The Locust Effect Quotes

“the poor don’t have much in the way of money or possessions to steal—so it turns out that the most profitable thing to steal is the whole person.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Over the years, I have sat with many very poor mothers and fathers as they have shared their stories of surviving genocide, slavery, murder, torture, humiliating rapes, and abuse. The pain they describe is unfathomable – and mental temptation is to imagine that the people who endure it are somehow fundamentally different from me. Maybe, somehow, they just don’t feel things like I do. Maybe they expect less, care less, hope for less, want less or need less. But painfully, over time, I have seen that they are exactly like me.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Violence in the developing world is like grief in the developed world—it’s everywhere, but we just don’t see it.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“One would hope that if the world woke up to such a reality, it would swiftly acknowledge and respond to the disaster—but tragically, the world has neither woken up to the reality nor responded in a way that offers meaningful hope for the poor. It has mostly said and done nothing. And as we shall see, the failure to respond to such a basic need—to prioritize criminal justice systems that can protect poor people from common violence—has had a devastating impact on two great struggles that made heroic progress in the last century but have stalled out for the poorest in the twenty-first century: namely, the struggle to end severe poverty and the fight to secure the most basic human rights.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“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

“Violence is as much a part of what is means to be poor as being hungry, sick, homeless, or jobless. In fact, as we shall see, violence is frequently the problem that poor people are most concerned about. It is one of the core reasons they are poor in the first place, and one of the primary reasons they stay poor. Indeed, we will simply never be able to win the battle against extreme poverty unless we address it.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Facts are hard things - and either we deal with the facts, or the facts will deal with us”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“for nearly a decade, the World Bank has been reiterating its finding that “crime and violence have emerged in recent years as major obstacles to the realization of development objectives.”8 The Bank has stated flatly, “In many developing countries, high levels of crime and violence not only undermine people’s safety on an everyday level, they also undermine broader development efforts to improve governance and reduce poverty.”9 Multiple studies by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have concluded that restraining violence is a precondition to poverty alleviation and economic development, plainly stating that “a foundational level of order must be established before development objectives can be realized.”10 Leaders of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) have concluded, “Poor people want to feel safe and secure just as much as they need food to eat, clean water to drink and a job to give them an income. Without security there cannot be development.”11 When it comes to violence, researchers are increasingly concerned that development experts are missing Amartya Sen’s insight that “development [is] a process of expanding the real freedoms people enjoy,” and are failing to appreciate the idea “that freedom from crime and violence are key components of development. Freedom from fear is as important as freedom from want. It is impossible to truly enjoy one of these rights without the other.”12”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“As Dr. Hamid Rashid, the senior Bangladeshi economist and a leader of the UNDP’s Legal Empowerment of the Poor program, has flatly stated: “With limited and insecure land rights, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the poor to overcome poverty.”80 And once again, it is the women in the developing world who are most devastated by the lawless chaos of insecure property rights. In the absence of clear and documented legal rights to property, there are two other social forces that step into the vacuum and settle who gets what: 1) brute force, and 2) traditional cultural norms. And under both influences women generally lose—and brutally so.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“there is virtually no credible social science evidence to support the idea that violence in societies can be effectively addressed in the absence of the state exercising its monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force through law enforcement.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“There are more slaves in the world today (best estimate—27 million) than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. And there are more slaves in India today than in any other country in the world.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“The Locust Effect then is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Without the world noticing, the locusts of common, criminal violence are right now ravaging the lives and dreams of billions of our poorest neighbors. We have come to call the unique pestilence of violence and the punishing impact it has on efforts to lift the global poor out of poverty the locust effect. This plague of predatory violence is different from other problems facing the poor; and so, the remedy to the locust effect must also be different. In the lives of the poor, violence has the power to destroy everything—and is unstopped by our other responses to their poverty. This makes sense because it can also be said of other acute needs of the poor. Severe hunger and disease can also destroy everything for a poor person—and the things that stop hunger don’t necessarily stop disease, and the things that stop disease don’t necessarily address hunger. The difference is that the world knows that poor people suffer from hunger and disease—and the world gets busy trying to meet those needs.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Sometimes the exacerbating factor is so acute that it can render the direct solution nearly useless—but solving the exacerbating factor is always inadequate in the absence of the direct solution.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“the problem is not the supply of food, but the inequities in the distribution system that rob the poor of the capacity to access the food.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“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

“You are probably not regularly being threatened with being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed. But if you were among the world’s poorest billions, you would be.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“In the developing world, about 1 out of 3 urban dwellers lives in a slum”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Mark L. Schneider. Placing Security and Rule of Law on the Development Agenda. Washington, DC: World Bank (2009). 14.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Christopher Stone advised the Bank, “In terms of social and economic development, high levels of crime and violence threaten to undermine the best-laid plans to reduce poverty, improve governance, and relieve human misery.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“high levels of criminal violence reduce a nation’s economic productivity by 2 to 3 full percentage points of GDP—and”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“in Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson emphasize the importance of legal institutions (and other state institutions) that are “inclusive” through rights and incentives equally available to all people rather than “extractive” (that is, designed to extract resources from the many for the few) if countries are to experience sustained economic growth.15”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“the Harvard scholar Christopher Stone, now the head of the Open Society Foundations, summed it all up in his report to the World Bank: “In terms of social and economic development, high levels of crime and violence threaten to undermine the best-laid plans to reduce poverty, improve governance, and relieve human misery.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

“Without the world noticing, the locusts of common, criminal violence are right now ravaging the lives and dreams of billions of our poorest neighbors.”
― Gary A. Haugen, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence