Opinions
British Green activist Richard Douthwaite interviewed a person who remembers once saying that "in some societies, very high levels — virtually First World levels — of individual and public health and welfare are achieved at as little as sixtieth of US nominal GDP per capita and used Kerala as an example". Richard Douthwaite states that Kerala "is far more sustainable than anywhere in Europe or North America". Kerala's unusual socioeconomic and demographic situation was summarized by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben:
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Kerala, a state in India, is a bizarre anomaly among developing nations, a place that offers real hope for the future of the Third World. Though not much larger than Maryland, Kerala has a population as big as California's and a per capita annual income of less than $300. But its infant mortality rate is very low, its literacy rate among the highest on Earth, and its birthrate below America's and falling faster. Kerala's residents live nearly as long as Americans or Europeans. Though mostly a land of paddy-covered plains, statistically Kerala stands out as the Mount Everest of social development; there's truly no place like it.
Read more about this topic: Kerala Model
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“Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are and so makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world—and never will.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)