Want Less Poverty in the World? Empower Women
Sean Illing of Vox (an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media) interviews Augusto Lopez-Claros, November 5, 2018. The single greatest antidote to poverty and social stagnation is the emancipation of women. Wherever this has been tried, wherever women have been empowered to do as they wish, the economy and the culture have been radically improved. A new book by Augusto Lopez-Claros, a senior fellow at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, an Iranian writer and novelist, is among the first to comprehensively test this proposition by surveying data from 189 countries. Titled Equality for Women = Prosperity for All , the book shows how gender inequalities - in education, income, law, employment, and wages - lead to instability and chaos at almost every level of society. I called Lopez-Claros to talk about the links between gender inequality and political instability, how discriminatory laws hold women back, and what