Richard N. Cooper Quotes
[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.
Richard Newell Cooper, Economist, Book Review, Foreign Affairs, September / October 2014
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The relationship of population increase economic growth is a critical one. If an underdeveloped country manages to have a 3% annual economic growth rate and also has a 3.2% population growth, at the end of the year, the average person is actually poorer than he was the previous year. South Korea, China, Thailand and India implemented successful population control and family planning programs before they were able to take advantage of economic development. To modernize, the country must be able to have a surplus of funds which can be invested in roads, schools, hospitals, and other facilities which can produce even more growth later. Too many new mouths to feed, clothe and care for can be a barrier to development even if the economy is reasonably good.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had proposed International Development Goal Benchmarks for donor organizations which was then officially endorsed by the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. But many people thought that many of these “benchmarks” were not only invalid but exacerbated some of the problems that they were trying to fix—especially in a developing country where structural factors inhibited class mobility and the focus was on large businesses and not small and “mom & pop” enterprises that poor could aspire to and benefit from.
What is also neglected very often is that America and the other developed nations exploited and destroyed much of their own environment in the process of developing yet they express concern that the lesser developed nations will do what they do.
the Bolshevik Communists of Russia Zenzinov was often a critic of the Bolsheviks.
Cost of the pill is only one factor responsible for the difference. Even in situations where birth control pills have been provided for free, there has been a slow acceptance and use rate among the poor and developing women. The other factors are resistance to change of any kind, cultural traditions, women tending to make no decisions without the husband’s OK, religious taboos where the affluent tend to ignore religious strictures when they interfere with desired lifestyle, while the poor tend to be more obedient, and most of all the sad fact that children are a woman’s social safety net in developing countries that do not yet have one built into the body politic.
Richard Newell Cooper was an American economist, policy adviser, and academic.
