Until you have looked in depth at the system and found out where women in Egypt are not being cut through female genital mutilation, or where kids in Vietnam are not malnourished, or where hospitals in America are getting rid of the superbugs anyway - unless you have that level of curiosity about what's going on without you, you will always come in with your great new recipe and just ignore what's going on, and that will make you much less effective at what you're trying to achieve.

The question, "When did you last listen to a poor person properly and try to understand what's going on inside their own experience?" enables you to connect.

There's no point in just hankering for the big trade unions of the 1950s or '60s.

Economists who studied in the '80s tend to have a pretty crude neoclassical view that's just about freeing up prices and markets, and then you'll get the growth and everybody benefits. And they'll just repeat that, because if you're a minister or a senior civil servant, you don't have time to read anything anymore. You get very fixed in your views.

Somewhere like Russia or China, decision-makers have far fewer constraints on acting than in more open systems.

If you were disabled in Russia, you had to re-register every year, and it took up to six months to re-register, so people who lost limbs in Afghanistan had to prove that their leg hadn't grown back.

People think there's a single solution to complex problems, and the solution is often making an enemy of a group of people - pulling back and rejecting the other.