Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.
Interpretation
Extreme poverty leads to negative social consequences such as disease and instability.
In this quote, Jeffrey Sachs highlights the detrimental effects of extreme poverty, suggesting that it creates an environment where diseases thrive, political unrest arises, and terrorism can flourish. It underscores the urgency of addressing poverty as a means to improve global health, stability, and security.
In practice
In a discussion about global issues, one might quote Sachs to emphasize the need for poverty alleviation strategies.
All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: 'You count for nothing.' We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.
Soil mapping is one of the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development
The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.
Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.
Our challenge, our generation's unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. Our planet is crowded to an unprecendented degree. It is bursting at the seams. It's bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms, and in ecological terms
Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty.
I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society.
Actually, the inability of any society to resist immigration, the inability to find other solutions to the problem of employment at the lower, more physical, and menial levels of the economic process, is a serious weakness, and possibly even a fatal one, in any national society. The fully healthy society would find ways to meet those needs out of its own resources.
I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear.
The extent to which all people in our society are made to count, and believe that they count, is not just a measure of decency; it makes sound economic sense.
There never yet was, and never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families.
The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.
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