Jeffrey Sachs on Human Rights, Development Goals and Structural Reform

today's session our main attraction is jeffrey sachs who is a world famous economist but also much more than that he is a broad thinker with an acute sense of history a penchant for normative reflection and an extensive political experience he has a detailed comprehension of the crisis our world is facing such as the covet 19 crisis a fragile financial system a looming climate catastrophe and a shifting power balance among superpowers but he also grasps the larger picture the possibilities for a world in which such dangerous crises would either not arise or else be contained through effective global institutional arrangements coordinating concerted action a world in which the danger of war has become remote in which severe poverty has become a distant memory in which the benefits of innovation are accessible to all humanity has all the wealth and technology such a world requires we know enough about the functioning of social institutions to conceive workable models drawing on successful states and unions of states such as the eu and yet like tantalus we seem unable to reach what is so plainly within reach to recognize ourselves for peace justice reorganize ourselves for peace justice democratic governance and the common good of humankind if this continues it's just a matter of time that our luck will run out and will be destroyed by war disease or economic or ecological collapse or is this too pessimistic are we on the right path perhaps already with the sdgs for example making enduring and accumulating progress toward a morally based world order what can humanity achieve in this century and how can we achieve it on these big questions we now hear from jeff sacks and as he said we want a good discussion so get yourselves prepared to discuss what he will give us as first input great thank you very much uh thanks for those wonderful words of introduction to guide our discussion today it is a um indeed a very complicated and interesting time that we are living in to say the least and uh i'll pick up uh on thomas's uh wise words uh with a couple of examples we have the this newly emerged virus sars cove ii we can talk more about why these zoonotic diseases are occurring but for the moment let me just focus on one person in fact and that is well under one year from the identification of this virus we had several effective vaccines already developed this is in record time typically vaccines have taken 10 or 15 years to develop several vaccines were developed in less than a year and are now in deployment that tells us something it tells us we are in an age of highly successful science uh we are in an age of uh dramatic innovation and that's uh an extremely positive note uh because we have the possibility to do things that we did not have even just a few years ago let me take a second point however we had donald trump as president until recently he is psychopathic uh extraordinarily dangerous and uh almost won re-election uh this country is deeply divided it had a white supremacist psychopathic leader who had a serious following in the united states and still has a serious following we have a significant proportion of uh republican party members saying that they would follow trump into a third party that is a deep social illness we could not solve problems in this country with such a person in charge but clearly his gaining power was not entirely accidental or incidental because the following is indeed so strong so at the same time that we can develop vaccines with unprecedented speed and remarkable efficacy and new technology platforms like the mrna vaccines of pfizer and moderna at the same time we did not have functional political institutions to keep a psychopath out of power or after an insurrection in which he tried to overthrow the government even to have that widely understood and acknowledged and indeed in our congress to this moment not acknowledged by almost half of the members of congress so this is a uh startling uh contrast with the scientific efficacy maybe one good way to think about it is a favorite expression of mine of professor edward wilson at harvard who i regard as one of the great people of our world and one of the great scientists the evolutionary biologist who likes to say we have entered the 21st century with our stone age emotions our medieval institutions and our god-like technologies and what professor wilson is indicating in that quip is that our human uh motivations emotions uh thought processes are evolved and uh the product of uh hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and uh we are uh we have a human nature which i do believe we have and it's a human nature which is slow changing the product of human evolution we're fairly mixed up in how we think sometimes sublimely rational sometimes perversely uh nutty uh but that is our human nature then we have institutions such as uh the us government the federal government which was created in 1787 uh in a constitutional uh convention which uh in some ways had a great uh genius to it and in some ways uh incredible cruelty it was an insta it was a constitution of slavery for example it was a constitution that also reflected realities of 230 years ago for example representative government because the idea of active participation of the public was impossible when it took weeks to get to washington rather than seconds to get online so we have a set of institutions that were developed more than two centuries ago and clearly do not function very well they have produced contested elections now several times in a row they have given the presidency uh twice to uh the uh candidate who had lesser votes because of the electoral college uh and its oddities and aside from the institutional uh aspect uh the racial legacy of the founding of this country remains today in a culture war between white supremacists and the rest of society so this is uh the medieval institutions and then we have science and science is a remarkably [Music] successful social enterprise since the 16th century it builds on itself it has created mechanisms of uh knowledge creation that are strong robust uh and with increasing returns to knowledge so the more knowledge opens up more frontiers for further innovation and this remarkable success leads to what wilson called the god-like technologies we don't understand them we don't i don't know how my phone works i don't know how this zoom works i don't know how almost anything works that i depend on daily i could probably say a few sentences about it but in terms of real deep understanding we're in the hands of engineers uh and systems experts who may or may not be governed i don't know about you but i don't really have a clue as to what's going on inside facebook uh apple uh amazon uh and so forth anymore i read about it constantly but who knows and i certainly don't know how they interact with the national security agency the pentagon and other parts of the systems uh technology that we are enmeshed in so this all means that the world is extremely complicated and not especially well governed in any way uh with all this knowledge this foolish country that we're in uh ended up tragically with more than 500 000 deaths from covid and you can compare that with under 5 000 deaths less than 100 in china for example which was able to contain the pandemic uh and uh stop the deaths basically while the united states could not so it's very sobering we're in the business every day of uh attacking china but the starting point i would say right now is that china contained the pandemic and we did not uh and uh it's notable that fact and it's a terrible blight on human rights in the united states that 500 000 people died because of the disastrous low quality of governance in our country well we're trying to do something about this so the basic idea and it's an idea really that goes back to around 1620 of francis bacon is that we ought to be able to turn science and technology into human well-being so that's an interesting idea i think bacon when he had that idea made a real breakthrough for uh humanity uh by saying in the new atlantis that we ought to be able to harness systematic knowledge uh and experimentation to improve the human good and i think that most of the gains that we have had in life expectancy or in escape from poverty and in quality of life is due mostly to advances in know-how to be able to do things better and of course to the extent that that know-how can be harnessed harnessing that know-how is a very complicated challenge however the first point is that almost all science has uh adverse sides as well as positive sides so we keep on finding that we're stuck between need and difficulty in scientific advances even the beauty of uh the [Music] most important invention of the industrial age the steam engine and what followed the internal combustion engine and the gas turbine it turned out that as much as those inventions dramatically slash poverty around the world they also had the side effect of producing carbon dioxide that is now presently wrecking the planet so it's a good example that uh technology tends to be uh potentially very positive but also very difficult to govern or closer to our own time the secrets of the of the atom of course produced nuclear energy and nuclear weapons that almost ended the world and were still unable to govern nuclear weapons properly and so the greatest advances of physics knowledge of the last century since newton the breakthroughs of general relativity and quantum physics also produced the most harrowing close call for humanity in the nuclear arms race and we still have thousands of nuclear weapons that could destroy the world many times over and completely stupid people like donald trump that come to power and that therefore put us into grave risk now we have the digital revolution and it is extraordinarily powerful it is reshaping the world it is in essence why vaccines could be developed in less than a year though that is a bioengineering phenomenon it is also a digital phenomenon because we could sequence the viral genome quickly and then translate that sequence into a an mrna strand and put some [Music] put it in a little ball of fat and lo and behold pfizer and moderna were able to come up with effective vaccines in a short period of time so digital knowledge brought us there but digital knowledge is also creating infodemics fake news a divided world a an epidemic of depression and new cyber weapons cyber warfare autonomous weapons my god everything has this other side to it and maybe it's because we keep coming back to the fact that with all this technology we are still with our stone age emotions uh and unable to govern ourselves properly for our own safety we face several big challenges therefore and let me just summarize those and uh turn them and say a few words about what i am trying to do and then turn it into a discussion so here we have arrived in 2021 with the i would say two overarching facts of the world maybe actually let me make it three overarching facts of the world first we have a host of environmental catastrophes underway that are themselves a reflection of the fact that the economic productivity and level scale of activity worldwide has increased hundreds of times since the start of the industrial revolution we have 8 billion people on the planet where we had 800 million at the start of the industrial revolution we have output around the world that has increased tremendously largely through the application of fossil fuel energy and that scale of activity has created four major environmental catastrophes one is climate change the second is loss of biodiversity and destruction of habitat the third is mega pollution and the fourth is the increasing frequency of emerging infectious diseases that jump from animal populations in this case horseshoe bats probably in southwest china to human populations so these environmental crises are global in scale they're deeply entrenched they reflect the basic functioning of the world economic system and they can kill us so we have to do something about them and we have to decide to do something about them so that's one mega bucket of challenges a second mega bucket of challenges is the profound inequality in the world broadly speaking we went from a world in which everyone is poor to a world in which a few are super rich beyond imagining a lot of people have uh are quite rich by any standard most of the world is out of abject poverty in the sense that their daily meal safe water supply physical safety uh subject to pandemics is uh secured and part of the world maybe 15 to 20 percent is in abject deprivation so the world is hugely unequal very interesting question of how it got to this level of inequality i've spent about 40 years thinking about that question uh maybe we can discuss a little bit of it but suffice it to say that at the start of the industrial revolution there was general poverty now there is a incredible spectrum from jeffrey bezos at one end with 200 billion dollars of wealth to uh hundreds of millions of people that basically do not have assurance that they're going to have enough to eat tomorrow and that's a world that is sad uh immoral unstable dangerous because to have so much suffering in the midst of so much wealth is actually quite different from having so much suffering because now we could solve this problem but we choose not to now poverty is a matter of choice it's not a matter of fate it is uh absolutely mechanically it could be ended by simply redistribution of income that would not be very heroic actually because there's so much wealth at the top if the rich countries gave a few percent of their income to the poor countries there'd be no abject poverty anywhere in the world there are other ways to end poverty as well but the point is poverty is now choice inequality is political choice or political system outcome let's say not the inevitability of subsistence with poor technology and the third major factor that i would put on the table is geopolitical stress basically we have had a world dominated by europe and then the united states for about 300 years depending on how you date things but maybe from 1700 onward of course the age of european empire began around 1500 with the voyages of columbus and vasco de gama but the real predominance of europe especially in asia i started only later and really uh occurred only with industrialization in the second half of the 18th century onward industrialization came first to england england then went and kicked the out of everyone in its way uh took over india uh colonized much of africa uh that's what uh that vast advantage of industrial and military power meant it brought about an empire that was unique in history in its global power and reach and was the result of it was the first empire of industrial power uh it then was supplanted by the us empire since the [Music] second world war essentially and now the u.s and so that is the backdrop but i would say that that world of north atlantic domination is ending just now in these uh days uh maybe this hour because of the rise of china of east asia the fact that asia has become a very dynamic location for science and technology so the core driver of economic power which has been science and technology is no longer limited to the north atlantic region this in its imminent moment is leading to anxiety and stress between the two most powerful countries the united states and china the fact that china is the second power in the world right now is unbelievable considering where china was 40 years ago except for the fact that china mastered the new technologies and did a very good job of us catching up through very high rates of saving building infrastructure and excellent education and this enabled china to make an extent of progress for 1.4 billion people that only had its rivals in the smaller countries of east asia japan korea taiwan uh singapore hong kong so this remarkable development of china has changed geopolitics and more generally i would say we're feeling the fact that the us and europe just don't run the world the same way that they did for centuries the only problem in my view is the us doesn't know it yet uh so the u.s still thinks that it runs the world and president biden in his speech to the munich security conference just a few days ago basically said we're back uh we're back as world leader but it strikes me as a kind of anachronism uh we are back we are limping we can barely make our own institutions work we can't stop a pandemic we can't stop an insurrection uh and yet we're back to lead the world i don't think so uh but that is the image of the us the self-image built up after decades and decades of technological leadership so why this is important in my mind is that it poses the threat of conflict in the midst of everything else if it were just competition and who's going to win and who's going to lose it wouldn't be so interesting historically in my view what makes it uh for me very unnerving and dangerous is i do not want to see the us and china spiral into hostility and while it seems far-fetched right now it's not impossible and it would just be crazy but it's uh crazier things happen and that's what i worry about in this third domain i don't want to divide the world i don't want a new cold war i don't want a club of democracies that confronts the club of autocracies as if these words mean what they're purported to mean because they're vast oversimplifications uh maybe if we put the world of white supremacists on one side and others on another side we'd have a different uh a different division of the world so i would prefer not to have the world divided but to actually have the world working together to try to bring these two structural crises the crisis of environment and the crisis of inequality under control that to my mind is our challenge so let me just end by saying that that challenge i call or that i mean i don't call it but i use the term sustainable development as the definition of intentionally trying to steer global society towards inclusion and environmental sustainability which i regard as the two great structural challenges of the material world and the sustainable development goals are short-term goals over the period to 2030 that the member states of the united nations have adopted to help guide this process the paris climate agreement is the agreement that has a intended uh [Music] time horizon at least to mid-century or perhaps to the end of the 21st century to help guide the transformation of energy systems and industry to sustainability and what i'm trying to do in my own work is to think of ways to accomplish the sdgs and the paris climate agreement so to try to understand how to change our medieval institutions how to educate our uh our uh stone age emotions uh or to tame them uh how to uh harness technology so that we could actually make the transformation when you think about it in those terms it turns out technology is the least of the problems we've got terrific solar power we have terrific wind power we have great tesla electric vehicles we have a lot of solutions the solutions are not the challenge the challenge is mobilizing resources tax revenues global cooperation private business and so forth in the path of solutions and that requires a mix of politics and economics but it is in essence in my view like a design project how to make the road shift in a different direction so that we don't go over the cliff but go around the mountainside uh in a in a safe manner and uh i will stop there turn it back over to you thomas and we can have a discussion about that very good thank you jeff and maybe let me start with this question what are the most important reforms of global governance that you think we should try to achieve in the rest of this century so do you foresee that we stay more or less with the institutions that we have and we just behave better we have better leaders we don't re-elect trump and hope that the leaders will see the light and will kind of do the things that need to be done mobilize the resources that need to be mobilized or is it crucial also to change the institutions that are governing the planet so things like the united nations for example do we need new institutions world trade organization world bank imf and so on do they need to be replaced do they need to be modified in order to create a different system of opportunities and incentives for states that would then make it more likely that they behave well i would start with the one core idea of subsidiarity subsidiarity is a theological doctrine and a political idea that problems need to be solved at different levels some problems are our own problems thank you so solve your own problem don't bother anybody else some problems are problems of our street level put a stop sign up or stop speeding put a speed bump some problems are problems at the scale of the city some problems are scaled are scaled at the state some problems are scaled to the national government many problems are regional for example if the united states is going to have a workable zero carbon energy system it should cooperate with canada and mexico to do that similarly in europe 27 individual energy systems don't make sense for the european union one needs a european-wide system so those are regional and some problems are global for example setting limits on greenhouse emissions is a global challenge uh ending uh eliminating nuclear weapons is a global challenge and so forth so subsidiary says basically recognize that different problems come at different levels choose the level closest to the human being at which a problem can be solved no need to have the united nations decide on the speed bumps on your street that's something you should do in your own neighborhood but when it comes to nuclear proliferation this is probably not something that can be accomplished in the upper west side of new york for example or in new haven it's something that is a worldwide challenge so subsidiarity forces you to think more clearly about what should be assigned to what in the united states we have complete confusion on this issue uh for a lot of reasons but part of our country says nothing should go to the u.n i we need america first as if we don't have global problems trump was an idiot i'm using technical terms but just uh to understand that this is such bad governance that we end up not solving any of the global scale problems and trump pulled us out of the paris climate agreement pulled us out of the world health organization pulled us out of unesco pulled us out of the human rights council pulled us out of the iran nuclear treaty and so forth all of which require global scale governance not anything that can be solved at the national level or below so it doesn't matter whether america's first or not what matters is whether you can solve the problems that america's facing america alone and you certainly can't do that so that's the first point to say now in terms of reform governments don't work at any of those levels very well so the answer is we are in constant need of innovation because our institutions are inherently lacking our technologies so we're inherently using old style ways to do things that they're not equipped to do i believe in general principle though i don't know how to do it and i would expect the people in this class to do it the students not the professors i think you can reinvent government to be online to a large extent that way we could have participation by everybody not just 535 representatives in the u.s that don't really represent anybody anymore but we could actually participate i would like wiki legislation i'd like good webinars on our national issues i would like us to be able to vote online on substantive issues i know there are many problems with that but i think the problems are less than the problems of not having participation so i would like to see what could be done in terms of innovating how government functions at the national level we have a big problem which is that most problems that we face today require regional cooperation so the united states canada and mexico at a minimum need to work together we don't need a wall we need solar energy and transmission grids from sonora mexico so that's quite different and we need regional cooperation almost everywhere but as a legacy of geopolitics as a legacy of imperial strategies of divide and conquer most regions of the world are divided not well unified so in east asia supposedly china's on one side and japan and korea are on the other side though the three countries ought to be working together to solve the problems of northeast asia and similarly in south asia i india and pakistan have nuclear weapons pointed at each other rather than bus lines connecting the two countries they don't trade with each other they don't exchange ideas all they do is share rivers though they share the punjab they share renewable energy but they don't even talk to each other it's absolutely unbelievable and extraordinarily dangerous this way or in the middle east turkey uh iran saudi arabia each represent different major ethnicities turks persian shias and uh and arab sunnis and yet they are all part of a drying ecosystem and a hydrocarbon dependence that is hugely problematic they need water resource management they share the same dust storms and for god's sake they should be solving the problems together rather than trying to buy more f-15s to kill each other with america trying to cash in on its arms trade so this regional uh these regional conflicts are doubly deadly they're dangerous in and of themselves and they prevent the kind of cooperation that is needed but the united states likes to foster them we're on the india side not the china side or korea and japan are on our side were against china we had the incredible temerity and foolishness to try to negotiate a trans-pacific partnership trade agreement with japan china australia and so forth with the whole idea that china wouldn't be part of it but if you look at a map china is actually in asia and so to have an asia trade agreement without china is a little bit stupid and that's american mentality why create hostility because we want to be dominant not because we want to solve problems so this is part of the governance issue so to come to your question thomas we need reform at every level at the u.n level there are many reforms but uh one is that the security council is an institution that is extremely important but it's been frozen in place since 1945 in structure essentially not quite but almost because the so-called five victors or united nations of uh of the the war against fascism uh the u.s china soviet union france and united kingdom i are the five permanent members of the security council but this is an out-of-date allocation of seats it doesn't even for me make too much sense to do this kind of representation by countries rather than by regions because there would be a way to have east asia represented south asia and then you make the countries in the region talk to each other and agree on shared strategies and so forth but the security council really needs reform india which has 1.4 billion people is not represented in the security council with a permanent seat and that's a an amazing uh anachronism uh actually for a country that is almost 20 percent of the world's population and uh in the midst of a lot of the issues of security more generally the un is vital for this global scale problem solving but it is rickety not very efficient under financed so there are many many problems with how the un operates i don't want to create something different because it would just be the u.n again i want to reform the u.n one of the things i would like to do is give the un agencies a lot more money so that they could solve problems better you know the entire core budget of the un unbelievably is three billion dollars a year the core budget of new york city is almost 100 billion dollars a year so the u.n runs on a tiny level of financing because the big powers don't want to share sovereignty with the u.n institutions and yet the big powers therefore can't solve their own problems because big power politics is not the same thing as solving global problems so we need reform at every level but i basically believe in the un system as a system of universal admission as a charter that says that problems should be solved peacefully rather than by war and as an institution that has a international law based on human rights starting with the universal declaration of human rights which is extremely important about to have its 75th anniversary and also needs an upgrade and needs people even aware of it because human rights can't thrive unless there's an awareness of human rights and unless the rights and what are the responsibilities alongside those rights are updated for the 21st century so lots of good reforms to do lots of good papers to write lots of good thinking to be done but i would not abandon multilateralism or start from scratch because we have these institutions they're pretty good but they are disempowered by the major countries and they need actually strengthening not weakening thanks jeff any questions from the audience you can raise your hand or you can just unmute yourself then i see that you want to or you can wave if you want uh radiant um in your introduction you suggested that redistributing wealth to developing countries is one solution to poverty and why in what way do you envision that happening where these countries are not well where the where politicians in developing countries are notoriously known for embezzling humanitarian aid money and uh if you were to suggest that there must be like an independent board or something of the lake uh do you think that would violate the principles of subsidiary and autonomy where locals don't get to decide how to allocate the aid well first i would say the rich countries are more corrupt dollar for dollar than the poor countries so i'm not at all persuaded that there's uh some uh ranking other than uh other than the rich countries having a history of violence abuse conquest and corruption to suppress the poor countries the united states has a lot of answering to do the british have a lot of answering to do for what they have created and how these systems continue until now um trump was thoroughly corrupt we will now get his tax returns shortly and that will be fun uh and we'll see what how things work here this latest campaign by the way or this latest election cycle i think i don't remember the price tag 12 billion dollars or something uh it was the uh expenditure 12 billion bucks for this election cycle that's a lot of money changing hands and don't believe that that's a lot of innocent money changing hands this is buying a lot of political power and a lot of structural policies so governance is not great uh in a lot of places having said that uh i would also agree with your solution uh which is that in general finance should be seriously directed and uh supervised to purposes for which it's put whether it's in the united states or whether it is in any part of the world i don't see any difference of that i helped to design 20 years ago something called the global fund to fight aids tb and malaria at the time the reason that motivated me was uh and thomas has been working on these issues with the great uh energy and importance for this period and poor people don't have access to the drugs that save their lives it's unbelievable and 20 years ago there were antiretroviral medicines that poor people could not access and so africans were dying for the stupid reason that of course they're poor that's not a reason to die that is a reason to help and so i propose that we fund that and that proposal was taken up and turned into the global fund in the process of designing the global fund my critics and there are many of them believe me i said this won't work these people are so corrupt there's no way you can take money and actually transfer it into medicines and then into delivery and then into care and treatment and the claim was you could not make something like a global fund work turned out not an issue by the way uh yeah corruption here and there like there is in any human organization but the global fund has saved millions of lives from each of the three diseases and the public health infrastructures are able to procure medicines get them into the hands of community health workers get them into the mouths of people that need them and save lives and it's not as if that organization has been plagued every year with new charges of corruption there have been scandals now and then but in an organization that works in a hundred countries you hardly hear of such problems because it's a systems process and by the way it's roughly the same reason why even in an extremely poor country generally speaking you can fly in and out on a civil airline without really too much risk a little bit higher than in a rich country but really very very low risk because the systems work they're engineers they take care of the planes the airlines insure the planes the insurance companies and the iata and the companies and so forth uh have reason to try to prevent the planes from going down and if there has been any corruption in civil aviation in the last few years it's been boeing not uh what's happening in these other countries boeing really screwed up in a major way on its 737 max and now another plane has lost an engine so it's grounded another part of the fleet i don't know what's going on on boeing the planes are still relatively safe but my point radian is that that in poor countries things work one of the reasons by the way in poor countries corrupt presidents are smart enough not to put their brothers or children into the charge of air traffic control because they don't want to die when they fly also so they leave it alone and when we make systems like that fiber systems connectivity systems energy systems health care systems you professionalize it so it's not just money into the hands of a politician it is money directed at a quantifiable and monitorable problem and these days since you can monitor everything in real time because everything is online you can literally watch the barcodes you can watch the supply chains you can watch the functioning of the infrastructure in ways that were not possible before uh so i am trying to think about ways to transfer a couple hundred billion dollars extra into uh african development right now uh in very specific ways in the fiber grid uh fiber network in in the energy accessibility and so on uh in online education and telemedicine and so forth the technical problems and and even the management problems are not the big problems the big problems are getting the money uh to do it and convincing uh the donors so-called or the financiers or the market mechanism to provide the financing okay any other comments questions martin yeah what would you have to say about cuba and what they've been doing in the world cuba is um complicated story uh first of all if cuba were not under an unending uh u.s attack the situation could be vastly different from what it is so the us has had an embargo on cuba now for 62 years it's enough it's ridiculous uh and uh the uh whole cuba story you know is is a nightmare that did not have to go the way that it went uh castro came to new york city uh in 1959 and made a good run for trying to get some decent relations but eisenhower and then kennedy decided that he had to be eliminated uh and this was a dreadful us policy mistake uh more than that but we couldn't face up to the reality of the essential colonial relationship under batista and all that that meant and the u.s was in the business of overthrowing any uh leftist government in south america or latin america for quite a long time so the cuban situation has been poisoned by u.s cuban uh animosity for more than 60 years the thaw that came with obama was of course completely reversed by trump uh all in the interest in my view of just making sure that he won the state of florida so so much of our cuba policy is really about florida's electoral votes not about the substance of cuba um in terms of what cuba is doing yeah it's a it's a mixed story because from the early days cuba did a good job of social services uh its first campaign was a literacy campaign uh it uh cuba made the best public health system uh by far in the caribbean and in uh throughout latin america the economic side was not very good and cuba is crumbling partly because there isn't a kind of normal path for the economy partly because the us embargo partly because getting out of the mess that they're in is hard but the economy is very poor and the social services were very are very good uh and uh that is the uh i think the continuing problem right now but it's the overarching problem is that we need normal relations with cuba let cuba figure out its uh next steps uh without getting uh recolonized by florida expats uh and their children uh and reopen the economy to proper mixed economy but the economic system definitely does not function from what i can see and from what i know so the um the industry in terms of um technology and vaccines and health international health brigades do you think that's of any significance yeah that that's good you know this is the one sector where there's real competence and a real contribution uh but it's not enough to make the economy function uh on on a broad level cuba needs tourism for one thing which would be quite easy to do if we had normal relations but the health sector and the biotechnology especially if it were more connected with the rest of the global biotechnology community could be a real strong point one final question do you think the profit motive is a problem when it comes to you know these global problems that you're talking about including healthcare yes and no uh i i believe broadly speaking that northern europe has gotten a pretty good balance between the profit motive and social responsibility and accountability not perfect but i'm basically a social democrat myself uh meaning that i don't think the swedes are rapacious money makers the way the americans are so i think that one can have a profit motive and still tamp it down have social norms of responsibility and accountability have a working corporate part of the economy but corporations that are uh by law and by social norm responsible and governed also by boards that include worker representation like german co-determination or uh mandates of uh gender balance as in scandinavia and i think that that works quite well actually not perfectly but where things get rapacious is the more anglo-saxon version of this which is not a social democratic ethos and in the united states we have the weird mix of well it's and it's not an accident it is uh british liberalist liberalism in its historic roots combined with the racism uh and uh the potent result of that is a kind of radical libertarianism of uh part of our political system that i think is in service of white supremacy and in service of uh of the plutocracy so it's a nice combination uh a not nice combination i mean uh so i think that the united states is really uh an outlier of this but the u.s role has also been uh extraordinarily significant because of the u.s role in the world as that diminishes i think the chance and i hope the chance for a global kind of sustainable development ethic could take hold but it's a value chains and the idea of sustainable development as an ethic is the idea of uh of social inclusion as being a a core norm for how an economy should function or to put it another way that economic rights are a fundamental part of economic functioning that everybody has the right to health education social protection uh and an income that is sufficient to meet household needs with dignity and that's what the universal declaration says and it's what social democracy aims at and i think it's achievable especially given how wealthy we are in the world so that's what i would i liken it to and another variant that i find extremely [Music] attractive and interesting is the catholic church's social teachings which hold similarly in pope francis's great expositor of course and the leader of this view that uh a market economy can function but it must function within the moral boundaries of uh what the church in its teachings calls the universal destination of goods which is that the earth is for everybody so the economy has to meet the needs of everybody and within that constraint a market economy provides many benefits but only constrained by a moral framework we have two student questions ryan was first and then enzo thank you uh thank you for um professor so my question was that uh i do know that uh you have a co-editor of a world happiness report and i was wondering if you could talk about this whether there's been some interesting trends in the last few years or anomalous trends as well yeah well the idea of the world happiness report is to start philosophically from the idea that our goal is not gdp per capita but our goal is eudaimonia it is well-being and uh that we now have better tools to actually measure well-being than we thought we had over the centuries we now can ask people in intelligent ways about their well-being and learn a lot from that so the world happiness report is actually based on one annual survey carried out by gallup uh which gallup international which asks the so-called cantril ladder question and that question is imagine that your life is like a ladder that life is a ladder and the bottom rung of the ladder is the worst life you can imagine and the top rung of the ladder is the best life you can imagine and the lowest rung of that ladder is rung zero and the top rung of the ladder is row ten where do you stand on the ladder that's the question it's asked to 150 000 people or so around the world each year we collate the results and then try to account for those results and the happiest countries according to that and happiness is this kind of eudaemonic happiness meaning your evaluation of your life not the haha happiness that i really had a good time yesterday which is also asked but what we're studying is the eudemonic happiness the countries that express the highest eudemonic or evaluative happiness are the scandinavian countries i'm biased i like that i didn't i didn't construct it that way i just am happy that it turns out that way because i really like how those countries function by and large not perfectly but by and large so uh finland the nordic countries almost invariably come out on the top the united states has been sinking over time i don't know what it's going to be we're going to release this in two weeks i don't even know this year's scores yet um but the united states has been ranking about 20th and there are 150 countries or so in the rankings each year now what do we learn about those rankings we learned that income per capita matters but only to an extent it matters logarithmically if you could if i can put it that way meaning that going from one to ten thousand dollars income is the same as going from ten thousand to a hundred thousand dollars income in its effect on uh rungs per dollar so you really have a diminishing marginal return of income after a while once you're pretty rich it takes a huge huge increase on average to generate an extra notch and the united states has been falling in well-being over the 18 years of this survey and that's consistent also with a famous prediction and finding of richard easterlund at university of pennsylvania who christened the easterland paradox where he said that we're getting richer but we're not getting happier and the united states has not really had any budge of happiness during the last 60 years it's had if anything a small decline even though per capita income has risen threefold all of the data that we have of any kind of data points that overlap over time show no evident sense of lives improving they show if anything more depression more unhappiness more stress more angst in the last 15 years and the things that we find to be correlated with well-being are income health and social connections so various social measures social capital uh people you can rely on general trust in other people in this society are strongly correlated with this happiness measure and i think what we're really learning from it is that to create a happy society you need a certain level of material well-being aristotle said the same by the way you need the good fortune of good health and you need social connection you need inclusion uh the distrust of high inequality uh of course the racism and all the rest is highly destructive of a good society enzo thank you so much for speaking out um speaking with us today professor sax my question is about you know corporations um operating in the developing world and how usually they not only exploit those countries where they operate financially but they leave behind you know like just environmental devastations at the end of the day so i was just wondering what types of mechanism can you you know suggest the to the class and myself you know to deal with this this problem because it's been going on for a really long time and just a week ago we were discussing the the the case of chevron in ecuador and i'm from nigeria so i sort of like have experiences that are similar to what happened in ecuador and that's why i want to get your input on this if you want to lead any protests against shell count me in uh what a disgusting company what an awful history in nigeria and also what an abuse that we're seeing right now that we really should campaign against which is and i haven't read the opinion so i may have the details wrong but uh there was a settlement against shell in the nigerian supreme court uh i think 2012. and uh of course shell then took the case to the uk court and the uk court said no you don't have to honor the nigerian supreme court well hell why not who the hell is the uk supreme court to decide that except the former colonial power and then the uh nigerian supreme court reconfirmed its finding and then shell is now suing nigeria under the bilateral investment treaty which is one of the most abusive uh institutions in the international scene this is a an institution that is part of almost all investment treaties that gives multinational companies extraordinary rights to make claims against host governments that no domestic company could ever claim against its government so it is a grant of privilege to multinational companies that invites incredible abuse and this is what the chevron case was about also because similarly the chevron courts had i mean the ecuador courts had found chevron guilty and then chevron took it to a three-person tribunal this isds as well as the new york uh courts uh and uh overturned the uh chevron ruling and then the tribunal uh which is an administrative tribunal pact with new york lawyers and cronies uh found for chevron and they're going to find for shell also and in the meantime shell is in my opinion a criminal institution for what it's done in the niger delta because it has destroyed the ecosystem the well-being the livelihoods of an enormous population with no accountability at all and uh what's my answer to it this is about power and you know i really think nigeria should basically kick shell out of the country at this point uh but i would absolutely i don't know the details so i probably shouldn't be quoted exactly that way uh but the truth of the matter is that shell has abused that your country historically and needs to pay a significant price for that abuse sorry go ahead and so if you want to work on that send me things that you write and uh i'll give you comments sounds good but even going further than that it's it's not just nigeria that i'm worried about no of course but let's get nigeria straightened out on this yeah it's for my classmates they're also thinking about the same problems as myself and we were thinking about ways to solve you know some global issues and one of them for instance is tax avoidance and tax evasion by these corporations that function in the developing world how do we you know take on these corporations head on at some point in the future not right now we don't have the means or the capability to do so but in some way down there how do we confront this problem and how do we confront problems like you know just oil spillage without any sort of oversight from the the the governments of those countries how do we deal with problems like that i see james henry on the line who knows a lot more about how to tax these companies than i do but uh i i would uh i would say among other things the design of the taxes really should be changed because if you put income taxes on uh you don't collect anything uh it's just so easy to manipulate the system i i do think that africa is going to need very different and higher royalty rates effectively or gross revenue collections on oil on mining resources and so forth because actually the african countries and governments desperately need the revenues for development sarah hi um my question is about the reforms and that you proposed um not only to the political system but to international institutions in particular and um i was wondering if the reforms that you proposed um aren't premised on the idea that they have significant support within the population which um i mean if if we count the 74 million votes and that have been cast for trump um in spite of everything that he's done over the past four years um does not show that um the idea of american america first is so prevalent within the population that reforms on the scale that you mentioned um seem to be quite impossible you mentioned in the beginning about asian countries managing and the crisis better than than western countries but isn't it also partly due to the fact that there is this idea of individual rights before social rights or that that the focus is more on the individual rights and that this idea of global justice and ending poverty everywhere and isn't isn't as prevalent as as we'd like it to seem well absolutely uh there are real ideological issues that need to be confronted my claim is that americans should support the kinds of changes that i'm talking about and i would give arguments why both in terms of uh ethics and in terms of practical implications you know trump uh yes he represented them and 500 000 people died and he lost the election after that and biden brought us back into all those u.n institutions right away so i wouldn't give up but we're a divided country and the u.s has been a divided country basically from the start and before the start and the division has been heavily along racial lines and racial ideology so there's an ugly side to america and some wonderful side to america as well and that's the battle that battle continues i happen to believe for a lot of reasons that we're going to win that battle but it is definitely different points of view in this country but i'm not ready to cede this country to trump uh or to white supremacists or to stupid narrow-minded uh 19th century liberalism or john locke's philosophy which by the way was a philosophy in the service of taking away native american land so i you know i i just think that we need uh to have exactly that kind of debate and understanding and societies change and they can improve and that's what we're after but you're absolutely right this is not a slam dunk issue it is and and it is uh to an important extent an ideological issue but i think ideological issues can be addressed first of all by historical knowledge by awareness by uh deliberation uh and so i'm i think we ought to take up take up the challenge harrison hi thank you thank you so much for speaking um i i think my question really builds off what you're just touching on there and that you know it strikes me that a lot of the problems have been talking about find their roots in the uh stone age emotions and and nature we have and i was wondering and and you know you touched on reforms we can make it so the institutional level but you also touched on the fact that you know the best level is always the level closest to to the human being and i was wondering you know what sort of reforms do you think we can make to uh like society or to like education um so that as many reforms as possible are sort of driven by individuals and driven at the grassroots level yeah i i'm part of an effort to promote sdg target 4.7 so each of these 17 sustainable development goals has a number of targets associated with them and if you look at target 4.7 online it says that everybody should have education for sustainable development sustainable lifestyles and a culture of peace and toleration so this is sometimes phrased as education for sustainable development and global citizenship and so the idea of this effort we actually have a project called mission 4.7 that i'm engaged in with the vatican and with unesco uh and with ban ki-moon to promote this kind of learning learn about the world learn about the environmental challenges and learn about human decency and do that in creative ways so some of that learning is very experiential learning some of it is mindfulness learning some of it is fact learning some of it could be using zoom in a creative way to connect children all over the world so that they are learning from each other working with each other in joint projects around the world uh i'm trying to talk unesco into a kind of global classroom scenario where uh each week we might visit a world heritage site with a live camera and a tour guide and children from all over the world could tune in so it's not a boring video but somebody walking along and showing the cool stuff of the acropolis or palmyra syria or any one of wonderful sites to give people the idea we're part of this this oh that's cool mom you know where i went today you know i was in iraq uh in babylon today uh in class think of what we could really do with our curriculum if it were engaged or another thing i'm trying to think about is what about if every young person had to go meet with the mayor of their city to talk about how to make sure their city was decarbonizing the energy system it's something that would be good for the education process i'm sure that i didn't know where my electricity came from uh when i was growing up or how many [Music] pounds of carbon dioxide the car was emitting as it was driving along and so forth but we should engage uh i'd say younger students as well as all of us but younger students in problem solving as well and problem solving in local communities because every community in the world needs to decarbonize somehow and every school each school could ask children could learn where does our electricity come from could we put up a solar panel uh on the roof of our school what is our carbon footprint and so forth these kinds of learning activities strike me as something that would have a a real tangible effect on understanding and engagement and i'd like to hear from creative people of the kinds of things that could be done but i also i've been enjoying online classrooms like we're having right now i've been doing it for about a dozen years um before there was a zoom and it was a big production at the beginning getting everyone online uh but you know i've tried to teach classes with already uh a dozen years ago we had i called a global classroom for sustainable development we had about 20 campuses online for each lecture it was pretty cumbersome didn't work all too well but i like the idea of it uh of everybody being connected and just the idea that they'd have that they're connected with each other but nobody could quite hear and the logistics weren't so great at the beginning but i do think that we really could experiment with new ways of pedagogy that could engage young people in the problem solving in an exciting way and give them the sense they're part of a bigger world and how cool is that radium yeah alongside harrison's mention of like stone age emotions and you talked about the factors of well-being um it seems like a lot of those factors besides finances rely on good leadership like feeling part of something and the communal feeling so my question for you is what do you think good leadership looks like and if anyone comes to mind that we can rightly look to as good leaders well i would just tell you that uh plato asked the same question because the whole republic is asking that question how do we get decent leaders to lead our republic in the end he created a whole education system for them and a whole elaborate society that would create good guardians and of course they would own no property it was not the trump family he was looking for he was looking for something else but this question of the uh the by causation of virtue in the public choosing good leaders and good leaders helping to create a virtuous public is a central theme of western philosophy back to socrates and plato and i think it's true when we have cruddy leaders it pollutes the whole scene uh when we have good leaders uh we tend to behave better uh and um part of our roulette game in the united states is we have a very plebiscitory system where we have this very powerful position the presidency and then a creep can come down an escalator and and win the presidency and torment the world as a result of that we escaped by a narrow margin first reform by the way i would not have presidents uh or if we had presidents i would have european style presidents that are uh good uh figureheads uh but not the powers uh because i think the parliamentary system while it also is vulnerable as we know it's not as vulnerable as a presidential system to bringing intemperate uh acrylic out of control psychopaths to power and that's the first role of politics is to stop people like trump or hitler or others from coming to power that's the first job of politics is to prevent disaster and we're not so good at that in this country uh and are getting worse and or it's at least very risky and so the first thing i would do is not have a position like that because it's too dangerous of course you know in 1787 it looked a lot safer than having a king and that was the real debate so instead of a king we had a president but if we were writing the constitution now i hope we would not design a president i hope we would go for something much more parliamentary and much more participatory as well but the question of who leads and how is a is a question who are the moral leaders right now who helps to instill good values i admire as i mentioned a few times i admire pope francis tremendously uh not i'm not roman catholic uh but he's talking for the whole world in a very uh important uh sensible and ethical way and by the way his most recent encyclical is uh it's called fratelli tutti all brothers uh uh quoting uh saint francis of assisi uh but the idea of that encyclical is we need to cooperate with each other beyond uh borders so it's neighbors without borders is that encyclical and so he's a moral leader this country killed a lot of its moral leaders uh this is uh one of the tragedies of the united states my generation we had we had two politicians who had a real tendency towards morality john and robert kennedy and they were both killed uh and martin luther king and malcolm x so we uh and many others were killed so this country because of its white supremacists traditions among other things uh murdered a lot of our moral leaders uh and uh we don't even recognize what is a moral leader from what is a psychopath very well right now uh so we have uh real work to do to get your question straightened out jim uh i'm gonna let racer go first and i'll oh um do you want to let jonah go i think he had his hand up like way before me but i can also go no please go but you could go first are you sure okay um yeah so earlier you mentioned that you helped start the global fund to fight malaria tv and aids which i thought was like really amazing because enzo and i actually wrote like a whole paper about this last semester um for professor pokey's other class so i was just wondering if you could talk like a little bit about any new initiatives that the global fund has been working on or new promising treatments that may be up and coming and also how the covert pandemic has hindered like any progress and distribution of necessary treatments so all of public health is uh all of public health has the features that more money can turn into better health because public health is an algorithmic systems-based approach to population health and that means that when i proposed a global fund 20 years ago it was on the basis of good advice that i got from malariologists hiv specialists tuberculosis specialists who explained to me how their particular diseases could be controlled in a systematic way and that means that the global fund and its partner institution gavi uh should be empowered to do more and more but the global fund unfortunately has been limited by the donor agencies who control its governance because our governments have not wanted to put more money into the global fund so the global fund is finance constrained it receives a few billion dollars a year it could easily use 10 times what it has to really build health systems in poor countries and it would be a phenomenal return in human well-being and in economic development but it's limited and the united states has been a big factor in limiting the funding strangely enough when the global fund started it started with the presidency of george w bush and i did not like george w bush's presidency uh almost at all he started the iraq war uh i thought he was the worst uh little did i know what was about to come but i was not a fan but there was george w bush jr endorsing the global fund and getting it started together with kofi annan and that was a wonderful thing because it created a bipartisan feeling about it it grew and grew and grew because it was successful and then came the financial crisis in 2008 president obama was elected i thought great now we're really going to expand and president obama's office of management and budget put a ceiling on financing the global fund i couldn't believe it so it was during the obama administration that the amount leveled off and they were told don't get into new missions do your job stick to your lane don't ask us for more money what a terrible mistake and i really resent it to this day that this mistake was made then came trump you probably have guessed i did not hugely like mr trump and he tried to cancel help for everything anything trump's idea was anything good must be an enemy of my interest he's really uh he's a he is clinically a psychopath and so he was out to destroy whatever he could destroy including attempting to destroy our our government by the end so no new developments took place then what i'm trying to do right now is find ways to bolster funds to fight covet because we need by reasonable estimate 30 billion this year minimum for developing countries to be able to fight covet effectively and at least another 15 billion more next year and we've created something good called the act accelerator and as part of that kovacs which is the uh the covet vaccine initiative but it doesn't have money in it and then our governments give little bits of money a billion here a billion there and what they don't do is what a rational actor would do a rational actor would say what is our problem what is its scale how much is needed and where do we get it that's basic rational problem solving our political class does not operate that way typically our political class at its best typically says oh we should do something i can find a billion for you say thank you and if you say but a billion that's only a tenth of what's needed you're a bad sport so instead of problem solving we have checking the box that oh of course we're giving for poor countries we gave 2 billion but then you're not allowed to ask the question well is 2 billion enough or shouldn't have been 20 billion and that's what real problem solving is is to ask what is needed to address the problem so before this call i was on a call earlier this afternoon about vaccines and the act accelerator which is the global multilateral arrangement for vaccines therapeutics and ppe for covid has a shortfall now of 22.9 billion just for 2021. unbelievable here the u.s is about to vote 1.9 trillion for short-term relief and here's a gap of 22 billion that the whole world can't fill that doesn't make sense this 22 billion is roughly 100 of what we're about to vote right now so the u.s alone could fill it but the u.s and the rest of the rich countries could easily fill it but they don't right now and if they did there'd be a storm in congress america first and so forth so this is the kind of problem that we face in practice what i'm trying to advocate for right now is to use a new allocation of special drawing rights at the imf to fill this purpose and there's a kind of design process underway to see whether we could use sdrs and allocate 40 or 50 billion of a large scr allocation for the purposes of kovacs and that could be a way to make a breakthrough because an sdr allocation does not require each parliament to have a vote it is a decision of our executive branches of governments by and large around the world and it would be a very good way to mobilize the resources necessary for containing this pandemic which is the first order of urgency for the whole world not just for the developing countries for all of us we have to contain the pandemic everywhere for the obvious reason that as long as it is spreading in some places it is not only at risk of returning anywhere else but it's a risk of throwing off new variants or new lineages that undermine the existing protections from vaccines or previous infections jim hey jeff it's good to see you again it's been a long time since bill o'zonix econometrics class three years ago i think we went to copenhagen and talked about a billionaire's tax yeah um i've been working a lot on another global tax proposal which is uh i just want to get you read because it may uh you know the stars have aligned uh and i think it may be the solution to some of the revenue problems that we're facing this is the notion of having a financial transactions tax yeah and the fact is that uh you know the the problem uh that you described with liberals is kind of well illustrated because in new york we have a democratic controlled assembly and this and the senate and the governor and we also have one of the most successful stock transfer taxes in history it was passed by a republican governor in 1905 and for 77 years it just worked they raised 100 billion dollars in the last 30 years however since governor kerry kind of uh was stampeded by wall street they rebated 345 billion dollars to wall street so i want to enlist you in this effort to get economists to put pressure on these folks because in the next six weeks uh the assembly and the senate are going to vote on a concrete bill to simply repeal the rebate which is now the grand sum of one nickel per hundred dollars because wall street last year had record trading 49 trillion dollars jesus and the two exchanges in new york that would have produced that nickel tax would have produced 24 billion dollars the reason of the estimates that the new york state comes up with about the amount of the rebate uh have been plummeting even though the volumes have been soaring is because as of the commissioner admitted today in testimony that i was participating in there are some firms that are under reporting [Laughter] and the state of new york has no direct data on this tax that they're rebating and this is you know cuomo is doing everything in the book to uh you know to legalize marijuana to you know he's cutting the middle middle class tax cut 400 million dollars he wants to tax sports betting but here we are staring us in the face you know there's billions of dollars and if we pass it in new york we can move it to the federal level uh you know jared epstein supports uh this you know just the uh biden's people seem to support it they need pushing and then it goes global because the eu uh has indicated they want to do this this uh this term and i i think it's just really the time is right every country in the world is in fiscal crisis um so i i just wanted to uh get your reaction to that and see if we can you know band together first of all count me in for sure uh it's extraordinary uh the protection that i think it's extraordinary our new york state every state and new york city urgently need revenues and they won't touch the 117 billionaires and they won't touch wall street right and what is extraordinary about and you know cuomo is so concerned that no billionaire changes residents that the city with the highest concentration of billionaires in the world has been asked to do precisely zero during this pandemic as their wealth has soared zero so then on the financial transactions tax it is like you say extraordinary the tax is actually on the books it's actually quote collected and then immediately rebated but in other words the administrative mechanisms the law is just there right so i would love to get involved great a sale yes okay we'll do it thank you we'll do it excellent okay join up all right so you were talking about how technology seems to be improving so much faster than our policy uh changes and it seems to me that because of the incompetence of our governments that a lot of our problems recently have been solved by technology rather than anything on policy so for example uh like the code pandemic being solved by vaccines rather than any effective policy and so and so it seems like there's a there's also there's also a big opportunity for these problems to be solved through technology and i'm wondering uh to what extent should we look towards policy to solve these problems and to what extent should we say like screw the policy let's try to develop better technology to solve the problem jonah great point and a very perceptive observation [Music] let me point out to everybody that covid has been controlled substantially not completely but substantially in the asia-pacific region while it has raged in the united states and europe so there are just basically almost no deaths in uh in china taiwan korea and i looked uh over the last seven days we averaged in the u.s 70 000 cases china averaged 22 cases not 22 000 22 cases per day on average over the last seven days korea averaged 479 cases per day compared to our 70 000 taiwan one case per day on average actually that's rounding up it was 0.7 of one case per day over the past seven days so i guess that's five cases over seven days in other words even without the vaccine this is controllable what does it require what these countries have done is uh contact tracing quarantining they have used some technology applications uh to uh uh help to enforce protocols and help to warn you've been uh you know you've crossed paths with someone that tested positive and that kind of thing but basically these countries have relied on public health and have done an excellent job i noticed this difference i mean this difference was apparent from the start but i started noticing it in mid-march and talking to the politicians here saying look in the asia pacific they're uh they're doing it better already it was impossible to get our politicians focused on that basic fact especially since they were also keen to say anything china says is a lie and then if you said asia they'd say china so the level of discourse was primitive and you could not have a sensible discussion if you download which i just recently did the hundred or so editorials by the wall street journal on covid none of them talks about the east the asia pacific success it's weird it's like we just don't want to look at what's happening somewhere else and when the wall street journal does look abroad it says well we're better than belgium you know but not we're worse than korea so it's a very odd thing that we have not been able to uh address this and you're exactly right that we are jumping to a technological solution but we can't even make that one work very well because we're we're not able to get the deployment of the vaccines and and the vaccine hesitancy and all the rest of the confusions of a confused society now that make all of this just much harder than it should be my gut instinct and the structure of the problems that we face tell me that you cannot rely just on technology technology without the social and political understanding will not get deployed universally it will not get deployed even perhaps effectively some things technology can't solve that we need human beings to accept and i'd say most technologies depend on social systems alongside the technologies and the governance of the technologies depends on normal society with normal moral scruples and boundaries so that pure technical solutions are very unlikely to work i'm just thinking i just finished reading a trilogy of books about the atomic age by martin sherwin who is a phenomenal historian who wrote a book last year called gambling with armageddon about the cuban missile crisis and then he wrote a book before that about j robert oppenheimer who led the manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb and then before that he wrote a book called a world destroyed which is about uh the governance and policy around the development of the atomic bomb during world war ii and the implications of that and the reason i mentioned it is that nuclear power and and the atomic bomb is a technology and some of our politicians thought it was the magic technology all we needed was a an atomic bomb and we could make the world safe and it was incredibly naive and it failed of course to make the world safe it made the world far more dangerous not safe and many of the technological assumptions were wrong people that developed the bomb not the physicist but the politicians and general groves and others thought well the russians won't have it for 30 years and of course the russians had it within four years and so and then we ended up in a in a uh almost devastating nuclear arms race so if you don't have the social systems you can't govern the technologies and they cannot be magic bullets on their own and yet exactly you put your your finger on it we are looking for the magic bullet rather than the social responsibility and the political responsibility so we're counting on the vaccine to do it and it won't do it for some reason unless we get our heads on straight and govern ourselves properly as well and so i think you know the theme you mentioned is i was thinking about exactly that today how our quest for the technological fix is so strong and it's so validated by the technologies that it actually goes into a kind of hyperdrive but it doesn't work none of these technologies by themselves without social scruples decency norms provides answers good i'm afraid we have to end with time but we are deeply grateful that you came jeff and gave us this enlightening discussion and we hope that we can call you again in some future instantiation of the seminar of course and thank you for having this seminar because this is the kind of brainstorming that we absolutely need and get good uh ideas papers themes reforms out of it because this is exactly the kind of brainstorming the world needs so happy to be part of it everybody thank you and call me about the uh the tax will do wittgenstein said famously uh knowledge philosophy is not a set of principles but an activity right this is a good example of that wonderful everybody you

Channel: Yale Global Justice Program

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Length: 114min 9sec (6849 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021