that when it comes to inequality, the question is not whether we can find a statistic that gives credence to the resentment the richest scholars feel as the richest movie stars leave them behind, but which dimensions of rising inequality do poor people care about?