South 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.

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

Even though I’m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. They’re putting important issues on the agenda.

It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity.

Human life consists of doing certain things ... to take part in the life of the community; to be able to talk about subjects that interest me and there freedom of speech comes into it.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

There may be countries [where] there's no gender inequality in schooling, even in higher education, but [where there is] gender inequality in high business. Japan is a very good example of that. You might find cases in the United States where at one level women's equality has progressed tremendously. You don't have the kind of problem of higher women's mortality as you see in South Asia, North Africa, and East Asia, China, too, and yet for American women there are some fields in which equality hasn't yet come.