Message-ID: <002001be0117$24b57560$cdf4fea9@jay98> Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 09:30:46 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:j@QMAIL.COM> Subject: Your friend and mine: "No Limits Larry" To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
I just got done reading a great book about the World Bank by Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli.According to the authors, the World Bank is supposed to HELP Third Worlders rather than destroy their lives. Here are a few choice quotes from one of our all-time favorite economic poster-boys, that modern-day Douglas MacArthur: Larry Summers:
"There are no...limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn't a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs". [p. 109]
On the Former Soviet Union, "speaking both for myself and on behalf of the World Bank":
"Look [at] the obvious entrepreneurial energy of the black market, look [at] the large numbers of Soviet workers who are finding jobs in Poland and who are regarded by Polish employers as the best workers they can find, and look [at] the wage rates for those workers--it's hard to find any plausible exchange rate that gets you to 75 cents and hour. That means that the system can be made to work." [p. 105]
--October 1991 Bank-IMF Annual General Meeting [Summers' talk was recorded by Kirsten Garrett of Australian Broadcasting Company, National Radio and is transcribed from the programme tape]
"The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. There's only one set of laws and they work everywhere. One of the things I've learned in my time at the World Bank is that whenever anybody says 'But economics works differently here', they're about to say something dumb".[p. 106]
It's a neat book:
Faith and Credit : The World Bank's Secular Empire by Susan George, Fabrizio Sabelli Paperback - 282 pages (September 1994) Westview Press; ISBN: 0813326079 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813326079
Jay -- www.dieoff.com