Ordinary people like you and me can achieve very little on their own. We need to build support. Even if you are a thought leader and have some good ideas on how to make the world better, and even if you write five or ten books - that won't have much effect unless you have people who are willing to support your ideas.
Thomas PoggeWhat is really nice about the Health Impact Fund is that it is a win-win, something that without much cost to anyone makes a lot of people better off.
Thomas PoggeWe live in a world where economic positions - income and wealth - are very unevenly distributed, and this leads to the widespread persistence of poverty.
Thomas PoggeIn 88 poor countries for which we have data, in each and every one of the 88, the PPP for food shows that poor people can buy less food than you would expect from the PPP that the World Bank is using. The reason for this is obvious on reflection. It has to do with the fact that most foodstuffs are tradable commodities: basic foodstuffs, such as rice, flour and beans, can easily be conveyed across national borders and their prices will therefore roughly mirror the exchange rates among currencies.
Thomas PoggeThe World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.
Thomas PoggeIn order to achieve something, in competition with the powerful and smartly wielded influence of corporations, we need to join forces and be as well-organized as they are. This does not come natural to us more intellectual types, as we tend to be averse to hierarchy and groupthink; we don't like to be part of anything like a disciplined and well-organized team or movement. But the alternative is to continue losing politically - which means continued failure to protect the world's poor, who are really bearing the brunt of our disorganization.
Thomas PoggeThe global financial crisis is a great opportunity to showcase and propagate both causal and moral institutional analysis. The crisis shows major flaws in the way the US financial system is regulated and, more importantly, in our political system, which is essentially a bazaar of legalized bribery where financial institutions can buy themselves the governmental regulations they want, along with the regulators who routinely receive lucrative jobs in the industry whose oversight had formerly been their responsibility, the so-called revolving-door practice.
Thomas Pogge