“The way the world tends to work” – but, contemplating such hard, cold facts inevitably makes many folk feel rather queasy.
Brings to mind an anecdote about the Victorian academic Benjamin Jowett, long-time Master of Balliol College, Oxford. At a London social event attended by various learned folks, during the period of the Irish potato famine; Jowett met an economics pundit of the day, called Nassau Senior. This guy was blithely discoursing on how the famine needed to get worse before it got better, so that through people’s starving to death and / or emigrating, Ireland’s population would be reduced to a sustainable level. Jowett remarked, long after: “Since that day, I have never felt altogether comfortable in the company of political economists.”