The world's 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over, Oxfam has revealed, adding that the global economic crisis is further enriching the super-rich.
"If anyone runs after money, their life will not have any beauty. It is boredom. A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy?From TED.
What if one decided to start philanthropy from day one?"
Noorwegen is het eerste land ter wereld dat als schuldeiser een onderzoek instelt naar de legitimiteit van schulden van ontwikkelingslanden aan de Noorse schatkist. Ook in Groot-Brittannië worden momenteel vraagtekens gesteld bij schuldenclaims aan ontwikkelingslanden.
De Noorse minister van ontwikkelingssamenwerking Heikki Holmås kondigde vorige woensdag een volledige doorlichting aan van de legitimiteit van alle schulden van ontwikkelingslanden aan de Noorse staat.
Three central propositions that encapsulate how thinking needs to change:
We need to narrow the target and broaden the instruments.
-- "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier, p. 192
"Growth is not a cure-all, but the lack of growth is a kill-all."
-- "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier, p. 190
Agriculture presents some unexpected paradoxes
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 149 - 150
"The equality assumption [in international trade theory]: Assuming away all differences -between human beings, between economic activities, among nations - [...] all factors qualitatively differentiating a twelve-year-old and his shoeshine 'firm' based in a Lima slum from Microsoft as a firm have been eliminated. The two of them have been averaged out as 'the representative firm'."
"The core assumption of 'perfect information' in reality implies that humankind must consist of individuals that are all alike [...] ."
"The conclusion so proudly reached by standard international trade theory, that a world trade will provide 'factor-price equalization' is in fact already built into the basic assumptions of the theory itself; a theory in which all the elements are equal and identical cannot produce anything but equality of outcome."
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 35 - 36
Theory development led to what Schumpeter calls 'the pedestrian view that capital per se propels the capitalist engine'. The West started thinking that by sending capital to a poor country with no entrepreneurship, no governmental policy and no industrial system, they could produce capitalism. The consequence is that today we virtually stuff money down the throat of countries with no productive structure - where this money could be profitably invested - because they are not allowed to follow the industrial strategy all the presently rich countries followed.
Developing countries are given loans they cannot profitably utilize, and the whole process of development financing becomes akin to that of chain letters and pyramid games. Sooner or later the system breaks down, and the ones who designed it, standing close enough to the door when everybody rushes out, are able to make good financial profits, while the poor countries themselves are the losers. This is part of the mechanism that often creates larger flows of funds from the poor to the rich countries than the other way around, one of Gunnar Myrdal's 'perverse backwashes' of poverty.
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 124
Education is increasingly regarded as the key to expanding wealth in the Third World. In countries like Haiti, which specialize in non-mechanized production - in technological dead-ends - raising the level of education of the population will not help to increase the level of wealth in the population. In such countries the demand for educated personnel is minimal. Education is more likely to increase the propensity to emigrate.
A strategy based on education succeeds only when combined with an industrial policy that also provides work for educated people, as happened in East Asia.
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 114
Standard textbook economics is created as an abstraction from an economic scenario in the same way that the game of chess is created as an abstraction of a war scenario. But just as the war in Iraq is not solved by referring to the rules of chess, the problems of world poverty are not solved by referring to an economic theory that does not contain key variables from factual knowledge.
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 34
Werner Sombart considers capitalism as a kind of historic coincidence, in which factors are brought together by a whole range of circumstances. Economic wealth is a result of its being willed, a result of a conscious policy. the driving forces of capitalism, which create both the foundation and the conditions for the system, are, according to Sombart:
- The entrepreneur, who represents what Nietzsche calls the 'capital of human wit and will', the human agent who takes the initiative to have something produced or traded.
- The modern state, which creates the institutions enabling improvements in production and distribution, and creates the incentives that make the vested interest of the entrepreneur coincide with the vested interests of society at large. Institutions encompass everything from legislation to infrastructure, patents to protect new ideas, schools, universities, and standardization of units of measurements, for example.
- The machine process, i.e. what was long called industrialism: mechanization of production creating higher productivity and technological change with innovations under economies of scale and synergies. This concept is very close to what we today call the 'national innovation system'.
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 120 - 121
"Africa's landlocked countries are not oriented toward their neighbors. Both their infrastructure and their policies are oriented either to be completely inward-looking or toward the world market. Neighbors are just in the way of the world market, not themselves the market. And this shows up in the growth spillovers.
In Africa, if the neighbors grow [...] it doesn't spill over. To date it has not mattered very much: usually in Africa the neighbors of the landlocked have barely been growing, so there has been precious little growth to spill over. But as things stand, even if the more fortunate countries started to grow, it would not help the landlocked."
-- "The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier, p. 57 - 58
"Reform in [failing states] has to come from within, and it takes courage. Vested interests can be relied upon to use their power, resources, and ingenuity to oppose change. Although the reformers have truth on their side, truth is just another special interest, and not a particularly powerful one. The villains willing to lie in order to defeat change have an advantage over those constrained by honesty. Reformers do not have it easy."
-- "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier, p. 180
