Daniel Barrows

“world’s first labor story: Exodus. Pharaoh was the first bad boss, Moses was the first labor leader, and the Exodus was the first strike.”
― Sara Horowitz, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up

“All species will go extinct eventually, even our own: it is one of nature's few imperatives. As of today, however, that train has not quite left the station. We still have some control over our demise-namely, how long it will take and how much our children and grandchildren will suffer. If we want to take action, we should get started while it still maters what we do.”
― Hope Jahren, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

“Monogamous marriage changes men psychologically, even hormonally, and has downstream effects on societies. Although this form of marriage is neither “natural” nor “normal” for human societies—and runs directly counter to the strong inclinations of high-status or elite men—it nevertheless can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition and altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men’s psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long-term investments, and steady economic accumulation”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Underlying or overall social mobility rates are much lower than those typically estimated by sociologists or economists. The intergenerational correlation in all societies for which we construct surname estimates - medieval England, modern England, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile, and even egalitarian Sweden - is between 0.7 and 0.9, much higher than conventionally estimated. Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility