Quotes About Development

Third, children do pick up the pattern.

In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world's people have become better off.

We have come a long way to arrive at an age in which one-pound preemies are rescued with heroic surgery, children are not expected to be economically productive until their fourth decade, and violence against children has been defined down to dodgeball.

the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. Speech

What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls "the enlightened economy.

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

An analysis in Bangladesh confirmed that the women who worked in the garment industry (as my grandparents did in 1930s Canada) enjoyed rising wages, later marriage, and fewer and better-educated children.46 Over the course of a generation, slums, barrios, and favelas can morph into suburbs, and the working class can become middle class.47 To appreciate the long-term benefits of industrialization one does not have to accept its cruelties.

If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the

The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that "the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.

Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.

The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.5

Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.

The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century.9

As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor—has gone unnoticed.

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything.

The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.

In the United States in 1901, an hour's wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts. The amount of every other foodstuff that can be bought with an hour of labor has multiplied as well: from a pound of butter to five pounds, a dozen eggs to twelve dozen, two pounds of pork chops to five pounds, and nine pounds of flour to forty-nine pounds.20

It cannot be when the root is neglected that what springs from it will be well ordered.

In order every one in our homeland learns principles of democracy and the peaceful transition of power, and in order to stabilize and develop multiple choices in democratic practice.

In mine opinion, love is fitter than fear, gentleness better than beating, to bring up a child rightly in learning.

Unity of minds, natural love and co-operation, are the qualities we have to develop today. Education is not for securing university degrees.

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

When the fruit appears the blossom drops off. Love of God is the fruit, and rituals are the blossom.