Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence Summers

"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to it"

Lawrence Summers, Economist

About this Quote

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.

Quote Details

Topic	Ethics & Morality
Source	Verified source: World Bank internal memo on dirty industries (Lawrence Summers, 1991) Text match: 97.76% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. (Dated December 12, 1991; opening section titled “'Dirty' Industries”). The earliest primary source located is not a book, speech, or interview, but an internal World Bank memorandum signed by Lawrence H. Summers, dated December 12, 1991, with subject line “GEP.” Later reporting identifies this as the source of the quote, and Harvard Magazine states the memo was dated December 12, 1991 and leaked to the press. A reproduced text of the memo shows the quote in the opening “'Dirty' Industries” section. Secondary but near-contemporaneous reporting in The Washington Post on February 10, 1992 describes the memo as having been written the previous December and quotes the line. A later scholarly summary says the leaked memo was published in The Economist on February 8, 1992 under the title “Let Them Eat Pollution,” but that publication was not the original source, it was a later public reprint/excerpt of the internal memo. There is also some evidence the memo text was drafted by aide Lant Pritchett and signed by Summers; however, the quote is still properly sourced to the December 12, 1991 World Bank memo bearing Summers's name. So the attribution is substantially verifiable, but the original source is an internal memo rather than a public publication or speech. ([harvardmagazine.com](https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/05/toxic-memo-html?utm_source=openai)) Other candidates (1) Utopia Unarmed (Jorge G. Castañeda, 2012) compilation97.3% ... Lawrence Summers's notorious February 1992 memo regarding the institu- tion's stance on the environment : " I thi...
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