Resources for Teachers and Students on Mahbub ul-Haq
Prepare: Along with his wife, Khadija, economist
Mahbub ul-Haq founded the Human Development Centre in Islamabad,
Pakistan, in 1995. After his death in 1998, the center was
renamed the Mahbub ul-Haq Human Development Centre. The
center's website contains a tribute
to Dr. ul-Haq's life.
Read:
Mahbub ul-Haq wrote an
original essay for the Architects of Peace project.
In it, he speculates that it would cost $34 billion dollars
per year to build a world society where there was adequate
education, health care and nutrition for all people. He
points out that this is less than a quarter of the $130
billion the Third World alone spends on its military.
Explore: Addressing the State of the World Forum
in 1997, Mahbub ul-Haq gave a speech titled "Towards
a More Compassionate Society" that is considered
a major articulation in the global movement to eliminate
poverty. He built a strong case, in this speech, that global
society is not a very compassionate society, and he outlined
practical steps to remediate that situation.
Write: In his Architects of Peace essay, Mahbub
ul-Haq opined that the cost of a single military submarine
was enough to provide safe drinking water to 60,000,000
people in the developing world, and that the cost of a jet
fighter could provide schooling to 3,000,000 children in
the developing world as well. If these figures are anywhere
close to being true, they beg the question of whether investments
in national security are counterproductive in terms of global
human security. Assuming Dr. ul-Haq's figures to be accurate,
what do they suggest about the ethics of defense spending?
At what point is it reasonable to suggest that money spent
on foreign aid will go farther to insure domestic security
than equal amounts of money spent on defense? Write a three-to-four
page informal essay on the economics of security in which
you examine these questions speculatively.
Extend: The United Nations Development Programme,
UNDP, works toward the UN goal of halving the proportion
of people suffering from extreme poverty worldwide by the
year 2015. While some consider this "Millennium Development
Goal" to be "Mission Impossible," a large
number of international economists think that it is entirely
possible. Programs underway toward achieving the Millenium
Development Goal are described on the UNDP website.
Additional Resource: The World Bank monitors progress
toward the UN
Millennium Development Goals on its website.
Biography of Mahbub
ul-Haq