9
" West Germany, even after absorbing the migrants fleeing East Germany, had yet more jobs to fill, and in the 1960s signed agreements with Greece, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia whereby they would send “guest” workers to West Germany, on condition they would eventually return. In 1973, foreign workers were one-eighth of the labor force in Germany. France was not far behind, with 2.3 million foreign workers, or 11 percent of the labor force. Many of these were employed for childcare, as cooks, and as custodians.20 England drew immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, including those expelled by Idi Amin from East Africa. "
― Raghuram G. Rajan , The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
11
" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” When seen over short stretches, it seems that history repeats, that racism and militant nationalism erupt periodically in the world to sow hatred and spawn conflict. Yet the society that experiences these movements is not the same, it trends toward being more tolerant, more respectful, and more just. Around that trend line, we do go up and down. We may be down today, and we have a long way to go, but the distance we have come should give us hope. Let us not let the future surprise us. Instead, let us shape it. "
― Raghuram G. Rajan , The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
14
" Three important impediments to a unified European market were a plethora of rules and regulations that differed across countries, impediments to the movement of firms and labor across countries, and currency fluctuation. In a series of negotiated agreements, starting with the Single European Act in 1986, the Maastricht Treaty in 1991, and the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, much of Europe agreed to merge into a Union which would implement the four freedoms—the freedom of movement of goods, services, people, and capital across the borders of the signatories. They agreed to a common European citizenship, over and above national citizenship. In addition, a subset of the countries decided to adopt a common currency, the euro. "
― Raghuram G. Rajan , The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
15
" The state, burdened with debt and large entitlement promises made in happier times, is strapped for funds. It is also paralyzed in many countries, with discredited establishment parties at each other’s throat, and challenged by radicals of all kinds. In the meantime, technology rolls on, threatening to automate many more jobs, while not yet producing the growth that will help address society’s difficulties. With society’s values having turned more individualistic, and with little empathy available to paper over differences in already diverse societies, there is none to spare for new immigrants. Nevertheless, population aging is already shrinking labor forces in many countries, so they may well need to encourage immigration. And even as countries turn inwards, bent by the weight of domestic problems, there are very visible signs that climate change, which will require global cooperation to a degree we have never seen before, is upon us. We need to act now, both domestically and internationally, but the will and ability to act is weak. "
― Raghuram G. Rajan , The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
20
" The more explicit and one-off the transaction, the more unrelated and anonymous the parties to the transaction, and the larger the set of participants who can transact with one another, the more the transaction approaches the ideal of a market transaction. The more implicit the terms of the transaction, the more related the parties who transact, the smaller the group that can potentially transact, the less equal the exchange, the broader the range of transactions and the more repetitive transactions are over time between the same parties, the more the transactions approach a relationship. The thicker the web of relationships tying a group of individuals together, the more it is a community. In a sense, the community and the market are two ends of a continuum. "
― Raghuram G. Rajan , The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind