Wealth acquired by creating value for society is not equivalent to wealth that comes from economic rents. For example, a very important factor in the increasing inequality of wealth in many countries has been the increase in real estate prices. But the owner of a building, unlike the inventor of a new treatment for cancer, does not create value for society.

— Jean Tirole and Steven Rendall, Economics for the Common Good

Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

— Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland

Those of us who are privileged to live in affluent countries have grown appreciably richer in the past few decades. So too have the Third World rich. But the second half is, quite simply, wrong. The poor have not, generally speaking, come to be worse off in recent decades. On the contrary, absolute poverty has diminished, and where it was quantitatively greatest—in Asia—many hundreds of millions of people who barely twenty years ago were struggling to make ends meet have begun to achieve a secure existence and even a modest degree of affluence.

— Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism

The postmodern perception, Lyotard writes, makes no claim to be true: “Our hypotheses, therefore, should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the question raised.”

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories