Democrats speak about policies that redistribute wealth and reduce income inequality because they live in unequal places

Republicans resent the lecturing of "liberal elites" and embrace policies that promote opportunity, because they live in places where people are generally in similar economic situations

Serfdom was a brutal system that generated extraordinary human misery, yes. But it wasn’t capitalism that put an end to it.

In short, the rise of capitalism generated a prolonged period of immiseration. It was among the bloodiest, most tumultuous times in world history.

In Manchester and Liverpool, the two giants of industrialisation, life expectancy collapsed compared with in non-industrialised parts of the country.

Public health activists had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by separating sewage from drinking water. And yet progress toward this goal was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class.

Luck plays a much more important role than it is usually accorded, so that the virtue commonly attributed to wealth in modern society—and, likewise, the stigma attributed to poverty—is completely unjustified.

James Baldwin once observed, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

The free market is essentially a casino that you can never leave.

The very first coin flip transfers money from one agent to another, setting up an imbalance between the two. And once we have some variance in wealth, however minute, succeeding transactions will systematically move a “trickle” of wealth upward from poorer agents to richer ones, amplifying inequality until the system reaches a state of oligarchy.