When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Interpretation
Saving a life contributes to the overall productivity of society.
This quote emphasizes the significant impact that saving lives has on society and the economy. By highlighting roles such as farmers, teachers, and mothers, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala underscores that every individual plays a crucial part in the economic fabric, and preserving lives ensures that those contributions continue.
In practice
In a speech about community service, you could reference this quote to emphasize the importance of helping others.
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.
Regulatory reform must move beyond limiting the damage that the financial sector can do and ensure that the sector genuinely serves society.
We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.
Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people.
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you'll create credit... So you reach a certain point that that you can't do that anymore... There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?
Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction.
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