Geographers From England

"The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin."

"The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time."

"Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value."

"All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe."

"Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself."

"Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life."

"The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses."

"The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour."

"The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space."

"Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences."

"There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run."

"Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?"

"A work of this sort admits no conclusion."

"The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war."

"Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe."

"Every production network has spatiality - the particular geographical configuration and extent of its component elements and the links between them."

"In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable."

"Innovation - the heart of technological change - is fundamentally a learning process."

"(Mercantilism is based upon the idea that a nation's wealth and security depend upon its ability to regulate and control its external trade at the expense of others.)"

"the internationalization of economic activity and its major vehicle, the TNC, can be regarded simply as being part of the normal expansive process of capitalist development."

"It serves to remind us that, in trying to explain the globalization of economic activity, we are dealing with the workings of a dynamic capitalist market system, and not just individual agents within it."

"Significantly, the 14 most transnational firms (in terms of the TNI) originate from small countries (Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada)"

"Transnational corporate networks, and their resulting spatial patterns, are always in a continuous state of flux. At any one time, some parts may be growing rapidly, others may be stagnating, others may be in steep decline."

"More broadly, strategic alliances are more difficult to manage and coordinate than single ventures; the potential for misunderstanding and disagreement, particularly between partners from different cultures, is great. Certainly many such alliances are short lived."

"It is indeed paradoxical that an industry which epitomizes all that is new and up-to-date at the same time harbours some of the oldest and least desirable attributes of work in manufacturing industry."

"One of the most striking developments has been the rise, fall and rise again of the semiconductor industry of the United States, which is, once again, the dominant player in the most advanced semiconductor product-markets."

"Without the parallel development of systems of monetary - and credit-based exchange there could have been no development of economies beyond the most primitive organizational forms and the most geographically restricted sales."

"In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself."

"A striking feature of financial service activities during the past few decades is that the financial transactions essential to the operation of the 'real' economy has become increasingly dwarfed by speculative activity."

"The primary driver of final consumer demand is, of course, the level of disposable income."

"Geographically, the global economy is now multi-polar, as new centres of production have emerged in parts of what had been, historically, the periphery of the world economy. The world is now more accurately described as a 'mosaic of unevenness in a continual state of flux'."

"One of the most striking trends, since at least the 1960's, has been for employment in services to grow far more rapidly than employment in manufacturing. It is this trend that has led to the view that developed economies have become de-industrialized and that they are now effectively service economies."

"All male animals, including men, when they are in love, are apt to behave in ways that seem ludicrous to bystanders."

"As these lines are being written, the circumstances under which I first clearly grasped the important generalisation that the laws of Heredity were solely concerned with deviations expressed in statistical units, are vividly recalled to my memory. It was in the grounds of Naworth Castle, where an invitation had been given to ramble freely. A temporary shower drove me to seek refuge in a reddish recess in the rock by the side of the pathway. There the idea flashed across me, and I forgot everything else for a moment in my great delight."

"The following question had been much in my mind. How is it possible for a population to remain alike in its features, as a whole, during many successive generations, if the average produce of each couple resemble their parents? Their children are not alike but vary..."

"After much consideration and many inquiries, I determined, in 1885, on experimenting with sweet peas, which were suggested to me both by Sir Joseph Hooker and by Mr. Darwin. ...The result clearly proved Regression; the mean Filial deviation was only one-third that of the parental one, and the experiments all concurred. The formula that expresses the descent from one generation of a people to the next, showed that the generations would be identical if this kind of Regression was allowed for."

"All the formulæ of Conic Sections having long since gone out of my head, I went on my return to London to the Royal Institution to read them up. Professor, now Sir James Dewar, came in and probably noticing signs of despair in my face, asked me what I was about; then said, "Why do you bother over this? My brother in law, J. Hamilton Dickson of Peterhouse, loves problems and wants new ones. Send it to him." I did so... and he most cordially helped me by working it out... on the basis of the... Gaussian Law of Error."

"Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.This is precisely the aim of Eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock."

"Mr. F. Galton would refer first to the purely ethnological part of the memoir, which dwelt upon the difficulty of defining the Bantu race. He thought that ethnologists were apt to look upon race as something more definite than it really was. He presumed it meant no more than the average of the characteristics of all the persons who were supposed to belong to the race, and this average was continually varying. The popular notion seemed based upon some idea like that of a common descent of the different races, from a parent Noachian stock, whence the aborigines of each county were derived, and where they lived in unchanged conditions till the white man came. Nothing can be further from the truth. We know how in South Africa the Bantu population has been in constant seethe and change; how, in much less than a single century, Chaka and his tribe, Mosilekatse and his tribe, and others, have in turn become prominent nations, and the average of the whole Bantu population must thereby have differed at different times. This same fluctuation of the average qualities of the population must, for anything we can see to the contrary, have gone on for many thousands of years. He therefore thought the phrase of Bantu race, as signifying some invariable and definite type, to be a mere chimera."

"I am disposed then, like a great many anthropologists, to believe more in nature than in nurture, more in heredity than in education. Once, at a soiree of the Royal Society, I spied, near together, two of my friends—Francis Galton, apostle of heredity, and Sir Joshua Fitch, prominent educationist. A wicked idea entered my head. I introduced the two, and stood by to watch the inevitable conflict. It was most instructive and diverting. The last thing I heard was Fitch saying in a plaintive tone, But if all you say is correct, what’s the use of me?"

"Speaking of rhetoric, there should be an editorial rule that sentences associated with sociobiology, with efforts to "justify slavery, imperialism, racism, genocide, and to oppose equal rights or ERA" [a quote from S.L. Washburn] should always appear next to sentences associating environmentalist/learning theory, with efforts to justify propaganda, psychological terror, false advertisement, public indoctrination of hatred of foreigners, class enemies, minority groups, and so on and so on. Juxtaposing sociobiology and learning theory in this manner ought to show how unproductive it is to claim through innuendo or otherwise that science will lead to pseudoscience, will lead to man's inhumanity to man: ergo no science. Actually, one could argue that since man is such a cultural/learning animal we should have greater fear of learning theory since learning has far more power over man's behavior than genes. More specifically, if humans were not such learning animals, they would not learn all that Galton trash: ergo stop learning research so that bad guys will not use the data to teach the trash more effectively."

"William R. Charlesworth, “Comments on S.L. Washburn's review of Kenneth Bock's Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology” Human Ethology Newsletter (Volume 3, Issue 3, September 1981), p.22"

"I have often heard, or read, though I cannot now give good references, that when the practice of selling or buying slaves was practised by men of our race, with few qualms of conscience, the slaves were priced after a minute inspection. An experience of my own, of some forty-five years ago, while travelling in the Soudan, is to the point. An Egyptian, who possessed little besides a sword, had attached himself to the caravan with which I was travelling. He was on his way to join a slave-raiding expedition on the borders of Abyssinia, and he had, I found out, considerable experience in slave markets. I asked him many questions, from time to time, about the valuing of slaves, and, at last, begged him, as a favour, to price myself, just as if I was a light-coloured African; for I was curious to know my worth as an animal. He took evident pains, and I think was fairly honest, though with a bias towards flattery. Having regard to the then high state of the market, he estimated my worth on the spot, at a number of piastres that was about equal to 20 pounds."

"Galton [...] combined analysis and mathematical techniques to great effect, and in so doing, brought many new facts to light. [...] it is part of a grand tradition that, especially in the fields of sociology and psychology, has unleashed a great many intriguing and clever experiments."

"Galton's passion shows itself best, I feel, in two essays that may seem more frivolous to us than they did to him. In the first, he computed the additional years of life enjoyed by the Royal Family and the clergy because of the prayers offered up for them by the greater part of the population; the result was a negative number. In the second, to relieve the tedium of sitting for a portrait painter, on two different occasions he computed the number of brush strokes and found about 20,000 to the portrait; just the same number, he calculated, as the hand movements that went into the knitting of a pair of socks."

"Francis Galton discovered the concept of correlation in the late fall of 1888. [...] To Galton, correlation meant what we might call today intraclass correlation—two variables are correlated because they share a common set of influences. [...] Galton seems to have only conceived of correlation as a positive relationship; negative correlations play no role in his discussions."

"It took Francis Galton several years to figure out that correlation and regression are not two concepts – they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean."

"I want to tell you about a boat." That was the challenge that Francis Galton used to find out about the strength of mental imagery. He found that no one person would immediately make the image specific far beyond the sharpness of this general word; another person would suppress the imagery altogether, as those who deal in abstractions do, starving their visual faculties. But if the faculty is free in its actions, Galton said, it can select the images it needs, shift them in any way it wishes, and use and take pleasure in its actions. Galton went on, of course, to particularize the boat; and he made the necessary further declaration that the visual power was to be "subordinated to the higher intellectual operations."

"The word eugenics (which means "the good birth") was coined in 1887 by the younger half cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton. A former child prodigy with a striking gift for data mining, he popularized the notion of regression toward the mean in statistical research, launched the science of forensics by discovering that each person possesses a unique set of fingerprints, and created the first weather maps. As Edwin Black described Galton in his history of eugenics in America, War Against the Weak: "He joyously applied his arithmetical prowess and razor-like powers of observation to everyday life, seeking correlation. Galton distinguished himself by his ability to recognize patterns, making him an almost unique connoisseur of nature-sampling, tasting, and discerning new character in seemingly random flavors of chaos.""

"Some writers have doubted whether those complex mental attributes, on which genius and talent depend, are inherited, even when both parents are thus endowed. But he who will study Mr. Galton's able work on 'Hereditary Genius' will have his doubts allayed."