Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence Summers

Nothing ages faster than a technocrat trying on irony. Lawrence Summers’s line - delivered in a notorious World Bank memo from the early 1990s - is written in the voice of pure cost-benefit rationality: if human life is valued through wages and lost earnings, then the “cheapest” place to absorb pollution is where incomes are lowest. The sentence is engineered to sound airtight, even virtuous (“we should face up to it”), because it borrows the cadence of hard-nosed realism. That’s the trick: it frames moral revulsion as sentimental denial of “logic.”

The specific intent is provocation with a purpose. Summers is dramatizing how certain economic models, taken literally, can justify obscene outcomes. But the subtext is double-edged: satire that depends on an audience catching the wink can also read as confession. When you say the logic is “impeccable,” you aren’t just mocking the spreadsheet; you’re reinforcing the idea that the spreadsheet is the adult in the room, and ethics are an optional add-on.

Context does the rest. In an era of triumphant globalization, structural adjustment, and Washington Consensus certainty, the memo crystallized a broader anxiety: that international policy was becoming a machine for laundering power into neutrality. The quote works because it exposes the hidden premise many institutions preferred not to name out loud - that markets price some lives lower - while also revealing how easily the language of efficiency can anesthetize responsibility.