Parenting & Family Quote by Lawrence Summers

Summers’s line is a technocrat’s grenade: a sentence engineered to sound like hard-headed compassion while quietly laundering moral responsibility through the language of “realism.” The move is simple and brutal. By presenting a binary - factory labor or street prostitution - he collapses a messy political economy into a forced choice, then asks the listener to applaud the lesser evil. It’s a rhetorical trick that turns exploitative employment into a kind of humanitarian shelter.

The intent is defensive: to justify low-wage, hazardous work in global supply chains as preferable to worse alternatives. It’s also preemptive. Anyone criticizing sweatshops is positioned as naive, sentimental, even complicit in harm: if you shut down the textile job, you “create” the prostitute. That inversion shifts attention away from employers, trade regimes, and governments and onto the moral purity of activists.

The subtext is what’s doing the real work. “Would be prostitutes” is not an empirical claim so much as a disciplining story: poor girls are framed as permanently one catastrophe away from sexual exploitation, and the market is cast as their guardian. It smuggles in a worldview where coercion is natural, scarcity is destiny, and policy’s job is to manage damage rather than change structures.

Context matters. Summers built a career inside institutions (Treasury, World Bank orbit, Harvard) that speak in incentives and second-best solutions. This quote reads like that tradition at its most ethically thin: a cost-benefit lens applied to human vulnerability, delivered with the confidence that describing the world’s ugliness absolves you from asking who profits from it.