Thomas Pogge Quotes

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• The fact that oppressive and corrupt regimes can borrow money in the name of the whole country means that the country's future generations will be weighed down by interest and repayment burdens, even if the money has been frittered away in some frivolous way, embezzled or used for weapons to suppress the country's population.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Mean, Names

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• We live in a world where economic positions - income and wealth - are very unevenly distributed, and this leads to the widespread persistence of poverty.

  Thomas Pogge

  Persistence, Income, World

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Economics is like a church, and it fulfills the same function the church had fulfilled for centuries: the justification of the status quo.

  Thomas Pogge

  Church, Economics, Century

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  5 Copy quote

• The massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. A corrupt ruler wants to be able to keep this money safe and to be able to spend it. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Opportunity, Return

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Feudalism is an economic system where a few people own all the land and the others have no option but to be serfs on such a feudal estate. We now condemn feudalism. We condemn not merely the feudal lords but we condemn the whole structure of rules that sustained feudalism. I am asking people to think similarly about the world economy.

  Thomas Pogge

  Thinking, Land, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  10 Copy quote

• I think that many citizens understand how our system works, or rather, fails to work, for structural reasons. But who has the capacity and the incentives to bring change? The banks and other corporations love the system because it allows them to buy legislation that serves their own interests even at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. Incumbent politicians love the system because it allows them to raise millions of dollars toward defending their seats.

  Thomas Pogge

  Thinking, Majority, Dollars

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  7 Copy quote

• We should not think of poverty eradication as a matter of collecting money and giving it to the poor so much as of reforming the global rules that are disadvantaging the poor and making it impossible for them to fend for themselves.

  Thomas Pogge

  Thinking, Giving, Matter

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• In order to prepare for meaningful change, we have to look at both sides of the problem. We need to examine the output of our political system, which is often very hostile to the poor abroad and hostile also to the poor and middle class domestically. And we must also look at the procedures through which this output is produced.

  Thomas Pogge

  Meaningful, Order, Class

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Persistence, Thug

  9 Copy quote

• America is run by the rich and powerful in their own interest. To an extent that I think is hard to exaggerate, the intellectuals - academics, journalists and so on - are bought off. And that's a big change that happened in the United States in the last 30 or 40 years.

  Thomas Pogge

  Running, Powerful, Thinking

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Domestic and supranational regulatory capture leads to two things: on the one hand, to an inequality spiral where the rich get richer because they can influence rulemaking and rule application in their favor; on the other hand, it also leads to instability. This is so because the relatively few organizations capable of influencing supranational rulemaking through the lobbying of major governments have diverse interests. This will, in some cases, lead to compromises. But it will also lead to spheres of influence.

  Thomas Pogge

  Government, Hands, Organization

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• You can get an ice-cold Coke for around fifty cents in most developing countries, not just in the major population centers, but at the most remote and surprising places. The logistical challenges to resupplying all these outlets are enormous - and yet, the entire system works with incredible efficiency as is confirmed by the price of the product.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Ice, Challenges

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Large companies are very good at solving extremely complex problems in a globally optimal way.

  Thomas Pogge

  Way, Problem, Very Good

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.

  Thomas Pogge

  Desire, Ought, Institute

  "Thomas Pogge and global fairness". "The Philosopher's Zone" with Alan Saunders, www.abc.net.au. March 18, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

• Our global institutional arrangements - the basic ground rules that govern our world economy - are human-made. They don't exist naturally, nor are they God-given. We make these rules, those of the WTO [World Trade Organization] Treaty for instance, which fill tens of thousands of pages. These words have been strung together by human beings and are also interpreted and enforced by human beings.

  Thomas Pogge

  Our World, Organization, Together

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• The collective shortfall of the 3.08 billion people (47 percent of world population) who, in 2005, lived below $2.50 per day was $507 billion per annum, which indeed comes to about two-thirds of the present US military budget. This gives us a rough sense of how much the eradication of poverty would cost.

  Thomas Pogge

  Military, Two, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Economists operate with this image of the homo economicus, the rational economic agent, and while such agents are rare in the wider world, they are common in economics departments. Exemplifying the homo economicus paradigm, economists typically choose their research projects and hypotheses so as to promote their own careers, to maximize their lifetime income. This explains the astonishing pressures toward conformity in academic economics: how deviant views (except those by a few who have already achieved stardom) get crushed by an army of conformists.

  Thomas Pogge

  Army, Views, Careers

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  6 Copy quote

• This splendid book discusses how, in the last two hundred fifty years, large numbers of people have achieved levels of well-being that were previously available only to a few individuals, and how this achievement has given rise to equally unprecedented inequalities. Unique in its focus and scope, exceptional knowledge and coherence, and careful argumentation, The Great Escape is highly illuminating and a delight to read.

  Thomas Pogge

  Book, Unique, Years

  9 Copy quote

• Because present procedures by design favor the affluent, the poor are being increasingly marginalized. And because the poor are so marginalized, they can exert little influence on institutional design decisions. We need to break out of this vicious spiral and create momentum in the opposite direction.

  Thomas Pogge

  Opposites, Design, Decision

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Think of US slavery in 1850, or the subjection of women. Both of these injustices could have been - and were! - defended by pointing out, quite correctly, that this situation of slaves and women had been improving throughout the preceding century. Slaves, in particular, were worked less hard, beaten and raped less frequently, better fed, and less often ripped apart from their families. So would a celebration of moral progress have been appropriate in 1850? Surely not. Slavery could have been and should have been abolished - then, if not before.

  Thomas Pogge

  Thinking, Should Have, Progress

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Given the total income and wealth available in the world today, we could easily overcome poverty, which would require raising the share of the bottom half from three to roughly five percent. Unfortunately, the trend is going in the opposite direction.

  Thomas Pogge

  Opposites, Overcoming, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

  Thomas Pogge

  Technology, People, Innovation

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  5 Copy quote

• You may know that in India now the Tata car is becoming all the rage; you can buy it for one lakh - $2000 dollars - it's very, very cheap. So India seems to be going the route that China went a few years ago and that developing countries all over the world seem to want to follow, namely, to rely on these personal vehicles, which is just an irrational way of organizing transport.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Years, Car

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

• Our international banking system allows banks to accept funds gained from tax evasion and other crimes and thereby facilitates and encourages embezzlement by public officials, especially in developing countries, as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by multinational corporations.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Banking, Developing Countries

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  6 Copy quote

• Critical journalism has gone out of fashion, or rather, it has been bought out. And so, we have much less of it than we did during the Vietnam era, where there was very critical reporting on the Vietnam War and a lot of disagreement among the media. Now you find that the media are much more homogenous, converging because they all must cater to the same community of advertisers. It's sad to see.

  Thomas Pogge

  Fashion, War, Media

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

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