Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.
Interpretation
Understanding oppression requires personal connection and recognition of those who suffer.
In this quote, Robert J. Shiller highlights the idea that oppression often continues unchecked when there is a lack of direct interaction or visibility between the oppressor and the oppressed. The physical or emotional distance creates a barrier that allows injustice to persist, as understanding and empathy are hindered when individuals do not confront the realities faced by those who are marginalized or oppressed.
In practice
During a community meeting about social issues, this quote could inspire discussion on the importance of understanding marginalized voices.
Those on the downside of rising economic inequality generally do not want government policies that look like handouts. They typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them. Redistribution feels demeaning. It feels like being labeled a failure.
Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.
That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.
Money management has been a profession involving a lot of fakery - people saying they can beat the market, and they really can't.
We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters - that is, the outlier events that matter the most.
If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.
[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
What is the evolutionary value of blushing? It seems not to be to our advantage to do it, to involuntarily reveal our inner emotions. If we're trying to manipulate or lie, actions in furtherance of individual goals as opposed to the goals of others, blushing would not seem to be helpful. And yet everyone blushes, except the psychopath.
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