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Oddly, no one has ever systematically pursued Kuznets’s work, no doubt in part because the historical and statistical study of tax records falls into a sort of academic no- man’s-land, too historical for economists and too economistic for historians. Th at is a pity, because the dynamics of income in e quality can only be studied in a long-run perspective, which is possible only if one makes use of tax rec ords.

Will the world in 2050 or 2100 be owned by traders, top managers, and the superrich, or will it belong to the oil-producing countries or the Bank of China? Or perhaps it will be owned by the tax havens in which many of these actors will have sought refuge.

It is difficult for writers not to
measure their own merit by their royalties, and when
bad work brings great pecuniary rewards it requires
unusual firmness of character to produce good work and
remain poor.

Painting, in former days, accompanied and
adorned spacious architecture, and may do so again
when the squalid privacy engendered by our competitive
fear of our neighbours has given place to a desire for
communal beauty.

It is said by many in the present
day that Communism and Fascism
are the only practical
alternatives in politics, and that
whoever does not support the
one in effect supports the
other. I find myself in
opposition to both, and I can no
more accept either alternative
than, if I had lived in the
sixteenth century, I could have
been either a Protestant or a
Catholic.

There are at most times all
sorts of doctrines being preached by all sorts of prophets,
but those which become popular must make some special
appeal to the moods produced by the circumstances of the
time.