[quotes] Poor Economics, a Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo 2011

 

"So it is not that the lack of food could not be a problem or isn't a problem from time to time, but the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for hunger to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty. This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Amartya Sen has shown, however, most recent famines have been caused not by lack of food availability but by institutional failures that led to poor distribution of available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere."

"Is is probably the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer's herbs and spells?"

"In the end, the mistrust of incentives for immunization comes down to an article of faith for both those on the right and the left of the mainstream political spectrum: Don't try to bribe people to do things that you think they ought to do. For the right, this is because it will be wasted; for the conventional left, which includes much of the public health community and the good doctors from Seva Mandir, this is because it degrades both what is given and the person who gets it. Instead, we should focus on trying to convince the poor of the benefits of immunization."

"For the same reason that those who live in rich countries live a life surrounded by invisible nudges, the primary goal of health-care policy in poor countries should be to make it as easy as possible for the poor to obtain preventive care, while at the same time regulating the quality of treatment that people can get... All this sounds paternalistic, it certainly is. But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?"

"The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace."

"The school Abhijit went to in Calcutta had a more or less explicit policy of expelling the bottom of the class every year, so that by the time the graduation exam cam around, it could claim a perfect pass record."

"In the treatment areas in Matlab, this change was faster than elsewhere - the community health worker, who tended to be a relatively well-educated and assertive woman, was both the embodiment of the new norm and the carrier of news about the shifting norms in the rest of the world."

"The right space for policy is not so much to replace the family as it is to complete its action and, sometimes, protect us from its abuses. Starting from the right understanding of how families function is crucial in being able to do so effectively."

"It is too hard to stay motivated when everything you want looks impossibly far away. Moving the goalposts closer may be just what the poor need to start running toward them."

"The emphasis on government jobs, in particular, suggests a desire for stability, as these jobs tend to be very secure even when they are not very exciting. And in fact, stability of employment appears to be the one thing that distinguishes the middle classes from the poor."

"This statement was a good reflection of an institutionalist view that has strong currency in development economics today. The real problem of development, in this view, is not one of figuring out good policies: It is to sort out the political process. If the politics are right, good policies will eventually emerge. And conversely, without good politics, it is impossible to design or implement good policies, at least not on any scale. There is no point in figuring out the best way to spend a dollar on schools, if 87 cents will never reach the school anyway. It follows (or so it is assumed) that 'big questions' require 'big answers' - social revolutions, such as a transition to effective democracy."

"Acemoglu and Robinson define institutions as follows: 'Economic institutions shape economic incentives, the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. Political institutions determine the ability of citizens to control politicians."

"As a result, the agents of the government (the bureaucrats, the pollution inspectors, the policemen, the doctors) cannot be paid directly for the value they are delivering to the rest of us - when a policemen gives us a ticket, we complain, but we don't offer him a reward for doing this job well and keeping the roads safe for everyone. Contrast this with the grocery store owner: She delivers value by selling us eggs, and when we pay her for the eggs, we know we are paying for the social value she is delivering."

"This simple observation has two very important implications: First, there is no easy way of assessing the performance of most people who work for the government. This is why there are so many rules for what bureaucrats (or policemen, or judges) should and shouldn't do. Second, the temptation to break the rules is ever present, both for the bureaucrat and for us, which is what leads to corruption and dereliction of duty."

"This is one important reason why government programs (and similar programs run by NGOs and international organizations) often do not work. The problem is inherently difficult and the details need a lot of attention. Failures are often not the result of sabotage by a specific group, as a lot of political economists would have it, but come about because the whole system was badly conceived to start with and no one has taken the trouble to fix it. In such cases, change can be a matter of figuring out what will work and leading the charge."

"The rules were (obviously) not designed with the objective of undermining the effectiveness of the entire health-care system in India. On the contrary, they were probably put on paper by a well-meaning bureaucrat, who had his own views of what the system should do and did not pay too much attention to what that demanded on the ground. This is what we call, for short, the 'three I's' problem: ideology, ignorance, inertia. This problem plagues many efforts to supposedly help the poor."

"We have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty, so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world - elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO workers, academics and entrepreneurs - in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day."

[quotes] How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee 2018

 

"And, of course, what was he thinking about? Which was a way of hoping he was thought about me."

"I can say that love and money are what most of my querents wanted to know about... It's the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there's a demon lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read."

"I felt shallow, but I was there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you."

"I was someone who didn't know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet. This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers."

"You are only one of you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it's on Tunis or the trees outside your windows, is what matters. Don't worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible."

"Talent isn't enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they're dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I'm writing. Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent - promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident-at-the-beginning to being a writer, and I learned that from her."

"Go to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there."

"I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have."

"He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was when he got in trouble. And so be made sure he was never alone."

"Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just part my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was."

"I wasn't rich in here in New York, but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow."

"The lesson for me at least - and I think of as the gift of the garden, learned every year I lived in that apartment: you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined."

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people - that is, to nonwriters in a capitalism system - for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time."

"I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My longstanding love for singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this was that I didn't feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity - any identity, really - was unreliable precisely because it was self-made."

"The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen."

"It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because you are never sure which version of the person you are with - the one who is hidden or the one trying to be free."

"I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this."

"I could see I had been very angry with her. A child's anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her to guess my thoughts. The adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it."

"The therapist gave me an exercise. You can't get rid of the guardians who've kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they've been doing since you were a child."

"You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become."

"What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?"

"Conservatism's oldest con is getting a voter to yell 'thief' at someone the thief chooses, the thief they voted for. And now we are in the final phase."

"Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine."