When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Interpretation
Saving a life contributes to the overall productivity of society.
This quote emphasizes the significant impact that saving lives has on society and the economy. By highlighting roles such as farmers, teachers, and mothers, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala underscores that every individual plays a crucial part in the economic fabric, and preserving lives ensures that those contributions continue.
In practice
In a speech about community service, you could reference this quote to emphasize the importance of helping others.
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.
Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.
If government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy.
Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones...You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.
It's not that other countries steal jobs from you guys. It's your strategy. Distribute the money and things in a proper way.
We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I?
Not only do unemployment benefits help families who are hurting; they also put money into their pockets that they'll then spend - and their spending will keep other Americans in jobs.
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