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.
Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.
People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
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