Indeed, many students and families believe El Sistema is needed more than ever: a free social project that gives the country's neediest children the chance to escape the dangers of poverty.
The obvious dangers of poverty, such as fostering terrorism, are noted, but Diaz also offered an even more consuming fact.
Radical reform is needed now, or millions of young people will be in serious danger of a poverty stricken old age.
For while most people placed behind the veil of ignorance might not be so risk averse as to choose the difference principle to govern their society, it is reasonable to suppose that most would at least be concerned to insure themselves against the danger of desperate poverty and would hence desire principles of justice that ensure everyone reasonable access to a social minimum.
Even so, when he retired in 1981, McNamara said that the bank "had barely begun to develop its full potential" and he spent his later years strenuously writing and lecturing about the dangers of world poverty.
The organisation's chief executive Fiona Weir said yesterday that reducing the cap "is likely to hit even more of these single parents with pre-school children" and said it the policy was in danger of increasing child poverty further.
Currently four out of five Americans live in danger of falling into poverty and are struggling with joblessness.
Mr. Simpson should know that the middle class is in a precarious position in this country, with millions in danger of falling into poverty.
They should go to see the prominence of important African-American churches and to counter the impression outsiders have of the Harlem of danger and poverty.
But for too many others, life will continue to be a vicious circle of poverty, danger and desperation.
In The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth, Mei's family and their shop are very much at the heart of my reimagined Chinatown: a small, close-knit East End community that - whilst it faces very real dangers in the shape of poverty, violence and organised crime - is a world away from the Chinatown of Victorian and Edwardian literature.
