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