JEFFREY SACHS - The Economy of Wellbeing

good evening thank you very much I really treasure being famous in Globe art were so thrilled to be part of this wonderful wonderful organization and the globe art academy so when Heidi Murray asked us to come for this year's celebration I think the answer was immediate yes and were so lucky to be together with you you gave away my punchline the economic economy of well being used the 17 sustainable development goals so I will take you out of suspense but I will explain why and I'll spend about 30 minutes describing why we're in a little bit of a mess and we feel that mess throughout the world right now Rousseau said 200 years ago that man is born free and is everywhere in Chains and I think we could say today that we are born rich and yet poverty and destruction is all around us and this is the paradox really why do we have an economy that doesn't deliver what is important for human beings that doesn't deliver an economy that gives a sense of satisfaction a sense of dignity and also protects the planet so that we're not destroying the very basis of our prosperity and I think the basic argument is we don't have our heads put on in in the right way right now the problems are not primarily technological they are obviously political in important ways but beyond politics is the way we think about the economy the way we talk about it the way we reason about it the way we measure the economy were not fulfilling what we could be fulfilling and it's easy for me to know it in the United States because we are among the most paradoxical places in the world were about as rich a an economy as is imaginable and yet we have about the worst president one could ever imagine a true psychopath and we have a growing social crisis alongside an economic boom looked at over the course of a generation so the contrast in the United States is absolutely stark we're at $65,000 income per man woman and child that's a lot of money at that level we actually could have roads that are not broken down we could have bridges that are not falling down we could arrive back at our airports in the United States and not have all the elevators broken all the escalators not working all of the two mile walk to get the taxis because all the broken infrastructure doesn't function in other words it's really an odd situation so for many many years I've been trying to understand the u.s. situation but obviously it's a more general problem though I think rather stark in in the u.s. we lack nothing in the United States except some decency and a better way to understand our situation so I want to talk about the economy of well-being from ancient wisdom to modern solutions and let's see where we can get to the idea for me is the economy of eudaimonia or i think the right pronunciation is abdomen eeeh I in the way that Aristotle would have said it although God I would love to have a chat with him to know but the basic idea is that Aristotle had a good thought and a basic thought which is that the economy and the politics ought to be organized to promote the well-being of people and he wrote two rather good books about that one the Nicomachean ethics i written two thousand three hundred fifty years ago i that was advice for his son nikka marcus and while we use ethics in a different way mainly in a Content way of right and wrong Aristotle used it mostly in a good advice manner of what's the right way to live so not so much right and wrong but good and bad and he gave some very good practical advice to his son and to Western civilization for the next two thousand years about what the good would be he wrote a companion volume that is quite literally designed to be the companion and that is called the politics written at the same time or collated by his students at the same time and the politics opens up with the idea that politics is about promoting abdomen iya of the community so it is ethics at the level of the polis rather than at the level of the individual these are two very good books in fact I often note for myself in incredible insane academic envy they are the best two books ever written on the subject so Aristotle invented the field of ethics he invented the field of political science he wrote the first two books in the two fields and they remained the best two books ever written in the field because basically we just keep rewriting the same thing better or worse not better slightly worse than Aristotle wrote it but we're still trying to get to this question of the economy of AB demonium of well-being and the paradox is a world of wealth and just to quantify it for you the world output adding up output sold on markets around the world each year is about a hundred trillion dollars now for seven point seven billion people so the average output per person on the planet is about twelve thousand dollars per person not bad actually as the average over the whole world in the rich countries it's about forty five thousand dollars per person in the poor countries it's about seven or eight thousand dollars per person but on average that's riches beyond imagining from the point of view of a century ago even a half-century ago after all China which is 20% of the world's population had a 35 time increase of its marketed production during the last 40 years and that's a scale of accomplishment that is one reason why the world economy is indeed so rich today so I want to stipulate we can talk about it more that we're a rich world but the paradoxes we have a billion people that barely survive day to day we have a billion people for whom one mosquito bite can be the difference of life and death because of malaria which is a hundred percent curable but you need a doctor there or a nurse or a community health worker to give the pills and even that minimum condition is not met and we have 260 million school-aged kids around the world not in school that's crazy because we have enough income to ensure that every child on this planet has a decent education and yet in the poor countries the completion rate for secondary education in other words the proportion of kids coming into first grade that finish 12th year is around 20% or 25% can you believe what we do with the most important resource on this planet our children that we're not desperate about that fact or desperate day to day knowing that 5 million kids will die under the age of 5 this year for completely preventable and treatable causes that could be stopped at almost no expense in the world if we had even a glimmer of care to do that so extreme poverty and deprivation social exclusion large parts of the world that just are not able to get a foothold into a decent life starting with women in a lot of the world who still face massive obstacles in the year 2019 to being able to finish school or to get training or to drive a car or to have a job or to be able to go outside of the household and so on but also including almost every indigenous group in the whole world if there's one consistency in the world it's that every society hates its indigenous people they are kind of witnesses to injustice and there are about 400 million people in indigenous nations around the world and they all face deprivation they have faced genocides exclusion and it continues until today and of course environmental devastation why are we using our wealth not to protect ourselves but to put the climate into devastating risk we've already warmed the climate to beyond the temperatures of the last 10,000 years we have polluted our oceans as you know whether it's the nitrogen or the phosphorus or the plastics or toxic chemicals or the antibiotics we have air pollution which claims more than 5 million deaths per year and every one of those has a technological pathway in solution that if we I was going to say if we took a deep breath but a lot of places in the world you don't want to take a deep breath but if we thought about it for just a bit we would know here is a path to safety thank God were so rich thank God we have the technologies but we don't act this is basically the paradox and the argument that I will make in a long long anticipated book in my household not written yet but written in my head mostly is of course the argument that our problem is a false anthropology we have a wrong theory of human-beings a wrong approach and of course it is based on psychological and ethical egoism that has gotten wildly out of control that neither reflects our human nature nor guides us from our self understanding or the design of our social institutions to be able to use our knowledge and our wealth in an effective way and we have a false theology and a false theology that is very prevalent in the United States increasingly prevalent in other parts of the world that is in the u.s. context called the prosperity gospel what it says is in essence if you're poor it's your own fault if you're poor maybe it's you're lazy and shiftless or in the literal theological sense Americans are told every week by their televangelist preachers if you're poor it's that you just don't believe in God enough it's a sign that you are just not in the comfort of God because God gives wealth to his believers and so if you would just deposit a little bit more money in our tel Evangelic Church we promise it will multiply wonderfully for you but do understand that the problems of poverty are your own and that is obviously part of our syndrome some of the exemplars of our false theology start famously with Margaret Thatcher who memorably said and you know there is no such thing as society there are individual men and women and there are our families it's interesting by the way when you read the politics which you will all go home to do tonight because it's probably been a few months since you read it I when Aristotle starts writing about the politics he starts with the commune and then only later goes to the individual and he says of course you have to start with the collectivity because that comes first the individual is derivative of the community because he says if you were describing a body would you start by talking about a hand and a leg an arm no you would talk about the whole body then you would talk about the pieces well the same with the society but in radical individualism you say there is no society there's just individuals and individuals are self responsible according to Margaret Thatcher and according to the prevailing libertarian views of the United States and so on now in the US were even worse on all of this because a rather terrible dying novelist became known as a philosopher in the United States a Ayn Rand she's wrote terrible novels which are the favorites of our 15 year olds and our members of Congress and she is known as a philosopher but she was a very unhappy person and a very nasty person actually and got her own personal life tangled up in a complete mess which is according to philosophical theory one measure of philosophy is how it does for the philosopher but she also led an idea which is our extreme individualism known as libertarianism and in the most famous treatment of libertarianism inane ran there's a hundred page speech by her character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged the ubermensch that has withdrawn the support of society created a crisis and then he comes out to speak to the country to explain that the powerful people have been mistreated by all of the takers from society and the rich people the powerful people are not going to have it anymore and john galt explains the following to help a man who has no virtues to help him on the ground of his suffering to accept his faults his need as a claim is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values in other words to help the poor is a denigration of your self-worth and I remember shuddering in the middle of the night as I was reading this a few years ago it just actually had me breaking out in a sweat be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile that he has not earned a tribute to a zero to a beggar is a treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it it is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made in other words if you as much smile at a beggar if you give a few pennies that you will never need you are leading to the desolation of the world this is one of the most popular philosophies in America or philosophers in America so it is a an absolute pathology of this individualism so this is the result a result of inequality exclusion environmental degradation and anomie the idea of alienation and collapse of social norms and a dislocation of individuals from feeling a part of society and as Pope Francis has written all of this comes without the discernment of individuals for self correction what Pope Francis calls the globalization of indifference which is an astounding added feature to this it's not as if we're sitting every day asking how do we solve this problem it is rather that the world goes on in this crisis with very little attention indeed to it and this I think is the most alarming point of all so we need a fresh start and where better to start than in the School of Athens of course which happens to be my favorite place in the world in concept all of these wonderful people and my favorite picture in the world of course Raphael's the School of Athens in the stands of Raphael in in the Vatican Museum and Plato and Aristotle Plato of course the elder gentleman pointing up to the sky in carrying at Emmaus his metaphysics and Aristotle the young man on the right pointing to the earth and carrying ethics in his hand and Raphael really got it right here they both are fundamental for our Western philosophy but Aristotle had some very important and down-to-earth things to say and what he said that has resonated for two thousand three hundred fifty years starts with the theory of the soul he said that all of us were made of three faculties of the soul the soul meaning the animating spirit of human beings the human nature and he said part of the soul was what we share with all life the vegetative soul which is the urge and capacity of reproduction nutrition growth the second soul is only of animals and that is the perceptive soul the soul of sensation the ability to perceive and to move towards desirable things and to move away from undesirable or dangerous phenomena I and he called that the sensitive soul or the animal the soul and then his claim was that human beings alone of all the animals have the rational soul and Plato had a division something like this as well and that some metaphysical level the rational soul is not only the uniquely human soul but is also part of our capacity to appreciate the divine or the creation or God or something beyond in terms of ultimate meaning but for Aristotle the main point was as human beings we are conflicted and this was before the Christian ideas of original sin or conflict and and so forth it was the basic simpler idea but very perceptive idea that were conflicted because we're attracted in our animal soul to food to wealth to fame to pleasures to sex whatever it is but we know from our rational soul that that's not necessarily good for us to indulge in every temptation and so the struggle for a good life forever Damania is to have our rational soul be able to choose the good and to tamp down the impulses that come from the animal soul and he points out in Nicomachean ethics if there's a dog or a cat or an animal it will be attracted instantly to a stimulus it will go for the food go for the sex go for whatever it is but only a human could say wait a minute really I have to get to work this is I shouldn't eat the fourth the slice of cake I have to control myself that's not really good and by using rationality we can forge a good life and that's the most basic idea of the Nicomachean ethics it is advice to nickim aqus Keep Calm keep the middle course don't let things run wild out of control use your brain son use your human reason son don't just go for the immediate stimulus and that is Aristotle's core idea and so this is elaborated in the best self-help volume again ever written because remember the ethics is not Conti in you ought to do this in Aristotle's terms it is a self-help guide how to live a good life and what Aristotle said was first aim for the highest good and for a human being the highest good your purpose your Telos was to achieve rationality to have your human reason guide you throughout life so human reason is key and the way to build that is to cultivate character and so Aristotle was all about cultivating good character what are called the virtues or in Greek arrete the excellences but excellences of character and they are the four great virtues that Aristotle talked about practical wisdom in Greek phronesis courage or Andreea temperance is safrussani and just as dear cousin age these are traits that need to be developed over time that need to be cultivated we don't just come into life with them you have to help your child to develop them the teacher should help the mentor should help the good examples in society should help we should tell our children do not look at the president of the United States the Mane's of goddamn wreck of a human being and we know people who say when the presidential debates come on you turn off the television because it's ungodly what's going to come and so this is what Aristotle says about cultivating the virtues he also says that human beings are xoan politican and political animals we live in society and he says anyone that wants to live alone is either a beast or a god so Margaret Thatcher has it completely wrong you can't start as individuals you start as your social being and that means be decent okay he finally writes at the end of it you want the best life the absolute best life to put it in modern parlance he says be a tenured professor of philosophy is that right Johannes chapter 10 I we have a great philosopher here and perhaps as some others as well but he says contemplation is the greatest joy of all because it gives you the window to the divine also the window to understanding the universe the window to something beyond yourself or even the active life of politics so basically happiness is achieved through virtue and if we want happiness we have to think about how to build the virtues and what's important in the dynamics in this picture is that the arrows will go both way a virtuous state has virtuous citizens if you have a corrupt president of the United States he's a tax cheat he's a liar he's a psychopath then it leads to mass shootings it leads to violence it leads to hate and that's what we're experiencing in the United States if you have the worst on top you have the worst in society but also to have the problem is to have a good you also have to have a virtuous society that's able to discriminate between the thugs and the not thugs and so the dynamic is complicated this is true also of the social virtues if we don't even know what's right and wrong if we've lost direction about what's decent or not decent behavior then individuals lose their way also that's the concept of enemy of Durkheim and and others of course Jesus and Christian thought added importantly to those four virtues by adding the theological virtues of faith hope and charity especially at the Sermon on the Mount the Beatitudes which remember beatitude is just the Latin translation of abdomen iya beatitude Oh is happiness abdomen iya is the Greek happiness Jesus's lecture his Sermon on the Mount is a lecture about happiness the same way and a core idea of course in the Greco Christian synthesis is that good works are therefore critical in achieving of Damania and love of creation Saint Francis is also critical in achieving EV Damania okay somehow we lost our way from this because these were actually very good ideas and they are not our prevailing ideas today Margaret Thatcher never heard of them Donald Trump certainly never came across them most of our societies don't come across the idea that virtue is the path to happiness it seems a little quaint maybe you hear it in Sunday school once maybe you hear about the seven cardinal virtues and vices but it's you have to memorize them for a quiz it's not something that is core to our philosophy something happened and I think it's fascinating and I don't have time tonight to trace this but I'm trying to trace it as others have how we went from this kind of view to philosophical and psychological egoism because we did fundamentally revert to an egoistic philosophy morality and psychology and some of the high points of this well Machiavelli certainly played a role because he gave us the alternative theory of politics if Aristotle's politics is the theory of the community achieving the common good the polis achieving ebbed ammonia then Machiavelli's theory of politics is the struggle for power so Machiavelli gave us modern political science at least one strand of it he knew better is a brilliant thinker and historian and practitioner but what we remember of Machiavelli mostly is that the prince should be conniving to hold power and Machiavellian politics became at least in the popular psychology the dominant politics yeah politicians are crooks and they just want to hold power and there's a lot of truth to that because they live up to our image of what politics should be the idea that politics is about well-being it sounds a little quaint doesn't it that it should be the politics of happiness rather than the politics of power Martin Luther also played a shocking role in this by basically denigrating the good works and individualizing radically the philosophy of the protestant approach saying that it's all between you and god and it is by faith alone after all and it is not by works that one achieve salvation or even happiness it is by faith alone Calvin according to Weber of course added through the doctrine of predestination let's just say a lot of anxiety because there was nothing you could do for achieving your salvation whether here or in an afterlife but maybe wealth could be a signal at least according to Weber of that you have been a chode that you are chosen well simultaneously Britain really took in the Protestant era took a radical divergence also from the Graco Christian tradition Hobbes's view was of the Fallen man so Hobbes's view was Aristotle temperance self-control practical wisdom nonsense we'd all kill each other unless someone stops us from doing it so the idea of Hobbes is that there is an insatiable ambition an insatiable quest for wealth an insatiable anxiety that only comes is manifested as aggression and Hobbes famously says you need a Leviathan a strong control to overcome the solitary life this is something Aristotle could never have understood because for Aristotle the state of nature so-called is not solitary poor nasty brutish and short it's a community because we are by nature social animals but for hobbes we are by nature individuals that will cheat and kill each other in less controlled it's a very dark view and by the way hobbes saw himself as the anti aristotle a hell of a lot of nerve in my opinion who did he think he was but hobbes thought that he was writing the new human physics and that the new human physics started with individuals that were against each other and david hume carrying the british tradition a complicated figure I'm told that he's more sympathetic than I read him to be but he said also that reason don't over eight reason so the basic Aristotelian idea that reason is what gives us the ability to be humans decent humans Hume said not it's not reason reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions so for Hume like Hobbes the passions dominate and reason is only an expose justification a confabulation but not the real reason what are not the real cause of our actions these are very dangerous ideas in my view and they lead in a way to a very strange philosophy that came with these two gentlemen very ingenious but also got us really in a difficult direction Mandeville was a pundit of his time writing in London around 1710 and he's known for one famous extremely clever and witty poem called the fable of the bees and the fable of the bees is a very clever poem that says that the bees all operate with vice but because of that the hive becomes powerful wealthy and the envy of all of the other beehives so he's writing about Britain he's writing about the profiteering the privateering the stealing the Spanish galleons and all the rest but might I results from all this ambition he says and then Adam Smith towards the end of the 18th century in 1776 in the wealth of nations writes that it is the self-interest that causes economies to be wealthy and of course he writes the famous line it is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer or the Baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own self-interest we address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love but by the way when you go to the butcher the baker of the brewer you probably don't address it just to their self-interest you chat with your baker you enjoy each other you ask how are the children you have a normal relationship the idea that it is only a monetary transaction is just empirically wrong but Smith told us its self-interest so just go for the self-interest now my view is that this variant that goes from Hobbes Hume Mandeville and Smith would have been a footnote in philosophy except for one fact which is the Britain became the most powerful country in the world and therefore it became a world philosophy because for the last 250 years Britain was the most powerful Empire in the world and so what the British said is what I learned in school and if you studied economics it's what you learned in school and it found its way into mainstream economic analysis of course its self-interest self control what is that that's not in our theory you're supposed to maximize maximize your wealth maximize your consumption your consumption is insatiable we're taught the first day we we're never asked to explain well will we explode if we try to consume a billion dollars of things what will we do actually with our 19th house and that's being put to the test by the billionaires these days what do they do with their 19th house of course they do nothing with it they have no idea it's interesting what taani a an economic and philosophical historian wrote in a famous book religion in the rise of capitalism he said plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism the qualities which enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues in other words we took ambition we took greed we took maximization as pleasure to be the obvious new moral virtues of the age and we unleashed one thing for sure and Adam Smith told us in the title rightly we did unleash the wealth of nations because ambition and greed really are powerful motivators but they are not the direction of happiness they are a direction of wealth but if you get wealth you don't necessarily get well-being finally this gets turned into Americana everything for sale joel osteen sells God on Sunday mornings to his tel Evangelic ole audience it is god-awful and he says in the prosperity gospel remember it doesn't matter how grave your situation seems right now if you will stay faithful and manage diligently what you have and trust God you will achieve an experience to true financial freedom so you can be sure if you're still poor your trust in God isn't good enough yet God just doesn't recognize you yet because those who do trust in God get wealthy so if you're poor examine yourself something's wrong with you I guarantee you this is making Americans very happy it's deadly it's telling you everyday you must have done something terribly wrong to be in the situation that you're in and Robert Merton one of our greatest sociologists in America put it this way in 1938 and I think it's worth thinking about and I know that I'm Way over time I know so I will finish up he said frustration and thwarted aspiration lead to the search for avenues of escape from a culturally induced intolerable situation or unrelieved ambition may eventuate in illicit illegal attempts to acquire the dominant values the American stress on pecuniary success an ambitiousness for all thus invites exaggerated anxieties hostilities and neuroses and antisocial behavior if you tell Americans that the path to happiness is to be rich but not every American can be rich if you tell them that if you believe enough in God you will be rich but you're not rich the outcome is enemy or social deviants exaggerated anxieties hostilities and neuroses and antisocial behavior also known as Donald Trump so what we have in the United States is rising income and falling well being we've had for the last 20 years rising suicide rates rising addictions epidemics of opioid overdoses despair leaving the workforce and soaring GDP it just all goes to mr. B's os-- and to mr. gates and to mr. Zuckerberg and to the top 1% but we don't redistribute any of that because the poor are their own cause of suffering and they should just do better or just believe in God more firmly or something else and so we have an epidemic of stress and anomie financial fraud environmental crime hate crimes and addictions it's estimated that more than 50% of the American public is seriously addicted to some harmful behavior whether it's diet or gambling or shop or opioids now finally let me say Aristotle is being confirmed by neuroscience too because basically what we're learning from neuroscience is the ideas right that we have not three souls exactly but multiple brain pathways one of them is the mesolimbic system it's the one that gets the rat to press the lever to get the the jolt of the electrode does stimulating the nucleus accumbens or the next dose of opiate to the death of the rat because we have a subcortical system an animal system which responds to pleasure it's not a pleasure center it is a stimulus response Learning Center it's a conditioned response dynamic but we also have the prefrontal cortex and the frontal Pole that's where we think that's where we have self-awareness that's where if it's not lesion or destroyed by addiction and trained we can tamp down our mesolimbic system we can say calm down we don't have to go for that lever one more time and so Aristotle he didn't even know that the brain was where this stuff was taking place he thought it was the heart but he was such a incredibly perceptive observer of psychology that he intuited what turned out 2,000 years later to be anatomically neuro scientifically right which is multiple pathways so cognitive neuroscience is confirming the multiple pathways of choice proheavy sees that the Greeks talked about and we also have come to understand the stress pathway that chronic stress absolutely degrades the ability of the prefrontal cortex to execute rational thought and the chronic stress syndrome star with young children makes it extremely difficult for young children that grow up in chronic stress to be able to have delayed gratification that to be able to have the social excellences and so forth and this is now understood in its biological terms oh there's a lot more I want to say he's the hero we need a new approach we need an approach based on virtues and Pope Francis has called this integral ecology and I depicted this way again individual virtues leading to intermediary virtues of businesses of social relations of politics and of ecology so Lodato see is a book about virtues but understanding virtues both on the individual level anthropologically and on the sociological level and on the ecological level as well and Pope Francis said to world leaders we need a plan to get out of the rut that we're in and Lodato C is a call for such a plan and here is pope francis speaking at the rostrum of the UN General Assembly on September 25th 2015 calling for a plan for our common home and this is what the world governments endorsed the world's governments endorsed the moment Pope Francis finished by acclamation they adopted sustainable development the 17 sustainable development goals as a way for that holistic vision of combining economics efficiency social justice and environmental sustainability the team that I lead for the UN measures the progress towards the SDGs Europe is in the world lead this is very important because Europe has a social democratic or social market ethos and that is a holistic approach to our politics the top-ranked governments are Sweden Denmark Finland Germany France Norway Switzerland Slovenia Austria and Iceland ranked for the whole world so Austria is in the top ten it's not reaching the sustainable development goals yet but it's 80% of the way there according to the calculations that we make we also measure well-being now how do you do that by asking people about how they feel about their lives so it's called subjective well-being and we report this once a year as well based on Gallup survey which are the top countries in this ranking Finland Denmark Norway Iceland Netherlands Switzerland Sweden New Zealand Canada and Austria number 10 the list is almost identical balanced societies are happier places the United States is way down on the list of both of those we are neither sustainably developing nor are we happy here were 19th we started out 5th 20 years ago we're now 19th because we're falling down the list so my proposal is that F Damania should become the global ethic it's actually Pope Francis's idea but I strongly support it now what's interesting is it's not just coming from the West but also from the east and the first call in modern times to have a gross national happiness rather than gross domestic product was the 4th King of Bhutan in 1971 and the prime minister of Bhutan in 2011 prime minister thing me Tinley gave a wonderful each to the General Assembly calling for putting happiness at the center of the global agenda and happily I worked with him on this and a few months later the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution happiness towards a holistic approach to development that's where our report came from the fact that we now have at least notionally a world effort to put happiness rather than wealth at the center we need ethics throughout our institutions and I would say ethics in the Aristotelian sense virtuous behavior that's true in business it's true of the way our societies function it's true of the way we respond to nature and so aiming towards the global consensus starts with cultivating virtues individually and institutionally it has to be found in a social context not an individual context it involves personal virtues social virtues business virtues political virtues and ecological virtues we don't even have a language for this appropriately but we need a language for this and it's a matter of survival some of the points to achieving this would be early childhood development for all children it would be childhood education in mwuh in other words what's called positive education it would be the concept of global citizenship it would be cultivating the concepts of justice it would be recognizing the civil economic social cultural and environmental rights that are part of the UN Universal Declaration on human rights it would be ecological stewardship it would be a whole ism intellectually the Greek word for university is pond ischaemia pond everything Epis T mio knowledge Epis t me oh what a lovely word that is I loved universities I entered one 47 years ago and never left never really got a job but they call what I do a job I call it a lot of fun and really lucky but pan episteme EO the idea that we need an integrated knowledge across the different parts of our world in order to have the holism of Damania is crucial and we need philosophy we need to return to a culture of contemplation finally let me note that Pope Francis is called for a gathering of economists from around the world next March in what is called the economy of francesco this is not a pope francis it's st. francis it will be in Assisi and it's a wonderful opportunity Pope Francis is helping to guide us towards an economy of ebbed Omonia Adam Smith told us about the economy of wealth the wealth of nations now we can aim for the well-being of nations thank you very much [Applause] great thank you we had a session with you me yes okay we had a session before this session about climate change and STDs and I collected three questions that I was supposed to ask you but two of them are totally impro inappropriate now so I will let them be and ask you about Aristotle in his Nicomachean eight ethics the central concept is the middle and when he talks about economic issues he says there's a middle between squandering and stinkiness and the middle is generosity there is one point the other is allowed to see Pope Francis talks about fullness and economics only see scarcity and never sees fullness and abundance could you comment and that because I think it really relates to what you were saying so Aristotle talked of course about the golden mean I that the basic advice he gave to his son and to all of us was moderation it's very interesting because it's also the advice that the Buddha gave in the middle path and basically it is a psychological observation not a Kantian de ontological or obligatory approach his approach is psychological which is if you are deficient in something you will suffer but if you have an access you will become addicted you will become drawn into an imbalance and I think biologically or in Systems Theory we could also use the concept of homeostasis which is a complex system needs to stay within certain operating bounds or it falls apart we die if our temperature goes to I know it only in Fahrenheit to 106 or 107 a little bit of warming of our body kills us a few little accidents take us away from our balance so Aristotle's logic was don't fall prey to addiction basically if you let the animal soul dominate your reason you will end up spending your life chasing money for example why would you want to do that is that gonna make you look back and say I led a kind of life that I want to lead no he said money's not bad he was very practical by the way nothing ascetic about Aristotle indeed he said looked contemplation requires leisure you need wealth for leisure so you have to be lucky to have enough wealth that you can spend the leisure time so he was not preaching asceticism he was not preaching de-growth by the way he was preaching moderation and I think that this is really very smart psychology the opposite is Hobbes who says you can't there is no such thing as self-control that's the essence of Hobbes the essence of Hobbes is demands are insatiable and Hobbes explains or things he explains even if you're wealthy then you start worrying about protecting your wealth so you need to be even wealthier then you need to be even wealthier so he says there can never be enough psychologically but Hobbes as bait is so pessimistic oh that's the problem Aristotle is quite optimistic he says we're human beings we have reason we can behave decently that's really the key point of Aristotle okay I have another question on this note on politics yes there he talks about chromatics and economics yes and that economics is about the household the good leading of the household and chromaticities is about with the art of making money right and in the common good you probably know that her medallion to John Cobb they described and you described the same thing I guess from from this move to to economics and away from know that this move away from economics to Kermit istic do you see a chance that you can always get back on this other path of being really economic you know the the Aristotle thought that making money from money was inappropriate morally ethically wrong ethically in the behavioral sense that I'm talking about not in the contine sense but he said that that's just not a good way to make life trading is okay you're trading a good for money then use the money to buy something else but making money from money he was very skeptical and again he's such a perceptive person that I'm sure of one thing we have a community that makes money from money and I live about five miles from it we live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and if you just head downtown you get to Wall Street and Wall Street is making money for money the lack of ethics on Wall Street is astounding Aristotle's psychological observation is in my opinion proved they cannot understand moral boundaries on Wall Street and I'll give you an example I just a personal example we have a drug company a horrible drug company called Gilead which makes its money by charging a thousand time markup on life-saving drugs in my view it's it's just killing people they know it but they are maximizing their profits I attack them and then I got an email from somebody who was a Wall Street trader he said mr. Sachs I don't understand what you're talking about you're an economist why are you writing this and I wrote back I said because people are dying because of this and he wrote back to me but not to yank my chain just normal discussion he said but mr. Sachs that's our system what are you complaining about so he wasn't saying no he was saying that's how it works because that is how it works and that is the way to behave and I know a lot of people on Wall Street that are just nasty in their professional behavior not talking about them as persons I'm talking about what they tell their companies to do really destructive and they are lionized in the community because they're wealthy because the the bottom line is money and that's the only bottom line in Wall Street is how rich are you of course rich and stay out of jail but rich and pay fines that's fine as long as you're paying fines as a cost of doing business and that is and the worst of it is the hedge funds because the hedge funds don't even have regulators they are just to make money so what they do is terrible things buying the debt of impoverished bankrupt countries at two cents on the dollar and then suing these governments to say we demand a hundred percent repayment and then the judges say well of course the port you know countries should pay a hundred percent that's the law and this is a way of doing business and it's horrible but it's not even recognized it's horrible it's recognized as being clever you you refer to happiness and the gross national happiness at the end of your talk a very famous Austrian philosopher you know of course Carmen Papa he warned about the dangers of happiness in the open society and enemies he says when politicians promise you happiness it's a certain way to hell right what do you think about that warning in it with respect to what you you've been telling us I think in general of course social sciences made a living on on unexpected consequences and on the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions I think by and large the road to hell is paved with bad intentions by the way I'm just a little unpersuaded of always going for the unexpected consequence we should be aware of it but it's not the first thing we should come to mind and not the first thing we should try to get tenure on is the trick that what you think is good is bad and what you think is bad is actually the invisible hand it's too much paradox and not enough intention so I'm not with popper okay I I actually think of course institutionally I'm with him that we need safeguards we need to understand that Stalin can come to power or Hitler can come to power of course we need that of course politicians make promises and so forth that's true but we should also talk about happiness we should see what are the drivers of well-being we should try to attend to that and we don't right now okay so the last question from the session I think that is appropriate what gives you hope what gives me hope is Aristotle and the fact by the way that what once I started on this path myself which is only 10 years now I would say of trying to understand a little bit more of our underpinnings philosophically of what is really driving us but because for a long time I knew something was wrong but I thought it could be handled at a very pragmatic level or that I didn't feel as clearly as I should have Pope Francis's drama of the globalization of indifference although I was ranting against it every day I don't feel that I fully understood it but what gives me hope is that this kind of discussion is everywhere now it is not in power it is not the dominant discussion but as a pervasive discussion that we need a different approach that we have to save ourselves from ourselves that we can do better I see Aristotle quoted I was a letter to the Financial Times today of course quoted Aristotle but that's almost a daily occurrence which is also quite wonderful he's been dead for 2,300 years but he is gave us a lot to think about and what really gives me hope is we actually have a good way out we actually have solutions we are not at the end of the tether where everything inevitably has to collapse we don't actually by the way need we don't even need an economic revolution by the way in fact I would say in a way god forbid because they don't turn out well we need to think more clearly about what we want about how to achieve it about how to be nice it's really that we need to think about decency we need to come back to the instinct that when you're told how many children are dying or how many kids are not in school we say what can we do and then when you find out it's just that then it should be of course we're going to do that because if we can come to that world and understand for a small change we can save so much and save ourselves it will give everybody hope I will actually end with an observation that I often quote of President Kennedy who was a wonderful president but he became a great president in the last year of his life in 1963 a truly magnificent president and the way he became a great president was he stumbled badly for the first two years of his presidency because he made a lot of mistakes the Bay of Pigs and his dealings with Khrushchev and then Khrushchev made terrible mistakes of putting missiles into Cuba and we almost destroyed everything and the world almost came to an end in October 1962 and it was within you can't even if you haven't studied it it's shocking how close we came to the edge you know there was a vote of two to one and one of the Soviet submarines that decided not to launch the the warhead that could have ended the world and the u.s. doctrine at the time by the way was any Soviet attack would have unleashed an attack that would have killed 700 million people and they didn't know about the nuclear winter so would have ended human life so we were within just just the hair width of ending everything well Kennedy grew up dramatically at that moment as did Khrushchev at the end of 1962 and said we can't go on like this and he made his final year of his life to negotiate the partial nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev and it's an act of will to create peace which is a stunning act of statesmanship at the height of the Cold War you know to go from almost the end to a peace agreement within a few months is an act of sublime statesmanship and what Kennedy realized was there are human beings on the other side we can find a way to peace and I say this because I wanted to quote a particular line but I'm gonna quote two of my favorite lines of Kennedy he described how to make peace in a wonderful speech given on June 10 1963 go look it up online it's called his peace speech it's the most marvelous foreign policy speech ever given by an American president because he didn't tell the Soviet Union what to do he told the American people we have to stop being militaristic we have to believe in peace unbelievable no American president has ever spoken like that and when Khrushchev heard that speech he called the American envoy and said I want to make peace with that man and five weeks later in Moscow they signed the partial nuclear test ban treaty to show that peace is a matter of will it's not a matter of fate it's a matter of vision of believing in the humanity of both sides but Kennedy said a couple of things one he said how to get to peace he said by defining our goal more clearly by making it seem more manageable and remote we help all people to see it to draw hope from it and to move irresistable e toward it to find the goal more clearly make it seem more manageable practical and then people will draw hope from it and they will move irresistible toward it it's brilliant leadership advice define your goals and then make them practical so that was the first point he made and then he said something and I'll and here and I know the hours late he described why we can solve the problems of the planet and he said the following to my mind the most beautiful lines I know of any modern statesman he said so let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved and if we cannot and now our differences at least we can help make the world safe for diversity for in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet we all breathe the same air we all cherish our children's futures and we are all mortal thank you very much thank you [Applause] you

Channel: GLOBART

Views: 2,414

Keywords: GLOBArt, GLOBArt Academy, Denkwerkstatt, Leben, 2019

Id: 9W0ZOWDnohw

Length: 73min 20sec (4400 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019