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Rio de Janeiro, incidentally, is not the poor part of the country, that sort of the rich part of the country. It's not the northeast, where 35 million people or so, nobody knows what happens to them, or cares. But Rio de Janeiro, that's where people are looking, the rich parts. And this journal is a science journal, kinda like Science in the United States. It was studying malnutrition. And here's the figures it had for Rio de Janeiro: infants from 0 to 5 months, severe malnutrition, meaning medically severe, 67%; 5 months to a year, 41%; a year to 5 years, 11%. Now the reason of course for the decline, from 67 to 41 to 11, is that they will die. So that's what happens under the conditions of the economic miracle, like in Guatemala. Now, it's a little wrong to say that the people die. The fact is, they don't die. We kill them, that's what happens. We kill them by carrying out policies, supporting the regimes of the kind that I've described. And by intervening with force and violence to suppress and destroy any attempt, however minimal, even on a speck like Grenada, we've got to stop any attempt to bring some change into this. That's the history of our hemisphere.

Noam Chomsky#193

PolicyEconomicsDataDeathHealthPoverty

About this quote

What does it mean?
Data shows infant malnutrition decreases in Rio because children die under policies. This economic miracle kills people rather than naturally reducing suffering.
In plain terms
Malnutrition numbers drop because the babies die not get better.
What can you take from it?
Look behind statistics to see human costs.

Where it applies

  • health policy
  • economic critique
  • data analysis

Putting it to work

  • check data causes
  • analyze policy effects
  • question economic reports

Questions to consider

  • How do policies kill people?
  • What is an economic miracle?

Another view

It makes a broad moral claim based on a specific dataset.

More from Noam Chomsky

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  2. We're not analyzing the media on Mars or in the eighteenth century or something like that. We're dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and…

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  3. You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal…

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