"I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted"
About this Quote
Weaponized technocracy in a single sentence: Summers takes the antiseptic grammar of economics and uses it to say something morally obscene without ever sounding like he’s saying it. “Underpopulated” and “underpolluted” are terms that pretend to be neutral, like a weather report. The joke - if you can call it that - is the smooth substitution of people for pollution as variables to be “optimized.” It’s a bleak piece of insider wit: the kind that plays in rooms where cleverness can launder cruelty.
The specific intent, historically, was less a personal manifesto than a provocation embedded in a 1991 World Bank memo (Summers was then the Bank’s chief economist). The argument, in stripped-down cost-benefit logic, proposed that exporting dirty industries to poorer countries could be “efficient” because the statistical value assigned to lost life and illness is lower where wages are lower, and because some places are, in his phrasing, “underpolluted.” The line reads like a parody of neoliberal reason, which is exactly why Summers later suggested it was meant satirically.
The subtext still lands: even when framed as satire, it reveals what the model permits you to think. If your spreadsheet treats premature death as a discount rate, the conclusion isn’t an accident; it’s a feature. The quote endures because it crystallizes a cultural conflict that never went away: the clash between global policy made legible in numbers and global justice felt in bodies, usually other people’s.
The specific intent, historically, was less a personal manifesto than a provocation embedded in a 1991 World Bank memo (Summers was then the Bank’s chief economist). The argument, in stripped-down cost-benefit logic, proposed that exporting dirty industries to poorer countries could be “efficient” because the statistical value assigned to lost life and illness is lower where wages are lower, and because some places are, in his phrasing, “underpolluted.” The line reads like a parody of neoliberal reason, which is exactly why Summers later suggested it was meant satirically.
The subtext still lands: even when framed as satire, it reveals what the model permits you to think. If your spreadsheet treats premature death as a discount rate, the conclusion isn’t an accident; it’s a feature. The quote endures because it crystallizes a cultural conflict that never went away: the clash between global policy made legible in numbers and global justice felt in bodies, usually other people’s.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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