Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.
The present Arab uprising didn't stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will not last. I am with the young people.
I experienced how foreign aid for large-scale vaccination projects helps to save the life of children and thus give a real input to growth and to escaping poverty.
On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.
If poverty and underdevelopment are primarily consequences of poor institutions, then by weakening those institutions or stunting their development, large aid flows do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do.
The 1996 welfare reform law, for the first time, connected welfare benefits with an expectation that recipients would work or participate in training. That work requirement led to record increases in employment and earnings and a record decrease in poverty and welfare dependence after it was enacted.
Too often, while well-intentioned, our poverty programs fail the poor. They fail them by keeping them in cycles of dependency.
I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it?
I'd worked at the World Bank briefly as an undergrad and studied poverty levels around the world - particularly those earning less than $1.25 a day.
I want to eradicate poverty. I think that there's a tremendous passion for that inside the World Bank.
World Bank is a bank that's focused on economic development and poverty alleviation.