Douglas Massey Quotations

One-third of all African Americans in the United States live under conditions of intense racial segregation. They are unambiguously among the nation's most spatially isolated and geographically secluded people, suffering extreme segregation across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Black Americans in these metropolitan areas live within large, contiguous settlements of densely inhabited neighborhoods that are packed tightly around the urban core. In plain terms, they live in ghettos.

Markets, and the way they operate can't be frozen in time and place. A dynamic economy that is growing and increasing material well-being for a large number of people have to change over time.

Globalization, meaning the global expansion of a market economy, is the only way we can guarantee widespread prosperity and peace. A lot of nations are just so small, that unless they can sell their goods and services on the market they're never going to develop, they don't have an internal market that's big enough to sustain anything.

You can't have a market without government, because governments create the rules of competition and enforce fairness in the markets, and they build the institutions within which competition takes place.

I want to get away from "It's either government or the market." That's a false dichotomy.

Markets are a social construction, they're made from institutions. We in a democratic society create markets, we constitute markets, we bring them into existence, and we shouldn't turn markets over to a narrow group of people who regulate them and run them in their interests, rather they should be run democratically for the common good.

I think liberals have to come to terms with the market and embrace market mechanisms as the only way to run a society that produces widespread material well-being and respects individual rights and liberties.

The United States, after all, was founded by men of liberal sentiment who were seeking to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by creating a constitutional order for the creation and expansion of liberty.

For me, liberals are people who seek to use government to promote the general welfare.

What happens in Jamaica today is that the elites stay because they have the power. It's the upwardly mobile and aspiring professional classes that leave.

The US wants the labor, but doesn't want to address the risks people take to get here.

The U.S. wants the labor, but doesn't want to address the risks people take to get here.

Almost everybody gets in. It's just a matter of how many times it takes.

It's all part of the process of immigration. It's a wave of technology that's enabled immigrants to continue to play a more direct role in the lives of their families at home.