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.
I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it's not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.
The problem is this. The spread of markets outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them, let alone to guide the course they take
Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.
Long experience, in the United States and in other advanced economies, has demonstrated that monetary policy is most successful when decisions are rendered independent of influence by elected officials.
Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?
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