Academics From The United States

"While no one is going to make a decision on abortion purely on scientific grounds, we feel that everyone, at the very least, ought to get the facts straight."

"The purpose of this book is to discuss and present evidence for the general thesis that the flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system."

"The fact that both you and the amoeba use these universal molecules in your energy metabolism is as striking an example of the relatedness of life as can be found."

"At the chemical level, human beings just aren’t all that different from pumpkins or any other life forms."

"We recognize that to many people such a statement of cold biological fact misses something essential about the developing fetus. We recognize that there is a strong inclination to assign personhood or a soul to the single cell that results from fertilization on the grounds that it represents “potential life.” Our position is that this inclination, as strongly as it may be favored on religious or social grounds, has no basis in science because, as we point out in Chapter 1, personhood and soul are simply not scientific concepts."

"The end point of this reasoning is that any policy based on assigning a unique status to conception in the emergence of humanness must be seen as coming from subjective evaluations—evaluations that may not be shared by others. Subjectivity does not, of course, does not make these arguments wrong; it simply means that they cannot be given the kind of public universality we assign to arguments grounded in scientific understanding."

"Even with this abbreviated sketch of the process of fertilization, one thing is obvious. When biologists object to statements about life beginning at conception, they are not splitting hairs or being pedantic. There is no time in the sequence we’ve just described where new life is created. In fact, from the point of view of the biologist, at conception, two previously existing living things come together to form another living thing."

"The net result is that slightly fewer than a third of all conceptions lead to a fetus that has a chance of developing. In other words, if you were to choose a zygote at random and follow it through the first week of development, the chances are less than one in three that it would still be there at full term, even though there has been no human intervention. Nature, it seems, performs abortions at a much higher rate than any human society. It is simply not true that most zygotes, if undisturbed, will produce a human being."

"Decisions cannot be made on purely scientific grounds. We can, however, use scientific information to guide our moral and political judgments. No matter which side of the debate we take in any public dispute, we should, at a minimum, get the facts straight and understand the scientific dimensions of the problem."

"It is clearly in the best interests of everyone involved that these decisions be made with a maximum of compassion, a minimum of bureaucratic intervention, and the absence of attorneys."

"In the end, the abortion controversy comes down to one question: Will this particular pregnancy be terminated or not? There are only two possible choices, neither good. One is to abort the fetus. The other is to demand that the pregnancy be brought to term and, in effect, to compel the birth of an unwanted child. The second choice is repugnant to me. Not only does it entail real and immediate risks for the mother, but it may create a lifetime of misery for the child – misery that will, in all likelihood, persist for generations. Frankly, I can imagine fewer human acts more deeply evil than bringing an unwanted child into the world."

"The rise of industrial capitalism thus rested on the maintenance of slavery in another part of the world, even though that slavery was no longer dependent on the continuation of the slave trade."

"Slaving gave rise to a division of labor in which the business of capture, maintenance, and overland transport of slaves was in African hands, while Europeans took charge of transoceanic transport, the "seasoning" or breaking in of slaves, and their eventual distribution."

"Man rises up against nature by means of what we would today call culture."

"Wealth in the hands of the holders of wealth is not capital until it controls the means of production, buys labor power, and puts it to work, continuously expanding surpluses by intensifying productivity through an ever-rising curve of technological inputs."

"Everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections."

"To understand how caste works concretely, one must, however, look beyond kinship organization and ritual idiom to the political economy of caste."

"In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was."

"By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls."

"If history is the working out of a more moral purpose in time, then those who lay claim to that purpose are by that fact the predilect agents of history."

"Our methods were becoming more sophisticated, but their yield seemed increasingly commonplace. To stem a descent into triviality, I thought, we needed to search out the causes of the present in the past."

"I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology."

"There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance."

"Although I wrote as an anthropologist rather than as a professional historian, I think history matters. It is also important to understand how an why these systems develop and extend their sway over people, and I located the rationale in the ways power and the economy sustain and drive each other on."

"The German catastrophe was of course the vortex of other catastrophes : Jewish, French, Gypsy, Polish and Russian, to name but a few way stations on the descent into hell. What the National Socialists wrought is, without a doubt, a cause of moral outrage, but outrage is not enough. It is vital that we gain an analytic purchase on what transpired, precisely because it embodied a possibility for humankind, and what was humanly possible can happen again."

"Anthropology is the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences. (1964)"

"Before capitalist relations could come to dominate industrial production, a set of related changes was required to guarantee the new order. The state had to be transformed from a tributary structure to a structure of support for capitalist enterprise."

"The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other."

"Under the conditions of the new mode, capital was able to embark on a process of continual internal and international migration, drawing ever more groups of people into its orbit and reproducing its strategic relationships wherever and whenever it took root."

"Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital"."

"The capitalist state exists to ensure the domination of one class over another."

"The development of industrial capitalism did not move in a smooth ascending line."

"Where Adam Smith and David Ricardo had envisaged a growing worldwide division of labor, they had thought that each country would freely select the commodities it was most qualified to produce, and that each would exchange its optimal commodity for the optimal commodity of others. Thus in Ricardo's example, Britain would send Portugal its textiles, while Britons would consume Portuguese wines in turn. What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another."

"American wheat, sold in Europe at lower prices than the domestic product, brought on a crisis in European peasant agriculture, sending a migrant stream of ruined peasants to seek new sources of livelihood in the burgeoning Americas. Ironically many of them made the journey westward on the same ships that carried to Europe the wheat that proved their undoing."

"The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor."

"Even the slave owner is restricted in his ability to manipulate his labor supply, for he must protect his investment in slaves by feeding them during times when they do not labor. In contrast, capitalist entrepreneurs can hire and fire laborers or very their wages in response to changing circumstances."

"The capitalist mode acts to accumulate capital through the hiring of labor power, but is marked by the cyclical alternation of labor mobilization and labor displacement; each intake of labor power uproots some prior adaptation, while each sloughing off of labor power creates a new cohort of the unemployed."

"A second justification for corporate taxation is that the corporation receives a number of special privileges from society, the most important of which is limited liability of the stockholders. The corporation tax can be viewed as a user fee for this benefit."

"Government is essentially a big computer that elicits from citizens their preferences and uses this information to produce social decisions."

"Government grows because low-income individuals use the political system to redistribute income toward themselves."

"Public decision making is complicated and not well understood. Contrary to simple methods of democracy, there appear to be forces pulling government expenditures away from levels that would be preferred by the median voter."

"From a theoretical point of view, lifetime income would be ideal, but the practical problems in estimating it are enormous."

"Plato argued that in a good society the ratio of the richest to the poorest person's income should be at the most four to one."

""Welfare" in the United States is a patchwork of more than 80 programs that provide benefits primarily to low-income individuals. These programs are means tested - only individuals whose financial resources fall below a certain level can receive benefits."

"In an experiment in Illinois, members of a randomly selected group of unemployed individuals were offered a bonus of $500 if they found a job within 11 weeks and kept that job for four months. On average, people who were offered the bonus received UI for one week less than the control group, and the program saved more on UI benefits than it spent on bonuses."

"To say the least, Becker's account of Nature has little in common with Walt Disney. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates."

"Dioxin is the outcome of the operations of markets. Does this mean that having dioxin in the environment is efficient?"

"It must be emphasized that free ridership is not a fact; it is an implication of the hypothesis that people maximize a utility function that depends only on their own consumption of goods."

"The First Welfare Theorem holds only if all consumers and firms are price takers. If some individuals or firms are price makers (they have the power to affect prices), then the allocation of resources will generally be inefficient."

"A social welfare function is simply a statement of how society's well-being relates to the well- being of its members."