… is from pages 323-324 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnotes deleted; link added; original emphases):
Understandable and commendable as it may be to be concerned about the fate of fellow human beings, that is very different from being obsessed with the fate of numbers in an abstract category. To say, as Professor Thomas Piketty does in his much acclaimed book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that “the upper decile is truly a world unto itself” is to fly in the face of the fact that most American households – 53 percent – are in the top decile at some point in their lives, usually in their older years. For most Americans to envy or resent the top ten percent would be to envy or resent themselves. This is not even “class warfare,” but confusion between social classes and age cohorts.
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