Chapter 22: Ending Poverty

1. When an uncompetitive leafcutter colony fails, every ant in the nest dies. But when an uncompetitive business firm folds, the company's employees do not die, they move on to other jobs.

2. In a technicultural economy, the penalty for uncompetitiveness is not death, but poverty. Much as humanity's struggle against mass starvation characterized the agricultural age, the battle against mass poverty shaped the industrial era.

3. To retain the manifest benefits of capitalism while achieving some semblance of economic fairness, traditional American liberals support a policy of income redistribution.

4. In a market-economy, differences in pay rates reflect differences in the amount of value-added per worker. Wage differentials widen and narrow with shifts in demand.

5. Human beings share 99.6 percent of their genes. Of the .4 percent genetic diversity that does exist, nearly all occurs within racial groups. The genetic difference between races is vanishingly small, just .04 percent.

6. In the Agricultural Age, landowners controlled the economy. In the Industrial Age economic power was held by the factory owners. With the onset of the Information Age, economic power is shifting to the owners of knowledge.

7. Equality of political rights does not imply equality of economic benefits. Critics of America's income diversity believe that since all people have equal rights, they should earn roughly the same incomes.

8. Workers are not interchangeable. Income diversity is caused primarily by education, not by genetics or luck. Education determines occupation and occupation determines income.

9. America has been losing the War on Poverty because we have been attacking the wrong enemy. The only remedy for poverty is aggressive investment, especially in human capital.

10. Too many Americans seem to agree with the Japanese that racial purity creates a competitive advantage. Too few Americans seem to grasp that it is our own heterogeneity that makes America such a vibrant society. The diversity of our immigrant society must be the foundation of our competitive advantage.