We’ve learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people.
Historically, industrial revolutions haven’t been kind to poor people. Despite the potential benefits technology can offer, the immediate impact on the lowest-paid members of society has often been negative.
I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn’t have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.
Poor people, people of color – especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.
You must do as your people do. If my people are poor, I must be poor. People ask me, ‘Why don’t you find a personal coach or a private car?’ I can’t. Then I won’t be part of my people.
My perspective is never gonna change on that… We’ve got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods, send them to bad schools, and say, ‘Good luck in life.’ That’s just not right.
China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.
I come from the poor people, and I have been here working my whole stinkin’ career for people who don’t have a chance, and I really resent anybody that says I’m doing it for the rich. Give me a break.
One thing that struck me in my study of history is how people are excluded. I don’t mean just racial minorities or women. Pretty much all poor people who don’t have documents are excluded from history and its records. People who were illiterate usually didn’t leave any primary documents.
We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they’re poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they’re all underneath it.
If you look at the world’s top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I’ll pay a royalty. But I shouldn’t be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.
To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.
Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.
This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don’t matter is not quite the way our history would define it.
I will continue to find ways to help poor people find a job, get a job, and learn someday to own the job.
Being Christian towards poor people means trying to improve their lives and give them back some self-respect.
I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
When Superstorm Sandy churned up fourteen-foot walls of water that slammed New York’s coastal communities in October 2012, they also washed away any false notions we had that we care sufficiently for poor people.
Bonuses balance my budget in New York City. The bigger the bonuses on Wall Street, the more money I had to spend on poor people. The New York City budget is determined greatly by the bonuses given on Wall Street.
I founded Samasource because I was frustrated by traditional approaches to poverty alleviation. Even those approaches focused on jobs often equip poor people with skills for which there is little market demand.
If you want to leave move money in the hands of poor people, you cannot do it through personal income tax cuts. You have to just give them money.
Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education.
Creative new health strategies like micro-insurance for poor people or Kangaroo care for pre-term babies are transforming health outcomes in even the most low-resource settings. Dedication and innovation are transforming health care worldwide.
Most Americans think that public health is services for poor people, and since most Americans hate poor people and want all poor people’s services destroyed, they hate public health.
You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.
