Wealth & Money Quote by Jimmy Carter

Globalization, Carter implies, is not a rising tide; it is a tide with admissions criteria. The sentence is built like a moral trapdoor. He starts with an extreme profile - "totally illiterate", "one dollar a day" - not to caricature poverty, but to strip away the comforting mythology that market integration automatically lifts the poorest. By choosing thresholds so stark, he denies the listener any easy rebuttal. If even this person is left out, then the celebrated aggregate gains of trade and investment are politically irrelevant.

The subtext is a rebuke to technocratic triumphalism. Globalization is often narrated in spreadsheets: GDP growth, cheaper goods, capital flows. Carter reframes it as a literacy problem, a capability problem, a dignity problem. In his formulation, the barrier isn't geography but access: education, basic services, functioning institutions. Without those, "benefits" remain theoretical, arriving as headlines rather than lived experience.

Context matters: Carter’s post-presidency turned him into a kind of moral auditor of American power, especially on development and human rights. Coming from a former president, the line carries a quiet indictment of policy choices that treat social investment as optional, and inequality as a tolerable side effect of progress. It's also a warning about backlash. If globalization produces winners who can read contracts and navigate systems, and losers who cannot, resentment is not a mystery - it's the predictable bill that comes due.