William W. Lewis

“The only long-term, high-confidence strategy for the world not to be overwhelmed by terrorism is for economic development to go so well that terrorists have no place to incubate or hide...Perhaps the easy step is for the United States to give recognition to poor countries that make the needed changes by themselves. Thus part of the U.S. strategy for global economic development should be "inclusion", rather than the "preemption" and "intervention" of the fight against terrorism.”

“...the special interests are almost everybody. Everybody perceives they stand to lose if the economy is allowed to evolve. They are right if their special-interest favoritism is the only favoritism that is fixed. The result...is that nobody is giving up their favoritism. In these circumstances everybody loses...”

“...the road, rail, and port systems are so bad that poor countries cannot develop the scale of operations necessary to achieve high productivity.”

“Even the highest compensation is a tiny fraction of the value created by many business and technical innovations. The problem with executive compensation in the United States is not with this idea. The problem is that in many cases the high compensation levels persist even when innovations do not occur and reactions to the innovations of others are slow.”

“One of the crucial traits of real leaders in a democracy is the ability to help people become better informed so that society can make better choices.”

“...education is not the way out of the poverty trap. A high education level is no guarantee of high productivity. The truth of the matter is that regardless of institutional education level, workers around the world can be adequately trained on the job for high productivity.”

“The bigger story was competition causing more productive business enterprises to replace less productive ones...However, it provides even more reason to worry about all the people living in economies where protection and distortion of competition allow unproductive enterprises to persist and cause these people to fall further behind, but even more importantly, to remain in poverty.”