Herman Kahn Quotes

We need fundamental change. In the past, national development led to people's happiness but now the link between national growth and improvement in people's lives has been severed.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.

We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

One of the biggest challenges facing the globe is the gap that exists in the wealth and standards of living enjoyed by the world's nations.

People want development. Not everyone knows what it means. Same as jobs. Not everyone knows what a job is, but people want jobs.

Global poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history.

We must embark on a bold new program for ... the improvement and growth of undeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery .... For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

We define poverty as a shortage of material goods, which justifies the production of more and more material goods. It does not occur to us that it might be more realistic to regard it as an aberrant situation in which more material goods are required than can actually be produced, for then the solution would be to create those socio-economic conditions in which less goods rather than more were required.

You're not going to solve the problems of poverty in the world with less energy.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

When the World Economic Forum was established in 1971, the global population was four billion, of which 50% lived in poverty.

I began to realize that, in spite of great achievements in wealth and military prowess, the great powers of Europe have not yet succeeded in providing the greatest happiness of the vast majority of the people; and that the reformers in these European countries were working hard for a new social revolution.

We must do our part to end poverty in Korea so that the next generation doesn't experience what we are going through now.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

Of course there are critics who believe that no matter what we do, the Florida dream is over. They claim that we must accept the idea that inevitably our future is one of high taxes and big government.

The absence of state capacity - that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted - is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world.

In the ideal world, philanthropy should be redundant or at least it should be at the edges, as innovation or risk capital. But it's far from an ideal world; the wealthy are cornering more and more opportunities and resources from this planet. So, the big challenge for philanthropy is... can it engage with the distribution of wealth itself?

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

Because we can expect future generations to be richer than we are, no matter what we do about resources, asking us to refrain from using resources now so that future generations can have them later is like asking the poor to make gifts to the rich.

This splendid book discusses how, in the last two hundred fifty years, large numbers of people have achieved levels of well-being that were previously available only to a few individuals, and how this achievement has given rise to equally unprecedented inequalities. Unique in its focus and scope, exceptional knowledge and coherence, and careful argumentation, The Great Escape is highly illuminating and a delight to read.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.