Gunnar Myrdal Quotes

Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?

I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.

Richness, the ideas of having plenty of money, is not ... an absolute state. Richness is about the amount of money you have compared to the people you see around you. It is about where you are in relation to others, and where they are in relation to you ... and whether you can have the things you want and other people have.

There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.

While economic development [in Egypt] made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.

Economics spreads happiness.

My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.

The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.

We have become stronger economically; we have been successfully resolving the social problems, raising the level of living - the standards of living - of the population.

I have to try and uplift the standard of living for the people in Zambia. If I cannot do that, I will have failed.

Richer people tend to be happier than poor people, and people in poor countries tend to be less happy than people in rich countries.

The wealth of a country is in its working people.

The level of real income is not what determines whether they are happy or not. It’s their relative place in the pecking order.

More people in more countries, both developing and developed, have experienced larger increases in living standards than in any prior fifty year period.

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

You need to think about the system that you live in and the comforts that you have. But the comforts that you have that are causing the discomforts of a massive amount of people around the world.

Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

A nation as such does not give aid to another nation. More precisely, the common citizens of our country, through their taxes, give to the privileged elites of another country. As someone once said: foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.

For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.

Although the Great Leader told us that we have to let the people eat rice with meat soup, wear silk clothes and live in a tiled roof house, we have not accomplished his will. We have already reached the status of a strong country in the military field, let alone politics and ideology, but there are still quite a number of things lacking in people's lives. I am trying to implement his will by solving these problems.

I understand we're on our way to being a Third World country. Could we just stop at 'Second World' before we get there?