Robert McNamara

Article

Robert McNamara is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 15, 2023 and June 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “World Bank, led by Robert McNamara”; “It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote”. It most often appears alongside Sierra Club, Washington Post, 1965.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 15, 2023
  • Last seen: June 23, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

May 15, 2023 · Original source
In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations. India complied:
June 23, 2023 · Original source
By his early twenties, Nader had become something of a hotshot at Harvard Law School, where he developed an interest in vehicle safety after one of his classmates was injured in a car crash. Post-World War II, highway construction had boomed and vehicle sales had boomed along with it, with U.S. car ownership tripling in the two decades following 1946. It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote that “what’s good for GM is good for America.” But these cars were also pretty dangerous, with a per-capita vehicle death rate more than twice today’s. At Harvard, Nader proposed the then-groundbreaking, but now widely accepted, “double-injury theory”: the idea that a car accident is best conceptualized as consisting of two separate injuries, first the car itself hitting something and then the passengers hitting the inside of the car6.