… is from pages 222-223 of David Schmidtz’s excellent 2023 book, Living Together (footnote deleted):
No system of property can look fair to those who see it as a snapshot. It is not possible. In a healthy economy, twenty-somethings tend to be poorer than forty-somethings. And, as society gets richer, progress inevitably manifests as forty-year-olds pulling ever farther ahead of where they were twenty years earlier when they started with next to nothing, and also ever farther ahead of what is currently the society’s statistical bottom rung: young people, new immigrants, or anyone starting with next to nothing. But statistical appearances hide this fact: As bottom-rung people start ever farther behind increasingly wealthy forty-year-olds, bottom-rung people are seeing their own prospects and their own futures, not only the present situation of current forty-year-olds, pulling ahead. Today’s wave of penniless twenty-year-old newcomers will some day earn more as forty-year-olds than current forty-year-olds who misleadingly appear to be leaving them behind in the statistical snapshot.
No system of property can look fair to those who see it as a snapshot. It is not possible. In a healthy economy, twenty-somethings tend to be poorer than forty-somethings. And, as society gets richer, progress inevitably manifests as forty-year-olds pulling ever farther ahead of where they were twenty years earlier when they started with next to nothing, and also ever farther ahead of what is currently the society’s statistical bottom rung: young people, new immigrants, or anyone starting with next to nothing. But statistical appearances hide this fact: As bottom-rung people start ever farther behind increasingly wealthy forty-year-olds, bottom-rung people are seeing their own prospects and their own futures, not only the present situation of current forty-year-olds, pulling ahead. Today’s wave of penniless twenty-year-old newcomers will some day earn more as forty-year-olds than current forty-year-olds who misleadingly appear to be leaving them behind in the statistical snapshot.The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.