Developing World Quotes

“It does not matter what it is; it matters how much there is of it; that all around the oases of your shining Western cities it exists; it is three-fourths of the world! Open your ears, my darling; listen to thier prayers; listen to the silence of those who've learned to pray for nothing. For nothing has always been their portion, whatever the name of their nation, thier city, their tribe.”
― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned

“No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.”
― Zia Haider Rahman

“I recall the way an old history professor of mine defined poverty: He said the poor are the ones who can never afford to have any bad luck. They can’t get an infection because they don’t have access to any medicine. They can’t get sick or miss their bus or get injured because they will lose their menial labor job if they don’t show up for work. They can’t misplace their pocket change because it’s actually the only money they have left for food. They can’t have their goats get sick because it’s the only source of milk they have. On and on it goes. Of course, the bad news is, everybody has bad luck. It’s just that most of us have margins of resources and access to support that allow us to weather the storm, because we’re not trying to live off $2.00 a day.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today's secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.”
― Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

“For the hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people who live outside the protection of the rule of law, they principal reason they suffer abuse is often not the absence of good laws, but the absence of a functioning public justice system to enforce those laws.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model feeling the overconsumption of the West.”
― Tom Butler, Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot

“...misunderstanding how sovereign currency works prevents many nations from living up to their resource capacity by adopting an unnecessarily restrictive fiscal stance while they leave domestic resources unemployed.”
― L. Randall Wray Yeva Nersisyan

“While MMT holds that sovereign governments are not financially constrained, whether developed or developing, this does not mean that they should not constrain spending. Whether or not they need to do so and to what extent depends on their internal and external resource space”
― L. Randall Wray Yeva Nersisyan