Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Petty

Petty isn’t describing inequality so much as embalming it. By framing poverty as something that “ever was and ever will be,” he performs a neat rhetorical trick: he turns a historically produced condition into a law of nature. The move does double duty. It absolves policymakers and property-holders of responsibility, and it preemptively delegitimizes complaint. If deprivation is eternal, then reform becomes not just difficult but faintly ridiculous.

The second clause sharpens the blade. The poor (or anyone objecting to hierarchy) are recast as “naturally querulous and envious,” making dissent a personality defect rather than a political argument. Petty’s “Evil as old as the World” isn’t poverty itself; it’s the noise poverty generates. That subtext matters: social instability is treated less as a symptom of material conditions than as a moral nuisance emitted by the lower orders.

Context turns this from mere cynicism into early-modern statecraft. Petty helped pioneer “political arithmetic” in Restoration England, an era obsessed with managing populations, labor, and taxation after civil war. His economics was inseparable from governance: measure the people, discipline the people, keep production humming. In that light, the line reads as ideological infrastructure for an emerging market society. Inequality is positioned as inevitable fuel for the system, while resentment is diagnosed as an ancient, recurring infection.

It works because it sounds like worldly wisdom. The cadence of inevitability (“ever was and ever will be”) and the moral labeling of critics create a closed loop: the system is natural, objections are vice, and the only sensible response is management, not change.