Quotes About Development

First, I need to convince you that human progress has, on balance, been a good thing, and that, despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being – even now in a deep recession.

because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich

the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.

Let's give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.

When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

The world's cities already contain half the world's people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world's land area.

The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.

The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance – not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats trained to do the central planning.

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.

Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation.

Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience.

The first railways were far more expensive than the existing canals and far less reliable. Only gradually and with time does the new invention bring down its own costs or raise its efficacy to the point where it can match the old.

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution.

Globalgiving.com

The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation.