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Thomas Pogge

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Philosopher

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“If we offer a prize, so to speak, to anyone who manages to bring a country under his physical control - namely, that they can then sell the country's resources and borrow in its name - then it's not surprising that generals or guerrilla movements will want to compete for this prize. But that the prize is there is really not the fault of the insiders. It is the fault of the dominant states and of the system of international law they maintain.”

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“The massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. A corrupt ruler wants to be able to keep this money safe and to be able to spend it. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs.”

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“The global financial crisis is a great opportunity to showcase and propagate both causal and moral institutional analysis. The crisis shows major flaws in the way the US financial system is regulated and, more importantly, in our political system, which is essentially a bazaar of legalized bribery where financial institutions can buy themselves the governmental regulations they want, along with the regulators who routinely receive lucrative jobs in the industry whose oversight had formerly been their responsibility, the so-called revolving-door practice.”

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“Each powerful player, or coalition of players, will make concessions in areas where it has relatively less at stake in exchange for other such players making reciprocal concessions in other areas where it has relatively more at stake. Such trades are collectively rational insofar as they get each of the powerful players more of what it wants. But such trades are also dangerous because the whole international rule-system will become incoherent and therefore vulnerable to crises that will continue to become increasingly severe.”

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“You may know that in India now the Tata car is becoming all the rage; you can buy it for one lakh - $2000 dollars - it's very, very cheap. So India seems to be going the route that China went a few years ago and that developing countries all over the world seem to want to follow, namely, to rely on these personal vehicles, which is just an irrational way of organizing transport.”

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“We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.”

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