Utopia For Realists: How We Can Build The Ideal World Quotes
"A world without poverty – it might be the oldest utopia around."
"The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
"We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is."
"True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well."
"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."
"It empowers people. It gives choices. I think it can make a difference."
"The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects. This one had quite large effects."
"The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money."
"For a long time, the Land of Plenty was reserved for a small elite in the wealthy West."
"The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income."
"Much like a satellite in space can survey the weather across an entire continent so can the GDP give an overall picture of the state of the economy."
"The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile."
"Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."
"It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege."
"We are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services."
"Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring."
"Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what."
"If the king sees you looking worse than the other young men your age, he would have my head because of you."
"Machinery must work for us in coal mines," Oscar Wilde enthused in 1890. Machines should "be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing."
"The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame," a New York University professor notes. "But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next."
"The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed."
"People do not get used to handouts," Duflo succinctly points out. "They get used to nets."
"Mankind will … become largely a race of machine tenders."
"We have to save capitalism from the capitalists," Piketty concludes.
"Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive."
"It’s as if they are being told," Graeber writes, "You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and healthcare?"
"Doing randomized controlled trials in poverty-stricken countries is difficult, time consuming, and expensive."
"Microcredit's reckoning came in the form of our old friend Esther Duflo, who set up a fatal RCT in Hyderabad, India."
"Cash handouts may be the most extensively studied anti-poverty method around."
"Not everything is measurable. And findings can’t always be generalized."
"The ethics to consider. Say that after a natural disaster, your study provides aid to half the victims but leaves a control group in the lurch."
"Since there’s never enough money to fix all the problems anyway, the best method is to do whatever seems to work."
"Everybody seems to have different ideas on how to raise school attendance."
"Few intuitions hold up against the evidence from RCTs."
"Traditional economists would say that the poor would get treated for worms of their own accord, given the obvious benefits – and innate human rationality."
"For randomistas like Duflo, the sidewalk is littered with these $100 bills."
"The time has come to put paid to what Duflo calls the three I’s of development aid: Ideology, Ignorance, and Inertia."
"Major dilemmas such as how to structure a democracy or what a country needs to prosper can’t be answered by an RCT."
"Imagine there was a single measure that could wipe out all poverty everywhere."
"Effectively, open borders would make the whole world twice as rich."
"Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history."
"The richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income."
"In the nineteenth century, inequality was still a matter of class; nowadays, it’s a matter of location."
"Opening borders to labor would boost wealth by much more – one thousand times more."
"Humans didn’t evolve by staying in one place. Wanderlust is in our blood."
"The grand total of global development aid adds up to about what a small European country like the Netherlands spends on healthcare alone."
"If we want to make the world a better place, there’s no getting around migration."
"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing."
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
"The time is always right to do what is right."
"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."