Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.
There is considerable evidence that women’s education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children.
We might have reason to be driven! We live for a short stretch of time in a world we share with others. Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat.
Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.
Democracy is a universal value.
I think the whole progress over the last two or three millennia has been entirely dependent on ideas and techniques and commodities and people moving from one part of the world to another. It seems difficult to take an anti-globalization view if one takes globalization properly in its full sense.
Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.
Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually.
The themes that the anti-globalization protesters bring to the discussion are of extraordinary importance. However, the theses that they often bring to it, sometimes in the form of slogans, are often oversimple.
The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.
The market economy succeeds not because some people’s interests are suppressed and other people are kept out of the market, but because people gain individual advantage from it.
It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity.
I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.
We live in a world where there is a need for pluralistic institutions and for recognizing different types of freedom, economic, social, cultural, and political, which are interrelated.
To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.
To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.
I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.
In all kinds of ways there are different freedoms that effect our lives and you can assess what our lives are like by looking at the various freedoms that we have.
From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.