To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.
Amartya SenThereยs a clear and strong connection between fertility reduction and womenยs literacy and empowerment, including womenยs gainful employment. If you look at the more than 300 districts of India, the strongest influences in explaining fertility variations are womenยs literacy and gainful economic employment.
Amartya SenThe best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other.
Amartya SenI think one big thing about the United States is that the American population, they may be excited about Iraq or one thing or another, but basically has had a great deal of interest in humanitarian causes both within the country and abroad. Even when they criticize the mechanism to which it flows.
Amartya SenNearly everywhere Buddhism went, there had been a higher level of literacy, even in miserable Burma, not to mention Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Amartya SenSouth Korea from a country that had relatively little primary education became close to universal literacy in the course of 25, 30 years, in a way trying to replicate what Japan had done earlier. They were learning to some extent from the Japanese experience too. So I think, in a sense, the East Asians were following a path, which all other countries including South Asia could follow but chose not too.
Amartya Sen