It is for the poor people's sake, above all, that we urgently need more unity and better organization and need to concentrate our reform efforts in order to really to achieve reforms, one by one.

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

By using general consumption PPPs, the World Bank is, in effect, saying to the poor: "Sure, you cannot buy as much food as the dollar value we attribute to your income would buy in the United States. But then you can buy much more by way of services than you could buy with this PPP equivalent in the United States." But what consolation is this? The poor do not buy services - they are services, on their luckier days.

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

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.

Severe poverty is getting better by some measures, but it's also becoming ever more scandalous because it is now so easily avoidable.

In the domain of pharmaceuticals, we need a metric for health impact, and with this metric we can then assess the value of the introduction of a new product and pay its innovator accordingly, say on the basis of the product's measured health impact during its first ten years on the market. In exchange, innovators must of course renounce the usual rewards they are otherwise entitled to, namely the patent-protected markup on the price of their product.