English materials for learning

Jacqueline Novogratz: Inspiring a life of immersion

2011-03-03T14:47:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days talking to groups of students and professionals. And everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes. On the one hand, people say, "The time for change is now." They want to be part of it. They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning. But on the other hand, I hear people talking about fear, a sense of risk aversion. They say, "I really want to follow a life of purpose, but I don't know where to start. I don't want to disappoint my family or friends." I work in global poverty. And they say, "I want to work in global poverty, but what will it mean about my career? Will I be marginalized? Will I not make enough money? Will I never get married or have children?" And as a woman who didn't get married until I was a lot older -- and I'm glad I waited -- (Laughter) -- and has no children, I look at these young people and I say, "Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is only to be human. And nothing important happens in life without a cost." These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level. Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the cost, we don't talk about the sacrifice.

One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South. In a short story called "Oh Yes," she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl. And she looks at her child with a sense of pride, but she also wonders, what price will she pay? "Better immersion than to live untouched." But the real question is, what is the cost of not daring? What is the cost of not trying?

I've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion. One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok. She was a leader of the Menominee tribe, a Native American peoples. And when we would gather as fellows, she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions. And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future, looking at them from the Earth. And they would look at them, holding them as stewards for that future. Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other, not only as human beings, but to every living thing on the planet.

And tragically, in 1999 when she was in Columbia working with the U'wa people, focused on preserving their culture and language, she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC. And whenever we would gather the fellows after that, we would leave a chair empty for her spirit. And more than a decade later, when I talk to NGO fellows, whether in Trenton, New Jersey or the office of the White House, and we talk about Ingrid, they all say that they're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life's mission. And when we think about legacy, I can think of no more powerful one, despite how short her life was.

And I've been touched by Cambodian women, beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia. And I met them in the early 90s. In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people. And they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers. And at the end of the war, there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living. And the women who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors, told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps. They said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance, hoping that others were alive and doing the same.

And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage, her hands at her side, and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was. And these big tears fell down her face, but she never lifted her hands to move them. And the women decided that they would train, not the next generation of girls, because they had grown too old already, but the next generation. And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands -- beautiful rhythms -- as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors. And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray. Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future. And what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we cannot measure.

I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership. And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider. In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's microfinance bank. And one of the women was Agnes -- there on your extreme left -- she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda. We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women.

But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end. And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the minister of justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women. She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide. And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves -- and in the extreme, to do terrible things.

And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men. I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male. And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide. And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun.

Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us. One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination -- the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective. And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera. And they're incredible guys. And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it. And then they created a business plan competition. Then they decided that they would do TEDx's.

And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men. Alex, in some ways, said it best. He said, "We used to feel like nobodies, but now we feel like somebodies." And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link. What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other. And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance. And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare -- the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs. And they're doing it. And my hat's off to you in Kibera.

My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive. At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital -- money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor, not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions. We leave our money for 10 to 15 years, and when we get it back, we invest in other innovations that focus on change. I know it works. We've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies. And those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets. This year alone, they've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing, emergency services, solar energy, so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems.

Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions, easy categories, because we don't see profit as a blunt instrument. But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit. And ultimately, we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact, measuring what is most important to us. And my dream is we'll have a world one day where we don't just honor those who take money and make more money from it, but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways. And it's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change.

Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side -- one based on violence and the other on transcendence. I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers. And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don't believe are fully Muslim. And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives, but they did more, because they created more hatred, more rage, more fear and certainly despair.

But less than 24 hours, I was 13 miles away from those mosques, visiting one of our Acumen investees, and incredible man, Jawad Aslam, who dares to live a life of immersion. Born and raised in Baltimore, he studied real estate, worked in commercial real estate, and after 9/11 decided he was going to Pakistan to make a difference. For two years, he hardly made any money, a tiny stipend, but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui. And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price. He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes. It took almost two years just to register the land. But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person's action.

Today, 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community. And there's schools and clinics and shops. But there's only one mosque. And so I asked Jawad, "How do you guys navigate? This is a really diverse community. Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays?" He said, "Long story. It was hard, it was a difficult road, but ultimately the leaders of the community came together, realizing we only have each other. And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams, and those imams would take turns, they would rotate who would say Friday prayer. But the whole community, all the different sects, including Shia and Sunni, would sit together and pray."

We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds. We face huge issues as a world -- the financial crisis, global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness. And everyday we have a choice. we can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was, a fear of each other, distancing and blame, or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation, transcendence, compassion and love, but also accountability and justice.

I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six year-old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South -- in this case New Orleans. And he said that every day this six year-old, dressed in her beautiful dress, would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily, calling her a monster, threatening to poison her -- distorted faces. And every day he would watch her, and it looked like she was talking to the people. And he would say, "Ruby, what are you saying?" And she'd say, "I'm not talking." And finally he said, "Ruby, I see that you're talking. What are you saying?" And she said, "Dr. Coles, I am not talking; I'm praying." And he said, "Well, what are you praying?" And she said, "I'm praying, Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing." At age six, this child was living a life of immersion, and her family paid a price for it. But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education.

My final story is about a young, beautiful man named Josephat Byaruhanga who was another Acumen Fund fellow who hails from Uganda, a farming community. And we placed him in a company in Western Kenya, just 200 miles away. And he said to me at the end of his year, "Jacqueline, it was so humbling, because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture. But especially when I was talking to the African women, I sometimes made these mistakes -- it was so hard for me to learn how to listen." And he said, "So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice. Because at the height of the season, at the height of its powers, it's beautiful, it's green, it nourishes the world, it reaches to the heavens." And he said, "But right before the harvest, it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came."

We need leaders. We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can ourselves extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man, woman and child on this planet. And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone. Robert Kennedy once said that "few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written." Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other. So may each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives, but in the end, it is all that will sustain us.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate

2011-03-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

One thing the world needs, one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates. We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument. (Applause) If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. I have a suggestion. Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.

So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion. First, let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality, give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens, Aristotle's theory of justice, and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today. So, are you ready for the lecture? According to Aristotle justice means giving people what they deserve. That's it; that's the lecture.

(Laughter)

Now, you may say, well, that's obvious enough. The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why. Take the example of flutes. Suppose we're distributing flutes. Who should get the best ones? Let's see what people -- What would you say? Who should get the best flute? You can just call it out.

(Audience: Random.)

Michael Sandel: At random. You would do it by lottery. Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them. Who else?

(Audience: The best flute players.)

MS: The best flute players. (Audience: The worst flute players.)

MS: The worst flute players. How many say the best flute players? Why? Actually, that was Aristotle's answer too.

(Laughter)

But here's a harder question. Why do you think, those of you who voted this way, that the best flutes should go to the best flute players?

Peter: The greatest benefit to all.

MS: The greatest benefit to all. We'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players. That's Peter? (Audience: Peter.)

MS: All right. Well, it's a good reason. We'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music. But Peter, Aristotle doesn't agree with you that that's the reason. That's all right. Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players. He said, that's what flutes are for -- to be played well. He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing, or the social activity, in this case, musical performance. And the point, the essential nature, of musical performance is to produce excellent music. It'll be a happy byproduct that we'll all benefit. But when we think about justice, Aristotle says, what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing. One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy, but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians.

Now, flutes may seem ... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case. Let's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice. It had to do with golf. Casey Martin -- a few years ago, Casey Martin -- did any of you hear about him? He was a very good golfer, but he had a disability. he had a bad leg, a circulatory problem, that made it very painful for him to walk the course. In fact, it carried risk of injury. He asked the PGA, the Professional Golfers' Association, for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments. They said, "No. Now that would give you an unfair advantage." He sued, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, believe it or not, the case over the golf cart. Because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated, provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity. He says, "I'm a great golfer. I want to compete. But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next."

Suppose you were on the Supreme Court. Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case. How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart? And how many say, no, he doesn't? All right, let's take a poll, show of hands. How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin? And how many would not? How many would say he doesn't? All right, we have a good division of opinion here. Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart, what would be your reason? Raise your hand, and we'll try to get you a microphone. What would be your reason?

(Audience: It'd be an unfair advantage.)

MS: It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart. All right, those of you, I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage. What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart? How would you answer the objection? Yes, all right.

Audience: The cart's not part of the game.

MS: What's your name? (Audience: Charlie.)

MS: Charlie says -- We'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply. Tell us, Charlie, why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart?

Charlie: The cart's not part of the game.

MS: But what about walking from hole to hole?

Charlie: It doesn't matter; it's not part of the game.

MS: Walking the course is not part of the game of golf?

Charlie: Not in my book, it isn't.

MS: All right. Stay there, Charlie.

(Laughter)

Who has an answer for Charlie? All right, who has an answer for Charlie? What would you say?

Audience: The endurance element is a very important part of the game, walking all those holes.

MS: Walking all those holes? That's part of the game of golf? (Audience: Absolutely.)

MS: What's your name? (Audience: Warren.)

MS: Warren. Charlie, what do you say to Warren?

Charley: I'll stick to my original thesis.

(Laughter)

MS: Warren, are you a golfer?

Warren: I am not a golfer.

Charley: And I am. (MS: Okay.) (Laughter)

(Applause)

You know, it's interesting. In the case, in the lower court, they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue. Is walking the course essential to the game? And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. And what do you suppose they all said? Yes. They agreed with Warren. They said, yes, walking the course is strenuous physical exercise. The fatigue factor is an important part of golf. And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart. Now, notice, something interesting -- Well, I should tell you about the Supreme Court first.

The Supreme Court decided. What do you suppose they said? They said yes, that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart. Seven to two, they ruled. What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we've just had is that the discussion about the right, the justice, of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf. And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question. And Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, said he had read all about the history of golf, and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible, and that walking was not essential, but incidental.

Now, there were two dissenters, one of whom was Justice Scalia. He wouldn't have granted the cart, and he had a very interesting dissent. It's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority's opinion. He said it's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf. Here's how he put it. "To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement, (Laughter) that is, what distinguishes games from productive activity, (Laughter) it is quite impossible to say that any of a game's arbitrary rules is essential."

So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority's opinion. Justice Scalia's opinion is questionable for two reasons. First, no real sports fan would talk that way. (Laughter) If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game. It's also objectionable on a second ground. On the face of it, it seemed to be -- this debate about the golf cart -- an argument about fairness, what's an unfair advantage. But if fairness were the only thing at stake, there would have been an easy and obvious solution. What would it be? (Audience: Let everyone use the cart.) Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to. Then the fairness objection goes away.

But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been, I suspect, more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA, even than making an exception for Casey Martin. Why? Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf, but, relatedly, the question, what abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents? Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game. (Laughter) After all, there's no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. (Laughter) So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart, it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer, the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes. That illustrates that with golf, as with flutes, it's hard to decide the question of what justice requires, without grappling with the question "What is the essential nature of the activity in question, and what qualities, what excellences connected with that activity, are worthy of honor and recognition?"

Let's take a final example that's prominent in contemporary political debate: same-sex marriage. There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage. How many here favor the first policy: the state should recognize traditional marriage only? And how many favor the second, same-sex marriage? Now, put it this way, what ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage? The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage, fundamentally, is procreation, and that's what's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging. And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no, procreation is not the only purpose of marriage. What about a lifelong, mutual, loving commitment? That's really what marriage is about. So with flutes, with golf carts, and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage, Aristotle has a point. Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition.

So let's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve, elevate, the terms of political discourse in the United States, and for that matter, around the world. There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite, that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Chris. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Anderson: From flutes to golf courses to same-sex marriage. That was a genius link. Now look, you're a pioneer of open education. Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big. What's your vision for the next phase of this?

MS: Well, I think that it is possible. In the classroom, we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions. And I think we can do that in public life more generally. And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we've created of the course -- it's available now, online, free for everyone anywhere in the world -- and to see whether we can partner with institutions, at universities in China, in India, in Africa, around the world, to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate.

CA: So you picture, at some point, live, in real time, you could have this kind of conversation, inviting questions, but with people from China and India joining in?

MS: Right. We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach, and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students. Wouldn't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing, engaging seriously with big moral questions, exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup, students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge, Massachusetts and create a global classroom. That's what I would love to do.

(Applause)

CA: So, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor. Michael Sandel. Thank you so much. (MS: Thanks so much.)

Jacqueline Novogratz: A third way to think about aid

2011-02-18T05:03:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

Clearly we're living in a moment of crisis. Arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us. And yet I stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive. Because of some of technologies we've been talking about. Because of the resources, the skills, and certainly the surge of talent we're seeing all around the world, with the mindset to create change. And we've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen, who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower, but that we've got to engage in a different way with the world.

And by definition, every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul, a global citizen. You work on the front lines. And you've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another. And no matter what country you live or work in, you've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of, even in their most ordinariness.

Today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty, how best we release their energies. On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. And what I want to talk about is something that compliments both systems. We call it patient capital.

The critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in Africa since 1970 and say, and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty, rampant corruption? They use Mobutu as metaphor. And their policy prescription is to make government more accountable, focus on the capital markets, invest, don't give anything away.

On the other side, as I said, there are those who say the problem is that we need more money. That when it comes to the rich, we'll bail out and we'll hand a lot of aid. But when it comes to our poor brethren, we want little to do with it. They point to the successes of aid: the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals. Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.

After 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation, it's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet, than low income people. They must navigate markets daily, making micro-decisions, dozens and dozens, to move their way through society. And yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family, they could be put back into poverty, sometimes for generations. And so we need both the market and we need aid.

Patient capital works between, and tries to take the best of both. It's money that's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy, thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity, but as individual customers, consumers, clients, people who want to make decisions in their own lives.

Patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk, a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment, to use the market as the best listening device that we have, and the expectation of below-market returns, but outsized social impact. It recognizes that the market has its limitation. And so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy, to include all people.

Now entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons. First, they tend to work in markets where people make one, two, three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level. Second, the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure. No roads to speak of, sporadic electricity, and high levels of corruption. Third, they are often creating markets.

Even if you're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages, it is something new. And so many low income people have seen so many failed promises, broken, and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them, that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience. It also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance. Not only to build the systems, the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way, but to connect those business, to other markets, to governments, to corporations -- real partnerships if we want to get to scale.

I want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation. In 2002 I met this incredible entrepreneur named Amitabha Sadangi from India, who'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet. And he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether, despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in India make under a dollar a day. They were creating subsidies either for large farms, or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use, rather than that the farmers wanted to use.

At the same time Amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in Israel. It was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant. And it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green. But the market also had bypassed low income farmers. Because these systems were both too expensive, and they were constructed for fields that were too large. The average small village farmer works on two acres or less.

And so Amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves. Because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he though that they should have. And he used three fundamental principles.

The first one was miniaturization. The drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre, even if he had two, because it was too frightening, given all that he had at stake. Second, it had to be extremely affordable. In other words, that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest. Or else they wouldn't take the risk. And third, it had to be what Amitabha calls infinitely expandable. What I mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre, the farmers could buy a second, and a third, and a fourth.

As of today, IDE India, Amitabha's organization has sold over 300 thousand farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple, on average. But this didn't happen overnight. In fact, when you go back to the beginning, there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day, that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet, and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors, agriculture.

And so we needed grants. And he used significant grants to research, to experiment, to fail, to innovate and try again. And when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers, that's when patient capital could come in. And we helped him build a company, for profit, that would build on IDE's knowledge, and start looking at sales and exports, and be able to tap into other kinds of capital.

Secondarily, we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries. And so we met Dr. Sono Khangharani in Pakistan. And while, again, you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in India, into Pakistan, just to get the permits, over time we were able to start a company with with Dr. Sono who runs a large community development organization in the Thar Desert, which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country. And though that company has just started, our assumption is that there too we'll see the impact on millions.

But drip irrigation isn't the only innovation. We're starting to see these happening all around the world. In Arusha, Tanzania A to Z Textile Manufacturing has worked in partnership with us, with UNICEF, with the Global Fund, to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people, mostly women. And they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for Africans around the world.

Lifespring Hospital is a joint venture between Acumen and the government of India to bring quality, affordable maternal health care to low income women. And it's been so successful that it's currently building a new hospital every 35 days.

And 1298 Ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry, building an ambulance service in Bombay that would use the technology of Google Earth, a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access, and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption. So that in the terrorist attacks of November they were the first responder, and are now beginning to scale, because of partnership. They've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances, and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in India.

This idea of scale is critical. Because we're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people. All of the ones I discussed have reached at least a quarter million people. But that's obviously not enough. And it's where the idea of partnership becomes so important. Whether it's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets, government itself, or partner with major corporations, there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation.

President Obama understands that. He recently authorized the creation of a Social Innovation Fund to focus on what works in this country, and look at how we can scale it. And I would submit that it's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations, not only for their country, but ones that we can use in the developed world as well. Invest financial assistance, but also management assistance. And then measure the returns, both from a financial perspective, and from a social impact perspective.

When we think about new approaches to aid, it's impossible not to talk about Pakistan. We've had a rocky relationship with that country and in all fairness the United States has not always been a very reliable partner. But again I would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen. And if we take that notion of a global innovation fund, we could use this time to invest not directly in government, though we would have government's blessing, nor in international experts, but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country.

People like Rashani Zafar. Who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country, and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country. And Tasneem Siddiqui who developed a way called incremental housing, where he has moved 40 thousand slum dwellers into safe, affordable community housing. Educational initiatives like DIL and The Citizen Foundation that are building schools across the country. It's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the Taliban.

I've invested in Pakistan for over seven years now and those of you who've also worked there can attest that Pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population. And there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature.

President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true. That these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of Pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day, provide real pathways to hope. And as we think about how we construct aid for Pakistan, while we need to strengthen the judiciary, build greater stability, we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world.

On one of my last visits to Pakistan I asked Dr Sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the Thar Desert. And we left Karachi one morning before dawn. It was about 115 degrees. And we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color, lots of heat, very little discussion, because we were exhausted.

And finally at the end of the journey I could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon. And as we got closer its significance became apparent. That there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall. Because one of the poorest farmers on Earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life. His name was Raja. And he had kind, twinkly hazel eyes, and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father.

And he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he hadn't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day. Because he was building these crops. And with the money he earned he could stay this year. And for the first time ever in three generations, his children would go to school.

We asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons. And he said, "Of course I will. Because I don't want them discriminated against anymore." When we think about solutions to poverty we can not deny individuals their fundamental dignity. Because at the end of the day dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. And what's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity. Because that is where dignity really starts.

Martin Luther King said that love without power is anemic and sentimental. And that power without love is reckless and abusive. Our generation has seen both approaches tried, and often fail. But I think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power. For that is what we'll need as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us. And to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal, to every human being on the planet.

The time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions, a cross sector is now. I can only talk from my own experience. But in eight years of running Acumen fund, I've seen the power of patient capital. Not only to inspire innovation and risk taking, but to truly build systems that have created more than 25 thousand jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet. I know it works. But I know that many other kinds of innovation also work.

And so I urge you, in whatever sector you work, in whatever job you do, to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we're trying to help. Rather than what we think that they might need. I will take embracing the world with both arms. And it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability, with a sense of integrity and perseverance. And yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations. And there is so much good that we can do. Just think of all those sunflowers in the desert. Thank you. (Applause)

Jacqueline Novogratz invests in Africa's own solutions

2011-02-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I want to start with a story, a la Seth Godin, from when I was 12 years old. My uncle Ed gave me a beautiful blue sweater -- at least I thought it was beautiful. And it had fuzzy zebras walking across the stomach, and Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru were kind of right across the chest, that were also fuzzy. And I wore it whenever I could, thinking it was the most fabulous thing I owned.

Until one day in ninth grade, when I was standing with a number of the football players. And my body had clearly changed, and Matt Mussolina, who was undeniably my nemesis in high school, said in a booming voice that we no longer had to go far away to go on ski trips, but we could all ski on Mount Novogratz. (Laughter) And I was so humiliated and mortified that I immediately ran home to my mother and chastised her for ever letting me wear the hideous sweater. We drove to the Goodwill and we threw the sweater away somewhat ceremoniously, my idea being that I would never have to think about the sweater nor see it ever again.

Fast forward -- 11 years later, I'm a 25-year-old kid. I'm working in Kigali, Rwanda, jogging through the steep slopes, when I see, 10 feet in front of me, a little boy -- 11 years old -- running toward me, wearing my sweater. And I'm thinking, no, this is not possible. But so, curious, I run up to the child -- of course scaring the living bejesus out of him -- grab him by the collar, turn it over, and there is my name written on the collar of this sweater.

I tell that story, because it has served and continues to serve as a metaphor to me about the level of connectedness that we all have on this Earth. We so often don't realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know. I also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be. That this traveled into the Goodwill in Virginia, and moved its way into the larger industry, which at that point was giving millions of tons of secondhand clothing to Africa and Asia. Which was a very good thing, providing low cost clothing. And at the same time, certainly in Rwanda, it destroyed the local retailing industry. Not to say that it shouldn't have, but that we have to get better at answering the questions that need to be considered when we think about consequences and responses.

So, I'm going to stick in Rwanda, circa 1985, 1986, where I was doing two things. I had started a bakery with 20 unwed mothers. We were called the Bad News Bears, and our notion was we were going to corner the snack food business in Kigali, which was not hard because there were no snacks before us. And because we had a good business model, we actually did it, and I watched these women transform on a micro level. But at the same time, I started a micro-finance bank, and tomorrow Iqbal Quadir is going to talk about Grameen, which is the grandfather of all micro finance banks, which now is a worldwide movement -- you talk about a meme -- but then it was quite new, especially in an economy that was moving from barter into trade.

We got a lot of things right. We focused on a business model, we insisted on skin in the game. The women made their own decisions at the end of the day as to how they would use this access to credit to build their little businesses, earn more income so they could take care of their families better.

What we didn't understand, what was happening all around us, with the confluence of fear, ethnic strife and certainly an aid game, if you will, that was playing into this invisible but certainly palpable movement inside Rwanda, that at that time, 30 percent of the budget was all foreign aid. The genocide happened in 1994, seven years after these women all worked together to build this dream. And the good news was that the institution, the banking institution, lasted. In fact, it became the largest rehabilitation lender in the country. The bakery was completely wiped out, but the lessons for me were that accountability counts -- got to build things with people on the ground, using business models where, as Steven Levitt would say, the incentives matter. Understand, however complex we might be, incentives matter.

So when Chris raised to me how wonderful everything that was happening in the world, that we were seeing a shift in zeitgeist, on the one hand I absolutely agree with him, and I was so thrilled to see what happened with the G8 -- that the world, because of people like Tony Blair and Bono and Bob Geldof -- the world is talking about global poverty, the world is talking about Africa in ways I have never seen in my life. It's thrilling. And at the same time, what keeps me up at night is a fear that we'll look at the victories of the G8 -- 50 billion dollars in increased aid to Africa, 40 billion dollars in reduced debt -- as the victory, as more than chapter one, as our moral absolution.

And in fact, what we need to do is see that as chapter one, celebrate it, close it, and recognize that we need a chapter two that's all about execution -- all about the how-to. And if you remember one thing from what I want to talk about today, it's that the only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.

And it was that -- that whole philosophy -- that encouraged me to start my current endeavor called Acumen Fund, which is trying to build some mini-blueprints for how we might do that in water, health and housing in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt. And I want to talk a little bit about that, and some of the examples so you can see what it is that we're doing. But before I do this -- and this is another one of my pet peeves -- I'm want to talk a little bit about who the poor are. Because we too often talk about them as these strong, huge masses of people yearning to be free, when in fact, it's quite an amazing story. On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.

That's who we talk about when we think about the poor. If you aggregate it, it's the third largest economy on Earth, and yet most of these people go invisible. Where we typically work, there's people making between one and three dollars a day. Who are these people? They are farmers and factory workers. They're working in government offices. They're drivers. They are domestics. They typically pay for critical goods and services like water, like healthcare, like housing, and they pay 30 to 40 times what their middleclass counterparts pay -- certainly where we work in Karachi and Nairobi. The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity.

So, two examples. One is in India, where there are 240 million farmers, most of whom make less than two dollars a day. Where we work in Aurangabad, the land is extraordinarily parched. You see people on average making 60 cents to a dollar. This guy in pink is a social entrepreneur named Ami Tabar. What he did was see what was happening in Israel, larger approaches, and figure out how to do a drip irrigation, which is a way of bringing water directly to the plant stock. But previously it's only been created for large-scale farms, so Ami Tabar took this and modularized it down to an eighth of an acre. A couple of principles -- Build small. Make it infinitely expandable and affordable to the poor.

This family, Sarita and her husband, bought a 15-dollar unit when they were living in a -- literally a three-walled lean-to with a corrugated iron roof. After one harvest, they had increased their income enough to buy a second system to do their full quarter-acre. A couple of years later, I meet them. They now make four dollars a day, which is pretty much middle class for India, and they showed me the concrete foundation they'd just laid to build their house. And I swear, you could see the future in that woman's eyes. Something I truly believe.

You can't talk about poverty today without talking about malaria bed nets, and I again give Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard huge kudos for bringing to the world this notion of his rage -- for five dollars you can save a life. Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon, we can see if there's life on Mars -- why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people?

The question, though, is not why can't we, the question is how can we help Africans do this for themselves? A lot of hurdles. One: production is too low. Two: price is too high. Three: this is a good road in -- right near where our factory is located. Distribution is a nightmare, but not impossible. We started by making a 350,000 dollar loan to the largest traditional bed net manufacturer in Africa so that they could transfer technology from Japan and build these long-lasting, five-year nets. Here are just some pictures of the factory.

Today, three years later, the company has employed another thousand women. It contributes about 600,000 dollars in wages to the economy of Tanzania. It's the largest company in Tanzania. The throughput rate right now is 1.5 million nets, three million by the end of the year. We hope to have seven million at the end of next year. So the production side is working. On the distribution side, though, as a world, we have a lot of work to do. Right now, 95 percent of these nets are being bought by the U.N., and then given primarily to people around Africa. We're looking at building on some of the most precious resources of Africa -- people. Their women.

And so I want you to meet Jacqueline, my namesake, 21 years old. If she were born anywhere else but Tanzania, I'm telling you, she could run Wall Street. She runs two of the lines, and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house. She makes about two dollars a day, is creating an education fund, and told me she is not marrying nor having children until these things are completed. And so, when I told her about our idea -- that maybe we could take a Tupperware model from the United States, and find a way for the women themselves to go out and sell these nets to others -- she quickly started calculating what she herself could make and signed up.

We took a lesson from IDEO, one of our favorite companies, and quickly did a prototyping on this, and took Jacqueline into the area where she lives. She brought 10 of the women with whom she interacts together to see if she could sell these nets, five dollars apiece, despite the fact that people say nobody will buy one, and we learned a lot about how you sell things. Not coming in with our own notions, because she didn't even talk about malaria until the very end. First, she talked about comfort, status, beauty. These nets, she said, you put them on the floor, bugs leave your house. Children can sleep through the night, the house looks beautiful, you hang them in the window. And we've started making curtains, and not only is it beautiful, but people can see status -- that you care about your children. Only then did she talk about saving your children's lives. A lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how we sell goods and services to the poor.

I want to end just by saying that there's enormous opportunity to make poverty history. To do it right, we have to build business models that matter, that are scaleable and that work with Africans, Indians, people all over the developing world who fit in this category, to do it themselves. Because at the end of the day, it's about engagement. It's about understanding that people really don't want handouts, that they want to make their own decisions, they want to solve their own problems, and that by engaging with them, not only do we create much more dignity for them, but for us as well. And so I urge all of you to think next time as to how to engage with this notion and this opportunity that we all have -- to make poverty history -- by really becoming part of the process and moving away from an us-and-them world, and realizing that it's about all of us, and the kind of world that we, together, want to live in and share. Thank you. (Applause)

Sunitha Krishnan fights sex slavery

2011-02-18T04:20:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation, the third-largest organized crime, a 10 billion dollar industry. I'm talking to you about modern-day slavery.

I'd like to tell you the story of these three children, Pranitha, Shaheen and Anjali. Pranitha's mother was a woman in prostitution, a prostituted person. She got infected with HIV, and towards the end of her life, when she was in the final stages of AIDS, she could not prostitute, so she sold four-year-old Pranitha to a broker. By the time we got the information, we reached there, Pranitha was already raped by three men.

Shaheen's background I don't even know. We found her in a railway track, raped by many many men, I don't know many. But the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body. And when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body. We still don't know who her parents are, who she is. All that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally.

Anjali's father, a drunkard, sold his child for pornography. You're seeing here images of three years, four-year-olds, and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. In this country, and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. They are sold in the name of adoption. They are sold in the name of organ trade. They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything.

I work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation. And I tell you stories from there. My own journey to work with these children started as a teenager. I was 15 when I was gang-raped by eight men. I don't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were eight men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn't go into my consciousness. I never felt like a victim, then or now. But what lingered from then till now -- I am 40 today -- is this huge outrageous anger.

Two years, I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated, because I was a victim. And that's what we do to all traffic survivors. We, as a society, we have PhDs in victimizing a victim. Right from the age of 15, when I started looking around me, I started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices, but have absolutely no respite, because we don't allow them to come in.

Where does their journey begin? Most of them come from very optionalist families, not just poor. You have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked. I had this I.S. officer's daughter, who is 14 years old, studying in ninth standard, who was raped chatting with one individual, and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine, who was trafficked. I have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families, and children from well-to-do families, who are getting trafficked.

These people are deceived, forced. 99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution. Some pay the price for it. They're killed; we don't even hear about them. They are voiceless, [unclear], nameless people. But the rest, who succumb into it, go through everyday torture. Because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends, or who want to have a family with you. These are men who buy you for an hour, for a day, and use you, throw you.

Each of the girls that I have rescued -- I have rescued more than 3,200 girls -- each of them tell me one story in common ... (Applause) one story about one man, at least, putting chile powder in her vagina, one man taking a cigarette and burning her, one man whipping her. We are living among those men: they're our brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, all around us. And we are silent about them.

We think it is easy money. We think it is shortcut. We think the person likes to do what she's doing. But the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, you name it, substance abuse, drugs, everything under the sun. And one day she gives up on you and me, because we have no options for her. And therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation. She believes, "Yes, this is it, this is what my destiny is about." And this is normal, to get raped by 100 men a day. And it's abnormal to live in a shelter. It's abnormal to get rehabilitated.

It's in that context that I work. It's in that context that I rescue children. I've rescued children as young as three years, and I've rescued women as old as 40 years. When I rescued them, one of the biggest challenges I had was where do I begin. Because I had lots of them who were already HIV infected. One third of the people I rescue are HIV positive. And therefore my challenge was to understand how can I get out the power from this pain. And for me, I was my greatest experience. Understanding my own self, understanding my own pain, my own isolation, was my greatest teacher. Because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential.

You see a girl here who is trained as a welder. She works for a very big company, a workshop in Hyderabad, making furnitures. She earns around 12,000 rupees. She is an illiterate girl, trained, skilled as a welder. Why welding and why not computers? We felt, one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage. They did not have any pardas inside their body, hijabs inside themselves; they've crossed the barrier of it. And therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world, very easily, and not feel very shy about it.

We have trained girls as carpenters, as masons, as security guards, as cab drivers. And each one of them are excelling in their chosen field, gaining confidence, restoring dignity, and building hopes in their own lives. These girls are also working in big construction companies like Ram-ki construction, as masons, full-time masons.

What has been my challenge? My challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up. I've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life. I can't hear from my right ear. I've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue. My biggest challenge is society. It's you and me. My biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own.

A very supportive friend of mine, a well-wisher of mine, used to give me every month, 2,000 rupees for vegetables. When her mother fell sick she said, "Sunitha, you have so much of contacts. Can you get somebody in my house to work, so that she can look after my mother?" And there is a long pause. And then she says, "Not one of our girls."

It's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, in this fantastic A-C hall. It's very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. It's not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. It's not nice for our children to study with their children. There it ends. That's my biggest challenge.

If I'm here today, I'm here not only as Sunitha Krishnan. I'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking. They need your compassion. They need your empathy. They need, much more than anything else, your acceptance.

Many times when I talk to people, I keep telling them one thing: don't tell me hundred ways how you can not respond to this problem. Can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem? And that's what I'm here for, asking for your support, demanding for your support, requesting for your support. Can you break your culture of silence? Can you speak to at least two persons about this story? Tell them this story. Convince them to tell the story to another two persons.

I'm not asking you all to become Mahatma Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings, or Medha Patkars, or something like that. I'm asking you, in your limited world, can you open your minds? Can you open your hearts? Can you just encompass these people too? Because they are also a part of us. They are also part of this world. I'm asking you, for these children, whose faces you see, they're no more. They died of AIDS last year. I'm asking you to help them, accept as human beings, not as philanthropy, not as charity, but as human beings who deserve all our support. I'm asking you this because no child, no human being, deserves what these children have gone through. Thank you. (Applause)

Jacqueline Novogratz on patient capitalism

2011-02-18T04:16:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I really am honored to be here, and as Chris said, it's been over 20 years since I started working in Africa. My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty Ivory Coast morning. I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials -- some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar -- because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent.

But literally within days of arriving I was told, in no uncertain terms, by a number of West African women, that Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me. I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn't really know Africa and besides, my French was pitiful. And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening.

I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there. And I did, and we ended up naming it Duterimbere, meaning "to go forward with enthusiasm." And while we were doing it, I realized that there weren't a lot of businesses that were viable and started by women, and so maybe I should try to run a business too. And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes. And, being a little intrigued, I went to go meet this group, and what I found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive.

And it was really the beginning of my understanding the power of language, and how what we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little. I also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business, that in fact, it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods, and living on 50 cents a day, still in poverty. So, I made a deal with the women. I said, "Look, we get rid of the charity side, and we run this as a business and I'll help you." They nervously agreed, I nervously started, and of course, things are always harder than you think they're going to be.

First of all, I thought, well, we need a sales team, and we clearly aren't the A-Team here, so let's -- I did all this training, and the epitome was when I literally marched into the streets of Nyamirambo, which is the popular quarter of Kigali, with a bucket, and I sold all these little doughnuts to people, and I came back, and I was like, "You see?" And the women said, "You know, Jacqueline, who in Nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall American woman?" And like -- (Laughter) It's a good point.

So then I went the whole American way, with competitions, team and individual. Completely failed, but over time the women learnt to sell on their own way. And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips and banana chips and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average. And with that confidence surge, I thought, well, It's time to create a real bakery, so let's paint it. And the women said, "That's a really great idea." And I said, "Well, what color do you want to paint it?" And they said, "Well, you choose." And I said, "No, no, I'm learning to listen -- you choose. It's your bakery, your street, your country, not mine." But they wouldn't give me an answer. So one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, "Well, how about blue?" And they said, "Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue." So, I went to the store, I brought Gaudence, the recalcitrant one of all, and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains, and on painting day we all gathered in Nyamirambo, and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim, like a little French bakery. But that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky.

So, blue, blue, everything became blue; the walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue. And Aretha Franklin was shouting "R.E.S.P.E.C.T.," the women's hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes, but it was their day. And at the end of it, we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done, and I said, "It is so beautiful," and the women said, "It really is." And I said, "And I think the color is perfect," and they all nodded their head, except for Gaudence, and I said, "What?" And she said, "Nothing," and I said, "What?" And she said, "Well, it is pretty, but you know our color, really, it is green." And -- (Laughter).

And I learned then that listening isn't just about patience, but that when you've lived on charity and dependent your whole life long, it's really hard to say what you mean. And, mostly because people never really ask you, and when they do, you don't really think they want to know the truth. And so then I learned that listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions.

And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life. And it taught me three lessons that I think are so important for us today, and certainly in the work that I do. The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. As Eleni has said, when people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity. But as human beings we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that. The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.

I think Andrew pretty well covered that, so I will move to the third point, which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty. Yes, we ran this as a business, but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training and the management support, the strategic advice and maybe most important of all, the access to new contacts, networks and new markets. And so, on a micro level, there's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy. And on a macro level, some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized. But, having had a father with heart disease, and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten, and having a good friend step in to help, I really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford. I think the market can help us figure that out, but there's got to be a charitable component or I don't think we're going to create the kind of societies we want to live in.

And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago. It's a nonprofit venture capital fund for the poor, a few oxymorons in one sentence. It essentially raises charitable funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health, housing, energy, clean water, to low income people in South Asia and Africa, so that they can make their own choices. We've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.

I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa. Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets. Both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise, and both of them, because they're manufacturers, create jobs directly, and create incomes indirectly, because they're in the malaria sector, and Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria. And so as people get healthier, they also get wealthier.

The first one is called Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited. It's a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues. These are old-hand farmers who've gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in Kenya over the last 30 years. Now, this plant is an Artemisia plant, it's the basic component for artemisinin, which is the best-known treatment for malaria. It's indigenous to China and the Far East, but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in Africa, Patrick and his colleagues said, "Let's bring it here, because it's a high value-add product." The farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize.

And so, using patient capital, money that they could raise early on, that actually got below market returns, and was willing to go the long haul and be combined with management assistance, strategic assistance, they've now created a company where they purchase from 7,500 farmers. So that's about 50,000 people affected. And I think some of you may have visited -- these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient. They buy it, they dry it and they bring it to this factory which was purchased in part by, again, patient capital from Novartis, who has a real interest in getting the powder so that they can make Coartem. Acumen's been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital. And I really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so. Because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make Coartem, when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history.

And we called all of the social investors we knew. Now, some of these same social investors are really interested in Africa and understand the importance of agriculture, and they even helped the farmers. And even when we explained that if ABE goes away, all those 7,500 jobs go away too, we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social. And it's really time we start thinking more creatively about how they can be fused. So Acumen made not one, but two bridge loans, and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20 million dollar round to move it to the next level, and I think that this will be one of the more important companies in East Africa.

This is Samuel. He's a farmer. He was actually living in the Kibera slums when his father called him and told him about Artemisia and the value-add potential. So he moved back to the farm, and, long story short, they now have seven acres under cultivation. Samuel's kids are in private school, and he's starting to help other farmers in the area also go into Artemisia production -- dignity being more important than wealth.

The next one, many of you know. I talked about it a little at Oxford two years ago, and some of you visited A to Z Manufacturing, which is one of the great real companies in East Africa. It's another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise. And this is really a story about a public/private solution that has really worked. It started in Japan. Sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide, so you could create a bed net, a malaria bed net that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped.

It could alter the vector, but like Artemisia, it had been produced only in East Asia, and as part of its social responsibility Sumitomo said, "Why don't we experiment with whether we can produce it in Africa, for Africans?" UNICEF came forward and said, "We'll buy most of the nets and then we'll give them away as part of the global fund's and the UN's commitment to pregnant women and children, for free." Acumen came in with the patient capital, and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in Africa, and Exxon provided the initial resin.

Well, in looking around for entrepreneurs, there was none better that we could find on Earth than Anuj Shah, in A to Z Manufacturing Company. It's a 40-year-old company, it understands manufacturing. It's gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it. And so, Anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in Africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria.

And, long story short again, they've been so successful. In our first year, the first net went off the line in October of 2003. We thought the hitting it out of the box number was 150,000 nets a year. This year they are now producing eight million nets a year, and they employ 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom are women, mostly unskilled. They're in a joint venture with Sumitomo. And so, from an enterprise perspective for Africa, and from a public health perspective, these are real successes.

But it's only half the story if we're looking at solving problems of poverty, because it's not long-term sustainable. It's a company with one big customer. And if avian flu hits, or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority, everybody loses. And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day. It costs at manufacturing point, six dollars to produce these, and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it, so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net. Most people can't afford that, so let's give it away free. And we said, "Well, there's another option. Let's use the market as the best listening device we have, and understand at what price people would pay for this, so they get the dignity of choice. We can start building local distribution, and actually, it can cost the public sector much less."

And so we came in with a second round of patient capital to A to Z, a loan as well as a grant, so that A to Z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace, and found a number of things. One, that people will pay different prices, but the overwhelming number of people will come forth at one dollar per net and make a decision to buy it. And when you listen to them, they'll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they don't like, and that some of the channels we thought would work didn't work. But because of this experimentation and iteration that was allowed because of the patient capital, we've now found that it costs about a dollar in the private sector to distribute, and a dollar to buy the net. So then, from a policy perspective, when you start with the market, we have a choice. We can continue going along at 12 dollars a net, and the customer pays zero, or we could at least experiment with some of it to charge one dollar a net, costing the public sector another six dollars a net, give the people the dignity of choice, and have a distribution system that might, over time, start sustaining itself.

We've got to start having conversations like this, and I don't think there's any better way to start than using the market, but also to bring other people to the table around it. Whenever I go to visit A to Z, I think of my grandmother, Stella. She was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines. She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn't have very much education. She moved to the United States where she met my grandfather who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies. My grandmother had tuberculosis, and she worked in a sewing machine shop making shirts for about 10 cents an hour. She, like so many of the women I see at A to Z, worked hard every day, understood what suffering was, had a deep faith in God, loved her children and would never have accepted a handout. But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams.

I look around at my siblings and my cousins -- and as I said, there are a lot of us -- and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers. One sister who makes other people's wishes come true. And my wish, when I see those women, I meet those farmers, and I think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day, is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility, and that they also can believe and get access to services so that their children too can live those lives of great purpose. It shouldn't be that difficult. But what it takes is a commitment from all of us to essentially refuse trite assumptions, get out of our ideological boxes. It takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success. It takes opening your arms, both, wide, and expecting very little love in return, but demanding accountability, and bringing the accountability to the table as well. And most of all, most of all, it requires that all of us have the courage and the patience, whether we are rich or poor, African or non-African, local or diaspora, left or right, to really start listening to each other. Thank you. (Applause)

Stephen Petranek counts down to Armageddon

2011-02-04T02:01:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology, and biology, in the last ten years, are really extraordinary -- to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. The science writers and editors -- I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science -- and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works.

And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. And that's what I wanna talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter)

Voice offstage: Can we finish up a little early?

(Laughter) Yeah, we need the time! At first it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11th happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is gonna end. Nobody wants to hear that. Not after this! And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to who was a neuroscientist, said, you know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up, and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem. So we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them. Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. Can we run that, Andrew?

President Bush: "Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it."

I agree with the president. He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two trillion dollar federal budget which will land us back into deficit spending real fast -- but terrorists aren't the only threat we face. There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism and what could've happened on September 11th.

I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget -- which is one -- or is 2/100ths of that budget -- and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about -- the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So I hope you find this both fascinating -- I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit -- to me these are -- Richard's cockroaches.

But I also hope -- because I think the people in this room can literally change the world -- I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy duty money spent on some of these ideas.

So let's start. Number 10: We lose the will to survive. We live in an incredible age of modern medicine; we are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. People around the world are getting better medicine -- but mentally, we're falling apart. The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced.

Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal life-span. A female child born tomorrow on average -- median -- will live to age 83. Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. Now the problem with all of this getting older is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide.

So what are the solutions? We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's -- (Applause) -- it's really a crime. Something like 98 percent of all people with depression -- and I mean really severe depression -- I have a friend with stunningly severe depression -- this is a curable disease, with present medicine and present technology. But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people. You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist -- or a psychologist -- and put down your 10 dollar co-pay, and get treated, just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It's ridiculous.

Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did ten years ago. We need a pump-push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science -- NSF -- and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs.

Moving on. Number nine -- don't laugh -- aliens invade earth. 10 years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer -- well, very few astronomers -- in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system. 1995 we found three, the count now's up to 80, we're finding about two or three a month. All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little teeny tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. In a few years NASA is gonna launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea.

Remember, we've only been an advanced civilization -- an industrial civilization, if you would -- for 200 years, although every time I go to Pompeii I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner too. So I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood -- I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, but -- and I don't believe there are any aliens on the earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own.

Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it. We can look at our own history -- the late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "Advanced western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization." If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization.

So what are the solutions to this? (Laughter) Thank God you can all read! It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species?

Secondly, and you're gonna hear more from me about this -- we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. We have got to develop the idea that the earth doesn't last forever, our sun doesn't last forever -- if we want humanity to last forever we have to colonize the Milky Way. And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. (Applause) It'll also help us a lot if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight --

Voice offstage: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED. (Laughter & Applause)

You've got it! You've got the job.

Number eight: The ecosystem collapses. Last July, in "Science," the journal "Science," 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article -- it wasn't really a research report, it was a screed. They said, we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we wanna tell you they're not in trouble, they're near collapse. Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years, California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. There's really a tree like that out there. That's really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So what do we do about this? What are the solutions?

There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble, until it's almost too late. We need to know earlier that they're getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. And with the kind of computing power we have now -- there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. National Science Foundation needs to say -- you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. And they get to prioritize, you know? There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say this is the most important thing. This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about.

Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around. There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank -- or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone. They can't fish there for a radius of 200 miles. And an amazing thing has happened -- almost all the fish have come back, and they're reproducing like crazy. We're going to have to start doing this around the globe. We're gonna have to have no-take zones. We're gonna have to say no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. Let it recover, before we start logging again. (Applause)

Number seven: Particle accelerator mishap. You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. This spring, there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island -- this spring it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. They are expecting to create little tiny black holes. They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter)

Other collider experiments -- there's one that's gonna take place next summer at CERN -- have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter whenever they hit other matter they destroy it, and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right. But -- all around the world, in Japan, in Canada -- there's talk about this -- of reviving this in the United States. We shut one down that was gonna be big. But there's talk of building very big accelerators. What can we do about this? What are the solutions?

We've got the fox watching the hen house here. We need to -- we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments.

Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the earth. We have an electromagnetic field around the earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high energy particles, like protons. And we don't -- in my opinion -- we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth.

Number six: Biotech Disaster. It's one of my favorite ones, because we've done several stories on BT corn. BT corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn-borer. You may of heard of it -- heard it called Starling, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where BT corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found BT corn genes in wild corn plants. Now corn originated, we think, in Mexico. This is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn. This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order.

So what do we do about that? We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. When the Starling disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy.

Number five, one of my favorites: Reversal of the earth's magnetic field. Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history -- North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are -- well basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter)

Offstage voice: Steve I have some additional hats downstairs.

So what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue -- it's been 780,000 years since this happened. So -- it should have happened about 480,000 years ago. Oh, and here's one other thing -- scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent. So maybe we're in the throes of it. One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the earth is, is that we have -- you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer.

So, there's a fairly simple solution to this. There's gonna be a lot of cheap rocketry that's gonna come online in about six or seven years, that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. It's not hard -- it's just three oxygen atoms. If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. You don't need that much up there. We need to learn how to repair and replenish the earth's ozone layer. (Applause)

Number four: Giant solar flares. Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the sun that bombard the earth with high speed subatomic particles. So far our atmosphere has done -- and our magnetic field has done -- pretty well protecting us from this. Occasionally, we get a flare from the sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity. But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long. And they think these are superflares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our sun so far.

Obviously we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it -- in studying stars like our sun we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent. One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here. So what can we do about this?

(Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects, I wrote a story about this in "Life" magazine in 1993. This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. Really more like 500 years to do it right. There's no reason why we shouldn't start now. (Laughter)

Number three -- isn't this stuff cool? (Laughter) -- A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time the germs sure get the upper hand. In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. That was back when the population was around 100 million people. The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. AIDS is coming back; Ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We've all learned what the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax.

The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. And we know staph can do amazing things. A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it, when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. The danger is that some germ like staph will be -- will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. That's happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease. So what can we do about it?

It is nuts. We give antibiotics -- (Applause) -- every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all -- you know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it's all farmed. You know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it's a wild fish, cause they're not gonna tell you. We're giving away the code -- this is like being at war, and giving somebody your secret code. We're telling the germs out there how to fight us. We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away.

Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. We have a real major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. Now there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. But I don't think to any extent that it really needs to be done.

Number two -- my favorite -- we meet a rogue black hole. You know, 10 years ago -- or 15 years ago, really -- you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, "You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy," and they're gonna hoot you off the stage. And now if you went into one of those conventions and you said, "Well, I don't think black holes are out there," they'd hoot you off the stage. Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really -- has just gained unbelievably in recent years.

We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone -- our galaxy. And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them. Most of them should be in orbit around something. But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. also, space is incredibly vast. So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. But -- it only has to get close; about a billion miles away, one of these things. About a billion miles away, here's what happens to earth's orbit -- it becomes elliptical instead of circular. And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180; for three months out of the year they go to 50 below zero. That won't work too well. What can we do about this? And this is my scariest -- (Laughter) I don't have a good answer for this one. Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race.

And finally, number one -- biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for earth. The important thing to remember here -- this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. In 1908, a -- just a 200 foot piece of a comet -- exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles. It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years in 1989 a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from earth.

Nothing to worry about, right? It passed directly through earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier. a small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up -- Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing -- an asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions -- we think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide. Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which -- some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, its in the Kuiper belt. There's also something a little farther out called the Oort cloud. There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock -- comets, really -- out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin in towards the sun and pass reasonably close to us. Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall -- they're making the first map of the universe -- three dimensional map of the universe. that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger. So you say yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening? Andrew, can you put that chart up?

This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwestern Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid slash comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done. Now look at the one right below that. Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. Could we have the solutions?

NASA's spending three million dollars a year -- three million bucks -- that is like pocket change -- to search for asteroids. Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit earth, and when it might hit earth. And they're trying to do that. But it's gonna take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued. Comets are a tougher act. We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. We really need a dedicated observatory. You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of -- amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs. We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets.

Part two of the solutions -- we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now a year ago, we did an amazing thing. We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And these guys orbited a 30 -- or no, about a 22 mile long asteroid called Eris. And then of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things where they had extra batteries, and extra gas aboard and everything, and then at the last minute they landed -- when the mission was over they actually landed on the thing. We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal. Now the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing, is that you don't have anything to push against in space, 'cause there's no air. A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22 mile long asteroid. Or vaporize it, would be more like it.

But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting earth. This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it. I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. Yikes! so many big threats!

The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11th. We don't wanna get caught flat-footed again. We know about this stuff. Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. Knowledge is power. The worst thing we can do is say jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future. Thank you.

Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic

2011-02-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I am honored to be here, and I'm honored to talk about this topic, which I think is of grave importance. We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people too, especially poor people. And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have bull's-eye on their foreheads are poor people. People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened for very good reason. People thought about, "Oh, my God. This is terrible, this oil. It's in the water. It's going to destroy the living systems there. People are going to be hurt. This is a terrible thing, that the oil is going to hurt the people in the Gulf."

What people don't think about is what if the oil had made it safely to shore. What if the oil actually got where it was trying to go? Not only would it have been burned in engines and added to global warming, but there's a place called "cancer alley", and the reason it's called "cancer alley" is because the petrochemical industry takes that oil and turns it into plastic and, in the process, kills people. It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf. So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem when there's a spill, they're a problem when there's not. And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products.

The other thing that we don't often appreciate is it's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer. Poor people also suffer at the point of use. Those of us who earn a certain income level, we have something called choice. The reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices, economic choices. We actually get a chance to choose not to use products that have dangerous, poisonous plastic in them. Other people who are poor don't have those choices. So low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using. Those are the people who wind up ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic and using it. And people say, "Well, they should just buy a different product." Well the problem with being poor is you don't have those choices. You often have to buy the cheapest products. The cheapest products are often the most dangerous.

And if that weren't bad enough, if it wasn't just the production of plastic that's giving people cancer in places like "cancer alley" and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use, at the point of disposal, once again, it's poor people who bear the burden. Often, we think we're doing a good thing. You're in your office, and you're drinking your bottled water, or whatever it is, and you think to yourself, "Hey, I'm going to throw this away. No, I'm going to be virtuous. I'm going to put it in the blue bin." You think, "I put mine in the blue bin." And then you look at your colleague and say, "Why, you cretin. You put yours in the white bin." And we use that as a moral tickle. We feel so good about ourselves. Maybe I'll forgive myself. Not you, but I feel this way. And so we kind of have this kind of moral feel-good moment.

But if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey, we would be shocked to discover that, all too often, that bottle is going to be put on a boat. It's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense. And it's going to wind up in a developing country -- often China. I think in our minds we imagine somebody's going to take the little bottle, say, "Oh, little bottle. We're so happy to see you little bottle." (Laughter) "You've served so well." He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal. And say, "What would you like to do next?" The little bottle says, "I just don't know." But that's not actually what happens. That bottle winds up getting burned. Recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people. And so poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like "cancer alley"; poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately; and then poor people, who even at the tail end of the recycling are having their lives shortened, are all being harmed greatly by this addiction that we have to disposability.

Now you think to yourself -- because I know how you are -- you say, "That sure is terrible for those poor people. It's just awful, those poor people. I hope someone does something to help them." But what we don't understand is -- is, here we are in Los Angeles. We worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in Los Angeles. But guess what? Because they're doing so much dirty production in Asia now, because the environmental laws don't protect the people in Asia now, almost all of the clean air gains and the toxic air gains that we've achieved here in California have been wiped out by dirty air coming over from Asia. So we all are being hit. We all are being impacted. It's just the poor people get hit first and worst. But the dirty production, the burning of toxins, the lack of environmental standards in Asia is actually creating so much dirty air pollution it's coming across the ocean and has erased our gains here in California. We're back where we were in the 1970's. And so we're on one planet, and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems.

Well the root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself. You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling, but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. But if you create a world where you don't trash people, you can't trash the planet. So now we are at a moment where the coming together of social justice as an idea and ecology as an idea, we finally can now see that they are really, at the end of the day, one idea. And it's the idea that we don't have disposable anything. We don't have disposable resources. We don't have disposable species. And we don't have disposable people either. We don't have a throw-away planet, and we don't have throw-away children -- it's all precious.

And as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding, new opportunities for action begin to emerge. Biomimicry, which is something that is an emerging science, winds up being a very important social justice idea. People who are just learning about this stuff, biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. Democracy, by the way, means respecting the wisdom of all people -- and we'll get to that. But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. It turns out we're pretty clever species. This big cortex, or whatever, we're pretty proud of ourselves. But if we want to make something hard, we come up, "I know, I'm going to make a hard substance. I know, I'm going to get vacuums and furnaces and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute, but I got this hard thing. I'm so clever." And you look behind you, and there's destruction all around you. But guess what? You're so clever, but you're not as clever as a clam.

A clam shell's hard. There's no vacuums, there's no big furnaces, there's no poison, there no pollution. It turns out that our other species has figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things that we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well. Well that insight of biomimicry, of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species -- I don't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff. I don't mean it from that way: abusing the little species -- I mean actually respecting them, respecting what they've achieved. That's called biomimicry, and that opens the door to zero waste production, zero pollution production -- that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life, a high standard of living without trashing the planet.

Well that idea of biomimicry, respecting the wisdom of all species, combined with the idea of democracy and social justice, respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people, would give us a different society. We would have a different economy. We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of. That should be the goal. And the way that we get there is to first of all recognize that the idea of disposability, not only hurts the species we've talked about, but it even corrupts our own society.

We're so proud to live here in California. We just had this vote, and everybody's like, "Well, not in our state. I don't know what those other states were doing." (Laughter) Just so proud. And, yeah, I'm proud too. But California, though we lead the world in some of the green stuff, we also, unfortunately, lead the world in some of the gulag stuff. California has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states. We have a moral challenge in this moment. We are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill, but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings, living people. And I would say that we live in a country -- five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners. One out of every four people locked up anywhere in the world is locked up right here in the United States. So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in.

And yet, as a movement that has to broaden its constituency, that has to grow, that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone, one of the challenges to the success of this movement, of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift, is people look at our movement with some suspicion. And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate? A poor person, a low-income person, somebody in "cancer alley", somebody in Watts, somebody in Harlem, somebody on an Indian reservation, might say to themselves, and rightfully so, "How can these people be so passionate about making sure that a plastic bottle has a second chance in life, or an aluminum can has a second chance, and yet, when my child gets in trouble and goes to prison, he doesn't get a second chance?" How can this movement be so passionate about saying we don't have throw-away stuff, no throw-away dead materials, and yet accept throw-away lives and throw-away communities like "cancer alley"? And so we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement. When we take on topics like this, it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow. And we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we've been in.

Most of you are good, soft-hearted people. When you were younger, you cared about the whole world, and at some point somebody said you had to pick an issue, you had to boil your love down to an issue. Can't love the whole world -- you've got to work on trees, or you've got to work on immigration. You've got to shrink it down and be about one issue. And really, they fundamentally told you, "Are you going to hug a tree, or are you going to hug a child? Pick. Are you going to hug a tree, or are going to hug a child? Pick." Well, when you start working on issues like plastic, you realize that the whole thing is connected, and luckily most of us are blessed to have two arms. We can hug both.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Liza Donnelly: Drawing upon humor for change

2011-01-31T21:56:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

(Laughter)

I was afraid of womanhood. Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend. I've learned to be flexible. In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear. Let me explain. Back in the '50s and '60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft. And we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy. Really not quite clear what we were supposed to be.

(Laughter)

There were plenty of role models all around us. We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of, course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be. Now my mother was different. She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together. And she didn't buy me pink outfits. Instead, she knew what I needed, and she bought me a book of cartoons. And I just ate it up. I drew, and I drew, and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family, I could draw, do what I wanted to do, and not have to perform, not have to speak -- I was very shy -- and I could still get approval. I was launched as a cartoonist. Now when we're young, we don't always know -- we know there are rules out there, but we don't always know -- we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is. We're told what shape we're supposed to be in. (Laughter) We're told what to wear -- (Laughter) -- and how to do our hair -- (Laughter) -- and how to behave.

Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture. We're being corrected. And the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition. We pass it down from generation to generation. Not only, we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us. And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing. (Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position.

(Laughter)

Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't -- I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them -- what better way than to change them with humor? Humor relies on the traditions of a society. It takes what we know, and it twists it. It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress, and it makes it unexpected, and that's what elicits a laugh. Now what if you put together women and humor? I think you can get change. Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table.

Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos. I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C. during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations, the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement. And I think I was drawing, trying to figure out what was going on. And then also my family was in chaos. And I drew to try to bring my family together -- (Laughter) -- try to bring my family together with laughter. It didn't work. My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested. But I found my place. I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in.

Now when I was a little older in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning. And I thought, "Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning." And so I did; I became a cartoonist. And then I thought, in my 40s I started thinking, "Well, why don't I do something? I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh?"

Now my perspective is a particularly -- (Laughter) -- my perspective is a particularly American perspective. I can't help it. I live here. Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman. But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course -- that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S. Consequently, we have -- women, because we're on the ground, we know the tradition -- we have amazing antenna.

Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists, which I so enjoy. And it's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth, to get at the issues quickly and succinctly. And not only that, it can get to the viewer through, not only the intellect, but through the heart. My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world -- countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, France -- and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties. And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances. But I feel blessed to be able to work with them.

And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents. And I think, I truly believe, that we change this thing one laugh at a time.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China

2011-01-31T21:52:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you'll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That's just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year.

And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world -- which I think is what China will become -- will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots.

Now I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that, as countries modernize, they also Westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not; it is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment by-and-large is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can't. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like -- just as a beginning.

The first is this, that China is not really a nation state. Okay, it's called itself a nation state for the last hundred years. But everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this. This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring state period -- the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago. And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.

Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China it's sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization state. I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization state, rather than as a nation state. And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It's never been the case.

So this is China, a civilization state, rather than a nation state. And what does it mean? Well I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown, the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire [Roman Empire]. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization state together.

The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets it's hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." 13 years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.

Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not such a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han. Now this is completely different from the other world's most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.

Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.

Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.

And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.

And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe." And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more-or-less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms, many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the the one-child policy.

Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to to understand the difference that is China -- the civilization state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society.

And yet we still insist, by-and-large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong -- our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect -- this is the reason. Unfortunately I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact -- which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West, have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.

I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there, now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning -- the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 -- usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future.

And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe, America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion." Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration. But there's another problem which goes along with this -- that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world -- and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future. I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in it's confidence. Take the 19th century for example. But this, alas, is no longer true.

If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China -- there's old Confucius. This is a railway station the like of which you've never seen before. It doesn't even look like a railway station. This is the new Guangzhou railway station for the high-speed trains. China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together. Or take this: Now this is an idea, but it's an idea to by tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing. Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour. Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States. China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.

Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big picture positive for this world. For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That's what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation. And we will have to learn about these civilizations.

This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. (Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368. I think they're playing golf. Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.

Welcome to the future. Thank you.

(Applause)

Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran

2011-01-31T21:48:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins. And I promise I will come back to those virgins. But in fact, here in the northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "gardens watered by running streams." Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its otherness. The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran, "As toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble."

(Laughter)

Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book -- as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God -- and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad -- were just another author on the best-seller list. Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote -- that is, to misquote. Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the highlighter version, which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes.

So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly -- as properly as I could, that is. My Arabic's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side, verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh century Arabic. Now I did have an advantage. My last book was about the story behind the Shia-Sunni split, and for that I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran -- an informed one, an experienced one even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading some else's holy book. (Laughter) So I read slowly. (Laughter) I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think is what is meant by hubris. (Laughter) Because it turned out to be three months. I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are.

But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran -- that feeling of "I get it now" -- it would slip away overnight. And I'd come back in the morning wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land. And yet the terrain was very familiar. The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. God himself was utterly familar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh -- jealously insisting on no other gods. The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.

Take the Faatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's prayer and the Shema Israel of Islam combined. It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation." But all is not lost in translation.

As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises -- a degree of environmental awareness for instance and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine, the Koran includes women -- talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women -- honorable men and honorable women. Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca where fighting was usually forbidden. And the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. Not, you must kill unbelievers in Mecca, but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over and only if there's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. And even then -- God is merciful, forgiveness is supreme -- and so, essentially, better if you don't. (Laughter) This was perhaps the biggest surprise -- how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible.

"Some of these verses are definite in meaning," it says, "and others are ambiguous. The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. Only God knows the true meaning." The phrase "God is subtle" appears again and again. And indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. Old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here. The word used four times is Houris, rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: Houris. Not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight. (Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying pure beings -- like in angels -- or it may be like the Greek Kouros or Kórē, an eternal youth.

But the truth is nobody really knows, and that's the point. Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise" and that you will be "recreated in a form unknown to you," which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. (Laughter) And that number 72 never appears. There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. Paradise is quite the opposite. It's not virginity, it's fecundity, it's plenty, it's gardens watered by running streams.

Thank you.

(Applause)

President Obama on Tax Cuts and Unemployment Extension on December 06, 2010

2010-12-30T23:34:00.000-08:00

Transcript: The White House

For the past few weeks there’s been a lot of talk around Washington about taxes and there’s been a lot of political positioning between the two parties. But around kitchen tables, Americans are asking just one question: Are we going to allow their taxes to go up on January 1st, or will we meet our responsibilities to resolve our differences and do what’s necessary to speed up the recovery and get people back to work?

Now, there’s no doubt that the differences between the parties are real and they are profound. Ever since I started running for this office I've said that we should only extend the tax cuts for the middle class. These are the Americans who’ve taken the biggest hit not only from this recession but from nearly a decade of costs that have gone up while their paychecks have not. It would be a grave injustice to let taxes increase for these Americans right now. And it would deal a serious blow to our economic recovery.

Now, Republicans have a different view. They believe that we should also make permanent the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. I completely disagree with this. A permanent extension of these tax cuts would cost us $700 billion at a time when we need to start focusing on bringing down our deficit. And economists from all across the political spectrum agree that giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires does very little to actually grow our economy.

This is where the debate has stood for the last couple of weeks. And what is abundantly clear to everyone in this town is that Republicans will block a permanent tax cut for the middle class unless they also get a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, regardless of the cost or impact on the deficit.

We saw that in two different votes in the Senate that were taken this weekend. And without a willingness to give on both sides, there’s no reason to believe that this stalemate won't continue well into next year. This would be a chilling prospect for the American people whose taxes are currently scheduled to go up on January 1st because of arrangements that were made back in 2001 and 2003 under the Bush tax cuts.

I am not willing to let that happen. I know there’s some people in my own party and in the other party who would rather prolong this battle, even if we can't reach a compromise. But I'm not willing to let working families across this country become collateral damage for political warfare here in Washington. And I'm not willing to let our economy slip backwards just as we're pulling ourselves out of this devastating recession.

I'm not willing to see 2 million Americans who stand to lose their unemployment insurance at the end of this month be put in a situation where they might lose their home or their car or suffer some additional economic catastrophe.

So, sympathetic as I am to those who prefer a fight over compromise, as much as the political wisdom may dictate fighting over solving problems, it would be the wrong thing to do. The American people didn’t send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories. They would much rather have the comfort of knowing that when they open their first paycheck on January of 2011, it won’t be smaller than it was before, all because Washington decided they preferred to have a fight and failed to act.

Make no mistake: Allowing taxes to go up on all Americans would have raised taxes by $3,000 for a typical American family. And that could cost our economy well over a million jobs.

At the same time, I’m not about to add $700 billion to our deficit by allowing a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. And I won’t allow any extension of these tax cuts for the wealthy, even a temporary one, without also extending unemployment insurance for Americans who’ve lost their jobs or additional tax cuts for working families and small businesses -- because if Republicans truly believe we shouldn’t raise taxes on anyone while our economy is still recovering from the recession, then surely we shouldn’t cut taxes for wealthy people while letting them rise on parents and students and small businesses.

As a result, we have arrived at a framework for a bipartisan agreement. For the next two years, every American family will keep their tax cuts -- not just the Bush tax cuts, but those that have been put in place over the last couple of years that are helping parents and students and other folks manage their bills.

In exchange for a temporary extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, we will be able to protect key tax cuts for working families -- the Earned Income Tax Credit that helps families climb out of poverty; the Child Tax Credit that makes sure families don’t see their taxes jump up to $1,000 for every child; and the American Opportunity Tax Credit that ensures over 8 million students and their families don’t suddenly see the cost of college shooting up.

These are the tax cuts for some of the folks who’ve been hit hardest by this recession, and it would be simply unacceptable if their taxes went up while everybody else’s stayed the same.

Now, under this agreement, unemployment insurance will also be extended for another 13 months, which will be welcome relief for 2 million Americans who are facing the prospect of having this lifeline yanked away from them right in the middle of the holiday season.

This agreement would also mean a 2 percent employee payroll tax cut for workers next year -- a tax cut that economists across the political spectrum agree is one of the most powerful things we can do to create jobs and boost economic growth.

And we will prevent -- we will provide incentives for businesses to invest and create jobs by allowing them to completely write off their investments next year. This is something identified back in September as a way to help American businesses create jobs. And thanks to this compromise, it’s finally going to get done.

In exchange, the Republicans have asked for more generous treatment of the estate tax than I think is wise or warranted. But we have insisted that that will be temporary.

I have no doubt that everyone will find something in this compromise that they don’t like. In fact, there are things in here that I don’t like -- namely the extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and the wealthiest estates. But these tax cuts will expire in two years. And I’m confident that as we make tough choices about bringing our deficit down, as I engage in a conversation with the American people about the hard choices we’re going to have to make to secure our future and our children’s future and our grandchildren’s future, it will become apparent that we cannot afford to extend those tax cuts any longer.

As for now, I believe this bipartisan plan is the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do for jobs. It’s the right thing to do for the middle class. It is the right thing to do for business. And it’s the right thing to do for our economy. It offers us an opportunity that we need to seize.

It’s not perfect, but this compromise is an essential step on the road to recovery. It will stop middle-class taxes from going up. It will spur our private sector to create millions of new jobs, and add momentum that our economy badly needs.

Building on that momentum is what I’m focused on. It’s what members of Congress should be focused on. And I'm looking forward to working with members of both parties in the coming days to see to it that we get this done before everyone leaves town for the holiday season. We cannot allow this moment to pass.

And let me just end with this. There’s been a lot of debate in Washington about how this would ultimately get resolved. I just want everybody to remember over the course of the coming days, both Democrats and Republicans, that these are not abstract fights for the families that are impacted. Two million people will lose their unemployment insurance at the end of this month if we don't get this resolved. Millions more of Americans will see their taxes go up at a time when they can least afford it. And my singular focus over the next year is going to be on how do we continue the momentum of the recovery, how do we make sure that we grow this economy and we create more jobs.

We cannot play politics at a time when the American people are looking for us to solve problems. And so I look forward to engaging the House and the Senate, members of both parties, as well as the media, in this debate. But I am confident that this needs to get done, and I'm confident ultimately Congress is going to do the right thing.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption

2010-12-22T17:42:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

So today I'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption. I'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you -- in just 15 minutes -- that this isn't a flimsy idea, or a short-term trend, but a powerful cultural and economic force, reinventing, not just what we consume, but how we consume.

Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example. Hands up -- how many of you have books, CD's, DVD's, or videos lying around your house that you probably won't use again, but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away? Can't see all the hands, but it looks like all of you. On our shelves at home, we have a box set of the DVD series "24" -- season six to be precise. I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present. Now my husband, Chris, and I love this show. But let's face it, when you've watched it once -- maybe, or twice -- you don't really want to watch it again, because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists. So there is sits on our shelves obsolete to us, but with immediate latent value to someone else. Now before we go on, I have a confession to make. I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan of "Sex and the City". Now I'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week. So how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of "24" for a wanted copy of "Sex and the City"? Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging called swap trading. Now the easiest analogy for swap trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media. What it does is use the internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person A's haves with person C's wants, whatever they may be.

The other week, I went on one of these sites, appropriately called Swaptree. And there were over 59,300 items that I could instantly swap for my copy of "24". Low and behold, there in Reseda, CA was rondoron who wanted swap his or her "like new" copy of "Sex and the City" for my copy of "24". So in other words, what's happening here is that Swaptree solves my carrying company's sugar rush problem, a problem the economists call "the coincidence of wants" in approximately 60 seconds. What's even more amazing is it will print out a purchase label on the spot, because it knows the weight of the item. Now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree, but that's not my interest, and nor is swap trading per se.

My passion, and what I've spent the last few years dedicated to researching, are the collaborative behaviors and trust mechanics inherent in these systems. When you think about it, it would have seemed like a crazy idea, even a few years ago, that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn't know and without any money changing hands. Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully. And the one percent that receive a negative rating, it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive on time.

So what's happening here? An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play. Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers. We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face-to-face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. So what's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back. We're bartering, trading, swapping, sharing, but they're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms. What I find fascinating is that we've actually wired our world to share, whether that's our neighborhood, our school, our office, or our Facebook network. And that's creating an economy of what's mine is yours. From the mighty eBay, the grandfather of exchange marketplaces, to car sharing companies such as GoGet, where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour, to social lending platforms such as Zopa, that will take anyone in this audience with $100 to lend, and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world, we're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe are more hip than hippie. I call this groundswell collaborative consumption.

Now before I dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption, I'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked, which is where did this idea come from. Now I'd like to say I woke up one morning and said, "I'm going to write about collaborative consumption." But actually it was a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas. Over the next minute, you're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots that went on in my head. The first thing I began to notice: how many big concepts were emerging -- from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs -- around how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose. And linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world -- from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia, and everything in between -- on what the power of numbers could achieve.

Now, you know when you learn a new word, and then you start to see that word everywhere? That's what happened to me when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators, to highly-enabled collaborators. What's happening is the Internet is removing the middleman, so that anyone from a T-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer. And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates. I mean, it's amazing to think that, in every single minute of this speech, 25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded. Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they're actually tapping in to our primate instincts. I mean, we're monkeys, and we're born and bred to share and cooperate. And were doing so for thousands of years, whether it's when we hunted in packs, or farmed in cooperatives, before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms. But things are changing, and one of the reasons why are the digital natives, or gen-Y. They're growing up sharing -- files, video games, knowledge; it's second nature to them. So we, the millennials -- I am just a millennial -- are like foot soldiers, moving us from a culture or me, to a culture of we.

The reason why it's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration. We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time, from a small device in our hands. All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008, when, of course, the great financial crash happened. Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists, and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall when mother nature and the market both said, "No more." Now we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption is a Ponzi scheme; it's a house of cards. Yet, it's hard for us to individually know what to do.

So all of this is a lot of Twittering, right? Well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head, until actually I realized it was happening because of four key drivers. One, a renewed belief in the importance of community, and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means. A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we behave. Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns. And four, a global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors. These four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift -- away from the 20th century, defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, defined by collaborative consumption. I generally believe we're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors -- through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online -- are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives. From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food, we are consuming and collaborating once again.

So my co-author, Roo Rogers, and I have actually gathered thousands of examples from all around the world of collaborative consumption. And although they vary enormously in scale maturity and purpose, when we dived into them, we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems. The first is redistribution markets. Redistribution markets -- just like Swaptree -- is when you take a used, or pre-owned, item and move it from where it's not needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is. They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' -- reduce, reuse, recycle, repair and redistribute -- because they stretch the life-cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste.

The second is collaborative lifestyles. This is the sharing and resources of things like money, skills and time. I bet, in a couple of years, that phrases like coworking and couch surfing and time banks are going to become a part of everyday vernacular. One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called Landshare. It's a scheme in the U.K. that matches Mr. Jones, with some spare space in his back garden, with Mrs. Smith, a would-be grower. Together they grow their own food. It's one of those ideas that's so simple, yet brilliant, you wonder why it's never been done before.

Now the third system is product service systems. This is where you pay for the benefit of the product -- what it does for you -- without needing to own the product outright. This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high idling capacity. And that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to -- How many of you have a power drill? Own a power drill? Right. That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. (Laughter) It's kind of ridiculous, right? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill. (Laughter) (Applause) So why don't you rent the drill, or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it? These three systems are coming together, allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles, or their cherished personal freedoms. I'm not asking people to share nicely in the sandpit.

So I want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors. The average car costs $8,000 a year to run. Yet, that car sits idle for 23 hours a day. So when you consider these two facts, it starts to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright. So this is where car sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in. In 2009, Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities -- and they're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies -- and got them to surrender their keys for a month. Instead, these people had to walk, bike, take the train, or other forms of public transport. They could only use their Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary. The results of this challenge after just one month we staggering. It's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise. But my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back. In other words, the car addicts had lost their urge to own.

Now products service systems have been around for years. Just think of libraries and laundrettes. But I think they're entering a new age, because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun. There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times that said, "Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the 8-track, what solar power is to the coal mine." I believe also, our generation, our relationship to satisfying what we want is far less tangible than any other previous generation. I don't want the DVD, I want the movie is carries. I don't want a clunky answering machine, I want the message it saves. I don't want a CD, I want the music it plays. In other words, I don't want stuff, I want the needs or experiences it fulfills. This is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions -- or as Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, puts it, "Where access is better than ownership."

Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud, a blurry line is appearing between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours. I want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening. This represents and eight-year time span. We've gone from traditional car ownership to car sharing companies -- such as Zipcar and GoGet -- to ride sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry, which is peer-to-peer car rental, where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor. Now all of these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation.

Now in the old consumer system, our reputation didn't matter so much, because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review. But now with the Web, we leave a trail. With every spammer we flag, with every idea we post, comment we share, we're actually signaling how well we collaborate, and whether we can or can't be trusted. Let's go back to my first example, Swaptree. I can see that rondoron has completed 553 trades with a hundred percent success rate. In other words, I can trust him or her. Now mark my words, it's only a matter of time before we're going to be able to perform a Google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital. And this reputation capital will determine our access to collaborative consumption. It's a new social currency, so to speak, that could become as powerful as our credit rating.

Now as a closing thought, I believe we're actually in a period where we're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste, and we're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity. I believe it will be referred to as a revolution, so to speak -- when society, faced with great challenges, made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good. I'm on a mission to make sharing cool. I'm on a mission to make sharing hip. Because I really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business, help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Tony Porter: A call to men

2010-12-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating -- no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear -- that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior, women are inferior; that men are strong, women are weak; that women are of less value -- property of men -- and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted. And we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.

This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. They're 11 and 12. Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. There was a period of time when my wife, her name is Tammie, and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. (Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. It didn't matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. Daddy's got you. That's all that's important.

Now Kendall on the other hand -- and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her -- he came to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "Why are you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what's wrong. Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you. Why are you crying?" And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, "Just go in your room. Just go on, go on in your room. Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a --" What? (Audience: Man.) "like a man." And he's five years old. And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, "My God, what's wrong with me? What am I doing? Why would I this?" And I think back. I think back to my father.

There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. We lived in New York City, as I said. We lived in the Bronx at the time. And the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. And the limousine empties out. My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine. And no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. He didn't want cry in front of me. But he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground -- something I just can't even imagine. The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me. And at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying.

I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12 year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad, I'd be mad, I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me -- the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?"

(Applause)

It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner-city. At this time we're living in the Bronx. And in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16 year-old boy doing with these 12 year-old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, "He was fine." He was having sex. We all looked up to him.

So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around, doing something -- I don't know what. He looks out his window, he calls me upstairs, he said, "Hey Anthony." They called my Anthony growing up as a kid. "Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, do you want some meant one of two things, sex or drugs -- and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, card, man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. (Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.

Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short. I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice's-worth of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.

So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything. And I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room. And lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it. And I say to them, "It was good." And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.

Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear getting outside the man box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.

See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.

So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.

I remember asking a nine year-old boy. I asked a nine year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?" He said to me, "I would be free."

Thank you folks.

(Applause)

Halla Tomasdottir: A feminine response to Iceland's financial crash

2010-12-10T14:50:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

It sure used to be a lot easier to be from Iceland, because, until a couple of years ago, people knew hardly anything about us, and I could basically come out here and say only good things about us. But in the last couple of years we've become infamous for a couple of things. First, of course, the economic meltdown. It actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on eBay. (Laughter) 99 pence was the starting price and no reserve. Then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends, including President Obama. By the way, the pronunciation is "Eyjafjallajokull." None of your media got it right.

(Laughter)

But I'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly; I'm here to tell you the story of Audur Capital, which is a financial firm founded by me and Kristin -- who you see in the picture -- in the spring of 2007, just over a year before the economic collapse hit. Why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm? Well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone. And I'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country. But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector. And that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems.

(Applause)

So we decided, a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this wasn't sustainable, to found a financial services firm based on our values. And we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance. Raised quite a few eyebrows in Iceland. We weren't known as the typical women women in Iceland up until then. So it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then. And we got a great group of people to join us -- principled people with great skills, and investors with a vision and values to match ours. And together we got through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients. And although I want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that -- and also there's a factor of luck and timing -- we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values.

So let me share with you our values. We believe in risk awareness. What does that mean? We believe that you should always understand the risks that you're taking, and we will not invest in things we don't understand. Not a complicated thing. But in 2007, it was at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures, it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market. We also believe in straight talking, telling it as it is, using simple language that people understand, telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides, and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter, like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the Icelandic financial sector that already we already had months before the collapse hit us. And, although we do work in the financial sector, where Excel is king, we believe in emotional capital. And we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence. It is actually people that make money and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets.

(Applause)

Last, but not least, we believe in profit with principles; we care how we make our profit. So while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers, we are willing to do it with a long-term view. And we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter. So we like to see profits, plus positive social and environmental benefits when we invest.

But it wasn't just about the values, although we are convinced that they matter. It was also about a business opportunity. It's the female trend, and it's the sustainability trend, that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come. The whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men, it is actually about women being different from men, bringing different values and different ways to the table. So what do you get? You get better decision-making. And you get less herd behavior. And both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results.

But one has to wonder, now that we've had this financial sector collapse upon us in Iceland -- and by the way, Europe looks pretty bad right now. And many would say that you in America are heading for some more trouble as well. Now that we've had all that happen, and we have all this data out there telling us that it's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables, will we see business and finance change? Will government change?

Well I'll give you my straight talk about this. I have days that I believe, but I have days that I'm full of doubt. Have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us? (Applause) Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity -- to do the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. So I guess the world is insane, because I see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again, hoping that this time it's not going to collapse upon us. I want to see more revolutionary thinking. And I remain hopeful. Like TED, I believe in people. And I know that consumers are becoming more conscious, and they are going to start voting with their wallets, and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside, if they don't do it from the inside.

But I'm more of the revolutionary, and I should be; I'm from Iceland. We have a long history of strong, courageous, independent women, ever since the viking age. And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society. I was seven -- it happened to be my mother's birthday -- October 24, 1975. Women in Iceland took the day off. From work or from home, they took the day off, and nothing worked in Iceland. (Laughter) They marched into the center of Reykjavik, and they put women's issues onto the agenda. And some say this was the start of a global movement. For me it was the start of a long journey, but I decided that day to matter. Five years later, Iceland Elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president -- first female to become head of state, single mom, a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breast removed. And at one of the campaign sessions, one of her male contenders alluded to the fact that she couldn't become president; she was a woman, and even half a woman. That night she won the election, because she came back -- not just because of his crappy behavior -- but she came back and said, "Well, I'm actually not going to breastfeed the Icelandic nation, I'm going to lead it."

(Applause)

So I've had incredibly many women role-models that have influences who I am and where I am today. But in spite of that, I went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman. Started in corporate America, and I was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual, that women and men would have just the same opportunities. But I've come to conclude lately that it isn't like that. We are not the same. And it's great -- because of our differences, we create and sustain life. So we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge.

The final thought I want to leave with you is that I'm fed up with this tyranny of either/or choices in life -- either it's men, or it's women. We need to start embracing the beauty of balance. So let's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there, and let's start thinking about doing good business. That's how we change the world. That's the only sustainable future.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Marcel Dicke: Why not eat insects?

2010-12-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

Okay, I'm going to show you again something about our diets. And I would like to know what the audience is. And so who of you ever ate insects? That's quite a lot. (Laughter) But still, you're not representing the overall population of the Earth. (Laughter) Because there's 80 percent out there that really eats insects. But this is quite good.

Why not eat insects? Well first, what are insects? Insects are animals that walk around on six legs. And here you see just a selection. There's six million species of insects on this planet, six million species. There's a few hundreds of mammals -- six million species of insects. In fact, if we count all the individual organisms, we would come at much larger numbers. In fact, of all animals on Earth, of all animal species, 80 percent walks on six legs. But if we would count all the individuals, and take an average weight of them, it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kg. for each of you and me on Earth. That means that in terms of biomass insects are more abundant than we are. And we're not on a planet of men, but we're on a planet of insects. Insects are not only there in nature, but they also are involved in our economy, usually without us knowing.

There was an estimation, a conservative estimation, a couple of years ago that the U.S. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year. It's a number -- very large -- a contribution to the economy of the United States for free. And so I looked up what the economy was paying for the war in Iraq in the same year. It was 80 billion U.S. dollars. Well we know that that was not a cheap war. So insects, just for free, contribute to the economy of the United States with about the same order of magnitude just for free, without everyone knowing. And not only in the States, but in any country, in any economy.

What do they do? They remove dung, they pollinate our crops. A third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants. They control pests. And they're food for animals. They're at the start of food chains. Small animals eat insects. Even larger animals eat insects. But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals, still larger animals. And at the end of the food chain, we are eating them as well. There's quite a lot of people that are eating insects. And here you see me in a small, provincial town in China, Lijiang -- about two million inhabitants. If you go out for dinner, like in a fish restaurant, where you can select which fish you want to eat, you can select which insects you would like to eat. And they prepare it in a wonderful way. And here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars, locusts, bee, [unclear] delicacies. And you can eat something new everyday. There's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe. That's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we're eating, like a cow or a pig or a sheep. More than 1,000 species -- an enormous variety. And now you may think, okay, in this provincial town in China they're doing that, but not us.

Well we've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally. But I can tell you that everyone of you is eating insects, without any exception. You're eating at least 500 grams per year. What are you eating? Tomato soup, peanut butter, chocolate, noodles -- any processed food that you're eating contains insects, because insects are here all around us, and when they're out there in nature they're also in our crops. Some fruits get some insect damage. Those are the fruits, if they're tomato, that go to the tomato soup. If they don't have any damage, they go to the grocery. And that's your view of a tomato. But there's tomatoes that end up in a soup. And as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency, there can be all kinds of things in there, no problem. In fact, why would we put these balls in the soup, there's meat in there anyway? (Laughter) In fact, all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of. So anything is a protein source already.

Now you may say, "Okay, so we're eating 500 grams just by accident." We're even doing this on purpose in a lot of food items that we have. I have only two items here on the slide -- pink cookies or surimi sticks or, if you like, Compari. A lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye. The surimi sticks is crab meat, or is being sold as crab meat, is white fish that's being dyed with coshineal. Coshineal is a product of an insect that lives off the cacti. It's being produced in large amounts, 150 to 180 metric tons per year, in the Canary Islands in Peru, and it's big business. One gram of coshineal costs about 30 euros. One gram of gold is 30 euros. So it's a very precious thing that we're using to dye our foods.

Now the situation in the world is going to change, for you and me, for everyone on this Earth. The human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially. Where at the moment we have something between six and seven billion people, it will grow to about nine billion in 2050. That means that we have a lot more mouths to feed. And this is something that worries more and more people. There was an FAO conference last October that was completely devoted to this. How are we going to feed this world? And if you look at the figures up there, it says that we have a third more mouths to feed, but we need agricultural production increase of 70 percent. And that's especially because this world population in increasing, and it's increasing, not only in numbers, but we're also getting wealthier, and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat. And meat, in fact, is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production.

Our diet consists for some part of animal proteins, and at the moment, most of us here get it from livestock, from fish, from game. And we eat quite a lot of it. In the Developed World it's on average 80 kg. per person per year, which goes up to 120 in the United States and a bit lower in some other countries, but on average 80 kg. per person per year. In the Developing World it's much lower. It's 25 kg. per person per year. But it's increasing enormously. In China in the last 20 years, it increased from 20 to 50, and it's still increasing. So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average, and a third of the world population is living in China and in India, we're having an enormous demand on meat. And of course, we are not there to say, it's only for us, it's not for them. They have the same share that we have.

Now to start with, I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world. We could do with much, much less -- and I know, I've been a vegetarian for a long time. And you can easily do without anything. You'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway. But then there's a lot of problems that come with meat production, and we're being faced with that more and more often. The first problem that we're facing is human health. Pigs are quite like us. They're even models in medicine. And we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human. That means that pigs also share diseases with us. And a pig disease, a pig virus, and a human virus can both proliferate. And because of their kind of reproduction, they can combine and produce a new virus. This has happened in The Netherlands in the 1990's during the classical swine fever outbreak. You get a new disease that can be deadly. We eat insects -- they're so distantly related from us, but this doesn't happen. So that's one point for insects.

(Laughter)

And there's the conversion factor. You take 10 kg. of feed, you can get one kg. of beef, but you can get nine kg. of locust meat. So if you would be an entrepreneur, what would you do? With 10 kg. of input, you can get either one or nine kg. of output. So far we're taking the one, or up to five kg. of output. We're not taking the bonus yet. We're not taking the nine kg. of output yet. So that's two points for insects.

(Laughter)

And there's the environment. If we take 10 kg. of food -- (Laughter) and it results in one kilogram of beef, the other nine kg. are waste, and a lot of that is manure. If you produce insects, you have less manure per kg. of meat that you produce. So less waste. Furthermore, per kg. of manure, you have much, much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure. So you have less waste, and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung. So that's three points for insects.

(Laughter)

Now there's a big "if" of course, and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality. Well there have been all kinds of analysese and in terms of protein, or fat, or vitamins, it's very good. In fact, it's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment. And even in terms of calories, it is very good. One kg. of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs, or six Big Macs. So that's four points for insects.

(Laughter)

I can go on, and I could make many more points for insects, but time doesn't allow this. So the question is, why not eat insects? I gave you at least four arguments in favor. We'll have to. Even if you don't like it, you'll have to get used to this. Because at the moment, 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock. That's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding, but it's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported. We can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests, but there's a limitation very soon. And if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent, we're not going to make it that way. We could much better from meat, from beef, to insects. And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects, so we are just a minority -- in a country like the U.K., the USA, The Netherlands, anywhere. On the left-hand side, you see a market in Laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night. On the right-hand side you see a grasshopper. So people there are eating them, not because they're hungry, but because they think it's a delicacy. It's just very good food. You can vary enormously. It has many benefits.

In fact, we have delicacy that's very much like this grasshopper: shrimps, a delicacy being sold at a high price. Who wouldn't like to eat a shrimp? There are a few people who don't like shrimp, but shrimp, or crabs, or crayfish, are very closely related. They are delicacies. In fact, a locust is a shrimp of the land, and it would make very good into our diet. So why are we not eating insects yet? Well that's just a matter of mindset. We're not used to it, and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us. That's why we're changing the perception of insects. And I'm working very hard with my colleague, Arnold van Huis, in telling people what insects are, what magnificent things they are, what magnificent jobs they do in nature. And in fact, without insects, we would not be here in this room. Because if the insects die out, we will soon die out as well. If we die out, the insects will continue very happily.

(Laughter)

So we have to get used to the idea of eating insects. And someone might think, well they're not yet available. Well they are. There are entrepreneurs in The Netherlands that produce them, and one of them is here in the audience, [unclear], who's in the picture. I predict that later this year, you'll get them in the supermarkets -- not visible, but as animal protein in the food. And maybe by 2020, you'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you're going to eat. And they're being made in the most wonderful ways. A Dutch chocolate maker. (Music) (Applause) So there's even a lot of design to it.

(Laughter)

Well in the Netherlands, we have an innovative minister of agriculture, and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry. And when she got all the ministers of agriculture of the E.U. over to The Hague recently, she went to a high-class restaurant, and they ate insects all together. It's not something that is a hobby of mine. It's really taken off the ground. So why not eat insects? You should try it yourself. A couple of years ago, we had 1,750 people all together in a square in Wageningen town, and they ate insects at the same moment, and this was still big, big news. I think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects, because it's just a normal way of doing.

So you can try it yourself today, and I would say enjoy. And I'm going to show to Bruno some first tries, and he can have the first bite.

(Applause)

Bruno Giussani: Look at them first. Look at them first.

Marcel Dicke: It's all protein.

BG: That's exactly the same [one]you saw in the video actually. And it looks delicious. They just make it [with] nuts or something.

MD: Thank you.

(Applause)

Birke Baehr: What's wrong with our food system

2010-12-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system. First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids like me to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet. Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. I must admit, I used to be one of them. I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day.

What I discovered was this is not true. I began to look into this stuff on the internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. First there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature -- like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato -- yuck. Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. (Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grow. The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals. And people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990's. And most folks don't even know they exist. Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. Yet almost all the corn we eat is altered genetically in some way. And let me tell you, corn is in everything. And don't even get me started on the confined animal feeding operations. called CAFOS.

(Laughter)

Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow. They do this because they've stripped the soil of all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too. Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets.

So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? This is what I found out. I discovered that there's a movement for a better way. Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. (Applause) Thank you. And that way I can have a greater impact on the world. This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system. Since I'm home schooled, I went to go hear him speak one day. This man, this lunatic farmer, doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds. And so for that, he's called crazy by the system.

I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we've known all our lives. Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really? With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital. (Applause) Now I know definitely what one I would choose. I want you to know that there are farms out there -- like Bill Keener in Sequachie Cove Farm in Tennessee -- whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from. I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community, popping up. I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. I try to share this everywhere I go.

Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six year-old cousin cereal. He asked if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugar-coated flakes -- you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front. My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal, because, Birke said, he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time.

So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food. Thank you.

(Applause)

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers

2010-12-10T14:42:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

We've got a real problem with math education right now. Basically, no one's very happy. Those learning it think it's disconnected, uninteresting and hard. Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough. Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it. And teachers are also frustrated. Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history. So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world, than we ever have had.

So what's the problem, why has this chasm opened up, and what can we do to fix it? Well actually, I think the answer is staring us right in the face. Use computers. I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work. So to explain that, let me first talk a little bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education. See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians. It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people -- modeling and simulation. It's actually very popular. But in education it looks very different -- dumbed-down problems, lots of calculating -- mostly by hand. Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world, except if you're learning it. And another thing about math: math sometimes looks like math -- like in this example here -- and sometimes it doesn't -- like "Am I drunk?" And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world. You wouldn't have expected that a few years back. But now you can find out all about -- unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but -- all about what happens.

So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math? What's the point of teaching people math? And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general? Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject? Well I think there are about three reasons: technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies, what I call everyday living. To function in the world today, you've got to be pretty quantitative, much more so than a few years ago. Figure out your mortgages, being skeptical of government statistics, those kinds of things. And thirdly, what I would call something like logical mind training, logical thinking. Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically; it's part of human society. It's very important to learn that. Math is a great way to do that.

So let's ask another question. What is math? What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math? Well I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question. What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here? And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math. People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others. So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem. That's stage two. Once you've done that, then there's the computation step. Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form. And of course, math is very powerful at doing that. And then finally, turn it back to the real world. Did it answer the question? And also verify it -- crucial step. Now here's the crazy thing right now. In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand. Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four -- conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that.

See, crucial point here: math is not equal to calculating. Math is a much broader subject than calculating. Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years. There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand. But in the last few decades that has totally changed. We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers. Calculating was typically the limiting step, and not often it isn't. So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating. But that math liberation didn't get into education yet. See, I think of calculating, in a sense, as the machinery of math. It's the chore. It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. And automation allows us to have that machinery. Computers allow us to do that. And this is not a small problem by any means. I estimated that, just today across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. That's an amazing amount of human endeavor. So we better be damn sure -- and by the way, they didn't even have fun doing it, most of them. So we better be damn sure that we know why we're doing that and it has a real purpose.

I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculation where it really makes sense to teach people that. And I think there are some cases. For example: mental arithmetic. I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. People say, is such and such true, and I'll say, hmm, not sure. I'll think about it roughly. It's still quicker to do that and more practical. So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand. And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number. One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates. See, thing we're doing right now, is we're forcing people to learn mathematics. It's a major subject. I'm not for one minute suggesting that, if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre -- they should do that. That's absolutely the right thing, for people to follow their self-interest. I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek. I don't think it's warranted. So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that.

So what are the issues people bring up with this? Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first. You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject. So my usual question is, what do you mean by basics? Basics of what? Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it, or design it for that matter? Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill? I don't think so. I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done. And automation allows you to make that separation. A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things. But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it. So automation allows this separation and also allows -- in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths -- a democratized way of doing that. It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that.

So there's another thing that comes up with basics. People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics. My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this. She enjoys making what she calls paper laptops. (Laughter) So I asked her one day, "You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these. Why do you think that was?" And after a second or two carefully reflecting, she said, "No paper?" (laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool.

So another one that comes up is "computers dumb math down." That somehow, if you use a computer, it's all mindless button pushing, but if you do it by hand, it's all intellectual. This one kind of annoys me, I must say. Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is really more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get? I don't think so. And what's worse, what they're learning there isn't even practically useful anymore. Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore. When they're out of education, they do it on a computer. Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual. Now of course, like any great tool they can be used completely mindlessly, like turning everything into a multimedia show, like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand, where the computer was the teacher -- show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand. This is just nuts. Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem hand that the computer should be doing anyway? All backwards.

Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate. See normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations. But when you're using a computer, you can just substitute. Make it a quartic equation; make it kind of harder, calculating-wise. Same principles applied -- calculations, harder. And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this. They're got hair all over them. They're not just simple, dumbed-down things that we see in school math. And think of the outside world. Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually got reduced by using computers? I don't think so; quite the opposite. So the problem we've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down, but that we have dumbed-down problems right now. Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding. So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer -- you can understand how the basics of the system work better. I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important. But there's a a fantastic way to do that in the modern world. It's called programming.

Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand. If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it. So programming is the way I think we should be doing that. So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously. I can't think of any other subject where that's recently been possible. It's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual. But I think we can do both at the same time here. And we open up so many more possibilities. You can do so many more problems. What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before. And experience of harder problems -- being able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. We want people who can feel the math instinctively. That's what computers allow us to do.

Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum. Traditionally it's been by how difficult it is to calculate, but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts, however hard the calculating. So calculus has traditionally been taught very late. Why is this? Well, it's damn hard doing the calculations, that's the problem. But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group. This was an example I built for my daughter. And very, very simple. We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number. And of course, it turns into a circle. And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration. You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme -- and very small sides and a very large number of sides. Very simple example. That's a view of the world that we don't usually give people for many, many years after this. And yet, that's a really important practical view of the world. So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams. In the end, if we test everyone by hand in exams, it's kind of hard to get a curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters.

And one of the reasons it's so important -- so it's very important to get computers in exams. And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? -- real questions that people have in their everyday lives. And you see, this isn't some dumbed-down model here. This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens How many years of protection do I need? What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth? Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding.

So I believe critical reform we have to do in computer-based math. We have to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics. This isn't some optional extra. And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook. In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the knowledge economy to what we might call a computational knowledge economy, where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is. We can engage so many more students with this, and they can have a better time doing it. And let's understand, this is not an incremental sort of change. We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real world math. And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all -- bigger disaster. No, what I'm suggesting is that we should leap off, we should increase our velocity so it's high, and we should leap off one side and go the other -- of course, having calculated our differential equation very carefully.

(Laughter)

So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future. Let's go for it. And while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here.

Thanks.

(Applause)

Auret van Heerden: Making global labor fair

2010-11-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

This cellphone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the Eastern Congo. It's mined by armed gangs using child slaves, what the U.N. Security Council calls "blood minerals," then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China. That factory -- over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year. One man died after working a 36-hour shift. We all love chocolate. We buy it for our kids. 80 percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children. Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves. Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations. Heparin -- blood thinner, a pharmaceutical product -- starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China, because the active ingredient comes from pigs' intestines. Your diamond: you've all heard, probably seen the movie "Blood Diamond". This is a mine in Zimbabwe right now. Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth. Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton. It's forced child labor on an institutional scale. And all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in Manila.

These places, these origins, represent governance gaps. That's the politest description I have for them. These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin -- the global supply chains, which bring us our favorite brand name products. Some these governance gaps are run by rogue states. Some of them are not states anymore at all; they're failed states. Some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment, promote trade. Either way, they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma. I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a Human Rights abuse in a global supply chain. But right now, most of the companies involved in these supply chains don't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future, nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product.

Now I didn't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain. We need a reality check. We need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have. This is an independent republic, probably a failed state. It's definitely not a democratic state. And right now, that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption. Now that's not a new story. You've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world, even in developed countries. You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop.

But take the example of heparin. It's a pharmaceutical product. You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital, probably squeaky clean. The problem is is that the active ingredient in there -- as I mentioned earlier -- comes from pigs. The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs. And when their factory in China -- which probably is pretty clean -- is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs, where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient. So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal, which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain. Worse, some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests. This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin -- the real ingredient -- cost $900 a pound. A no-brainer. The problem was that it killed more people.

And so you're asking yourself, "How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allow this to happen? How did the Chinese state agency for food and drugs allow this to happen?" And the answer is quite simple: the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities, not pharmaceutical facilities, so they don't audit them. And the U.S. FDA has a jurisdictional problem. This is offshore. They actually do conduct a few investigations overseas -- about a dozen a year -- maybe 20 in a good year. There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone. In fact, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore, particularly China and India. And we don't have a governance system, we don't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe. We don't have a system to ensure that Human Rights, basic dignity are ensured.

So at a national level -- and we work in about 60 different countries -- at a national level we've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil. And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it's supranational. So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball, at a national level have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level. And you can just look at the headlines. Take Copenhagen last year -- complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge. Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago -- stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago. You can take any one of the major global challenges we've discussed this week and ask yourself, where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions, responses, to those international problems? And the simple answer is they can't; they're national. Their voters are local. They have parochial interests. They can't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good.

So if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level -- in this case, in the global supply chain -- we have to come up with a different mechanism. We need a different machine. Fortunately, we have some examples. In the 1990's, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. -- child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses -- and eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House -- invited industry, Human Rights NGO's, trade unions, the Department of Labor -- got them all in a room and said, "Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom. I don't know how to prevent that, but I'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response." So they formed a White House task force, and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain. Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility. They don't own those facilities. They don't employ those workers. They're not legally liable. Everybody else at the table said, "Folks, that doesn't cut it. you have a custodial duty, a duty of care, to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it, without fear of our safety, or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product." So they agreed, "Okay. What we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct. We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control. We'll make it part of the contract." And that was a stroke of absolute genius, because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract, private power, to deliver public goods.

And let's face it, the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law, the local environmental regulations, the local Human Rights standards. Those factories will probably never see an inspector. If the inspector did come along, it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe. Even if they did their jobs, and they cited those facilities for their violations, the fine would be derisory. But you lose that contract for a major brand name, that's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt. That makes a difference. So what we've been able to do, is we've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain, that of the multinational company, and get them to do the right thing, get them to use that power for good, to deliver the key public goods.

Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies. They weren't set up to do this; they're set up to make money. But they are extremely efficient organizations. They have resources, and if we can add the will, the commitment, they know how to deliver that product. Now, getting there is not easy. Those supply chains I put up on the screen earlier, they're not there. You need a safe space. You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions. We can do it; the technical solutions are there. The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGO's, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies. If we can put those two together in a safe space, get them to work together, we can deliver public goods right now, or in extremely short supply.

This is a radical proposition, and it's crazy to think that if you're 15 year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka -- 22, 23, 24 dollars a month -- your best chance enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract. It's crazy; multinationals are protecting Human Rights. I know there's going to be disbelief. You'll say, "How can we trust them?" Well, we don't. It's the old arms control phrase: "Trust, but verify." So we audit. We take their supply chain, we take all the factory names, we do a random sample, we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities, and then we publish the results. Transparency is absolutely critical to this. You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work. So what we're doing is, we're not only enlisting the multinationals, we're giving them the tools to deliver this public good -- respect for human rights -- and we're checking. You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me. Go to the website. Look at the audit results. Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way? Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics? That's the way the system works.

I hate the idea that governments are not protecting Human Rights around the world. I hate the idea that governments have dropped this ball. And I can't get used to the idea that somehow we can't get them to do their jobs. I've been at this for 30 years, and in that time I've seen the ability, the commitment, the will of government to do this decline, and I don't see them making a comeback right now. So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure. we're now thinking that, in fact, this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges. Call it network governance, call it what you will, the private actors, companies and NGO's, are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face. Just look at pandemics -- swine flu, bird flu, H1N1. Look at the health systems in so many countries. Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic? No. Could the private sector and NGO's get together and marshal a response? Absolutely. What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action. That's what we're trying to provide.

I know as well that this often seems like overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume. "You want me to deliver Human Rights throughout my global supply chain. There are thousands of suppliers in there. It seems too daunting, too dangerous, for any company to take on. But there are companies. We have 4,000 companies who are members. Some of them are very, very large companies. The sporting goods industry in particular stepped up to the plate and have done it. The example, the role model, is there. And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address -- child labor in cottonseed farms in India -- this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India. It seems overwhelming. The numbers just make you want to zone out. But we break it down to some basic realities.

And Human Rights comes down to a very simple proposition: can I give this person their dignity back? Poor people, people whose Human Rights have been violated -- the crux of that is the loss of dignity, the lack of dignity. It starts with just giving people back their dignity. I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi, one of the flashiest, brightest new cities popping up in India right now, and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road. And I asked them what message they would like me to take the brands. They didn't say money; they said, "The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist. Please ask them to treat us like human beings." That's my simple understanding of Human Rights. That's my simple proposition to you, my simple plea to every decision maker in this room, everybody out there. We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped. If we don't do it, we're abandoning hope, we're abandoning our essential humanity, and I know that's not a place we want to be, and we don't have to be there. So I appeal to you, join us, come into that safe space, and let's start to make this happen.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Emily Pilloton: Teaching design for change

2010-11-16T08:15:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

So this is a story of a place that I now call home. It's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both. So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA, to give you an idea of the where. So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state. It's about two hours east driving time from Raleigh. And it's very flat. It's very swampy. It's mostly farmland. The entire county is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed. So there's only 27 people per square mile, which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer.

Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America. We've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders. We know the symptoms. It's the hollowing out of small towns. It's downtowns becoming ghost towns -- the brain drain, where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back. It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban. And Bertie County is no exception to this. Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with, like many communities similar to it, is that there's no shared, collective investment in the future of rural communities. Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities, and yet 20 percent of our population lives there.

So Bertie County is not only very rural, it's incredibly poor. It is the poorest county in the state. It has one in three of its children living in poverty. And it's what is referred to as a rural ghetto. The economy is mostly agricultural. The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco, and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut. The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant. The County seat in Windsor. This is like the Times Square of Windsor that your looking at right now. It's home to only 2,000 people, and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years. There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use. You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand -- Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite. But in the whole county there is no coffee shop, there's no internet cafe, there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore. There isn't even a Walmart.

Racially, the county is about 60 percent African American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy. So the public school students are about 86 percent African American. And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class, and you can see the difference is pretty stark. So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling, would be a huge understatement. There's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from. And only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher. So there isn't a big legacy in the pride of education. In fact, two years ago, only 27 percent of all the third through eighth graders were passing the state standard in both English and math.

So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place, but I promise there is good news. The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now, is this man. This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z. He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system. And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina and then in Denver, Colorado. He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late 80's in the U.S. And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary, and he is the reason that I now live and work there. So in February of 2009, Dr. Zullinger invited us, Project H Design -- which is a non-profit design firm that I founded -- to come come to Bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district. And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process -- one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital. Specifically, we use these six design directives, probably the most important being number two: we design with, not for -- in that, when we're doing humanitarian-focused design, it's not about designing for clients anymore; it's about designing with people, and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within.

So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco. And so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County. And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder. So fast-forward to today, and we now live there. I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo, because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits. But this is our front porch. We live there. We now call this place home. Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place. We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County, that, as designers and builders, you can't do everywhere. There's space to experiment and to weld and to test things. We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger. There's a nobility of real, hands on, dirt under your fingernails work.

But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there, there is a huge need. There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County. There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county. And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the -- to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit. The initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger that was why we were there. But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County as a community was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking. So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education, but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development.

So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education. And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County, but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond. So the first of the three is design for education. This is the most kind of direct, obvious, intersection of the two things. It's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students. This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days. And so this played out for us in a couple different ways. The first was a series of renovations of computer labs. So traditionally, the computer labs, particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County, where they have to benchmark test every other week, the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility. You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave. So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology, to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging, more accessible. And also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction. So this is the lab at the high school. And the principal there is in love with this room. Every time he has visitors, it's the first place that he takes them.

And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape. It allows elementary level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid. So this game that the kids are playing here -- in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me. And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams, one team on each side of the playground, and the teacher will take piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires. And then she'll call out a math problem -- so let's say four times four -- and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it. So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins. And the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing. Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores, a greater comfort level with the material, especially with the boys, that in going outside and playing, they aren't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem -- and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material. So with design for education, I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers, so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them. So this is Mr. Perry. He's the assistant superintendent. He came out for one of our teacher training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself.

(Laughter)

So the second approach is redesigning education itself. This is the most complex. It's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom. So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change, which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities. So for us, this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie. There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county. And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system. Right now I should say, there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home internet connection. And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings, or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint, which I find myself squatting outside of a lot. Aside from, you know, getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place, it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community. It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community's development. So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer, and we're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day.

And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is design as education. So design as education means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning -- not like let's learn physics by building a rocket -- but actually learning design thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose. It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation. And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by. It's hands-on, it's in-your-face, it requires an active engagement, and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways. So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class -- wood and metal shop class in particular -- historically, has been something intended for kids who aren't going to go to college. It's a vocational training path. It's working-class it's blue-collar. The projects are things like, let's make a birdhouse for your mom for Christmas. And in recent decades, a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely.

So we thought, what if you could bring back shop class, but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed, and to infuse shop class with more critical and creative design thinking studio process. So we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with Dr. Zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class. And so this starts in four weeks, at the end of the summer. And my partner and I, Matthew and I, just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it. And this is what it looks like.

So over the course of two semesters, the Fall and the Spring, the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 sq. ft. studio/shop space. And during that time, they're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need finding, coming back into the studio, doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work, and then moving into the shop and actually testing them, building them, prototyping them, figuring out if they are going to work and refining that. And then over the summer, they're offered a summer job. They're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community. So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year. So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say, "I built that, and I'm proud of it."

So I want you to meet three of our students. This is Ryan. She is 15 years-old. She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher. She wants to go to college, but she wants to come back to Bertie County, because that's where her family is from, where she calls home, and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she's been fairly fortunate in. So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way.

This is Eric. He plays for the football team. He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect. So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting, to wood and metal construction, to how to do research for a client.

And then this is Anthony. He is 16 years old, loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands. And so for him, Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement. He's interested in forestry, but he isn't sure, so if he ends up not going to college, he will have developed some industry-relevant skills.

What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom. So this building downtown, which may very well become the site of our future farmers' market, is now the classroom. And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why, that's a homework assignment. And the ribbon cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers' market and it's open to the public, that's the final exam. And for the community, what design and building offers is real, visible, built progress. It's one project per year. And it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future.

So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story -- 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place. But we feel like this could work in other places. And I really, strongly believe in the power of the small story, because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale. Because, when you zoom out that far, you lose the ability to view people as humans.

Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers. And let's face it, designers, we need to reinvent ourselves. We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter, we need to work outside of our comfort zones more, and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard. So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design.

Thank you.

(Applause)

David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

2010-11-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does. We stand in elections, we vote in elections, we observe elections. Our democracies rely on elections. We all understand why we have elections, and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote. We cherish the opportunity to have our say, to help decide the future of the country. The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us, to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all. Without that mandate, they would be corrupt.

Well unfortunately, power corrupts, and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power, including doing bad things to elections. You see, even if the idea of the election is perfect, running a countrywide election is a big project, and big projects are messy. Whenever there is an election, it seems like something always goes wrong, someone tries to cheat, or something goes accidentally awry -- a ballot box goes missing here, chads are left hanging over here.

To make sure as few things as possible go wrong, we have all these procedures around the election. So for example, you come to the polling station, and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote. When you come back out, you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes, so that no one knows how you voted.

Well, what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that, after you drop your vote into the ballot box. And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted, because they trust that the election system works. They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly. The ballot boxes go to counting places. They're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted. Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote, and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election. So we have to trust a lot of people. We have to trust a lot of procedures. And sometimes we even have to trust computers. So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes, all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines. And you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better.

Well in the face of all these bad headlines, researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently. They've zoomed out and looked at the big picture. And the big picture is this: elections should be verifiable. Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly, without breaking election secrecy, which is so very important. And that's the tough part. How do we make an election system completely verifiable, while keeping the votes absolutely secret?

Well, the way we've come up with uses computers, but doesn't depend on them. And the secret is the ballot form. And if you look closely at these ballot forms, you'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one. And that means, if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list, I won't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for. And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right. And there's some complicated cryptography going on in there, but what's not complicated is voting with one of these forms. So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us, and then we'll use the paper for verification.

So this is how you vote. You get one of these ballot forms at random, and then you go into the voting booth, and you mark your choices, and you tear along a perforation. And you shred the candidate list. And the bit that remains, the one with your marks, this is your encrypted vote. So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote. And because it's encrypted, it can be submitted, stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see, including you. So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt. And after the close of the election, you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website. And remember, the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth, so if, in fact, and election official wants to find out how you voted, they will not be able to. If the government wants to find out how you voted, they won't be able to. No hacker can break in and find out how you voted. No hacker can break in and change your vote, because then it won't match your receipt. Votes can't go missing, because then you won't find yours when you look for it.

But the election magic doesn't stop there. Instead, we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves. They can check that all the votes were counted correctly. They can check that the announced result of the election is the correct one. And these are elections by the people, for the people, so the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Shashi Tharoor: Why nations should pursue "soft" power

2010-11-07T07:17:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower. In fact, the American publishers of my book, "The Elephant, The Tiger and the Cellphone," added a gratuitous subtitle saying, "India: The next 21st-century power." And I just don't think that's what India's all about, or should be all about.

Indeed, what worries me is the entire notion of world leadership seems to me terribly archaic. It's redolent of James Bond movies and Kipling ballads. After all, what constitutes a world leader? If it's population, we're on course to top the charts. We will overtake China by 2034. Is it military strength? Well, we have the world's fourth largest army. Is it nuclear capacity? We know we have that. The Americans have even recognized it, in an agreement. Is it the economy? Well, we have now the fifth-largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. And we continue to grow. When the rest of the world took a beating last year, we grew at 6.7 percent.

But, somehow, none of that adds up to me, to what I think India really can aim contribute in the world, in this part of the 21st century. And so I wondered, could what the future beckons for India to be all about be a combination of these things allied to something else, the power of example, the attraction of India's culture, what, in other words, people like to call "soft power."

Soft power is a concept invented by a Harvard academic, Joseph Nye, a friend of mine. And, very simply, and I'm really cutting it short because of the time limits here, it's essentially the ability of a country to attract others because of its culture, its political values, its foreign policies. And, you know, lots of countries do this. He was writing initially about the States, but we know the Alliance Francais is all about French soft power, the British Council. The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the Voice of America and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity.

So soft power is something that really emerges partly because of governments, but partly despite governments. And in the information era we all live in today, what we might call the TED age, I'd say that countries are increasingly being judged by a global public that's been fed on an incessant diet of Internet news, of televised images, of cellphone videos, of email gossip, in other words, all sorts of communication devices are telling us the stories of countries whether or not the countries concerned want people to hear those stories.

Now, in this age, again, countries with access to multiple channels of communication and information have a particular advantage. And of course they have more influence, sometimes, about how they're seen. India has more all-news TV channels than any country in the world, in fact in most of the countries in this part of the world put together.

But, the fact still is that it's not just that. To have soft power you have to be connected. One might argue that India has become an astonishingly connected country. I think you've already heard the figures. We've been selling 15 million cellphones a month. Currently there are 509 million cellphones in Indian hands, in India. And that makes us larger than the U.S. as a telephone market. In fact, those 15 million cellphones are the most connections that any country, including the U.S. and China, has ever established in the history of telecommunications.

But, what perhaps some of you don't realize is how far we've come to get there. You know, when I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor, or something, you might have a telephone. But, sometimes it just sat there.

I went to high school in Calcutta. And we would look at this instrument sitting in the front foyer. But half the time we would pick it up with an expectant look on our faces, there would be no dial tone. If there was a dial tone and you dialed a number, the odds were two in three you wouldn't get the number you were intending to reach. In fact the words "wrong number" were more popular than the word "Hello." (Laughter) If you then wanted to connect to another city, let's say from Calcutta you wanted to call Delhi, you'd have to book something called a trunk call, and then sit by the phone all day, waiting for it to come through. Or you could pay eight times the going rate for something called a lightning call. But, lightening struck rather slowly in our country in those days, so, it was like about a half an hour for a lightning call to come through.

In fact, so woeful was our telephone service that a member of parliament stood up in 1984 and complained about this. And the then-communications-minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country communications are a luxury not a right, that the government had no obligation to provide better service, and if the honorable member wasn't satisfied with his telephone, could he please return it, since there was an eight-year-long waiting list for telephones in India.

Now, fast-forward to today and this is what you see, the 15 million cellphones a month. But, what is most striking is who is carrying those cellphones. You know, if you visit friends in the suburbs of Delhi, on the side streets you will find a fellow with a cart that looks like it was designed in the 16th century, wielding a coal-fired steam iron that might have been invented in the 18th century. He's called an isthri wala. But he's carrying a 21st-century instrument. He's carrying a cellphone because most incoming calls are free, and thats how he gets orders from the neighborhood, to know where to collect clothes to get them ironed.

The other day I was in Kerala, my home state, at the country farm of a friend, about 20 kilometers away from any place you'd consider urban. And it was a hot day and he said, "Hey, would you like some fresh coconut water?" And it's the best thing and the most nutritious and refreshing thing you can drink on a hot day in the tropics, so I said sure. And he whipped out his cellphone, dialed the number, and a voice said, "I'm up here." And right on top of the nearest coconut tree, with a hatchet in one hand and a cellphone in the other was a local toddy tapper, who proceeded to bring down the coconuts for us to drink.

Fishermen are going out to sea and carrying their cellphones. When they catch the fish they call all the market towns along the coast to find out where they get the best possible prices. Farmers now, who used to have to spend half a day of backbreaking labor to find out if the market town was open, if the market was on, whether the product they'd harvested could be sold, what price they'd fetch. They'd often send an eight year old boy all the way on this trudge to the market town to get that information and come back, then they'd load the cart. Today they're saving half a day's labor with a two minute phone call.

So this empowerment of the underclass is the real result of India being connected. And that transformation is part of where India is heading today. But, of course that's not the only thing about India that's spreading. You've got Bollywood. My attitude to Bollywood is best summarized in the tale of the two goats at a Bollywood garbage dump -- Mr. Shekhar Kapur, forgive me -- and they're chewing away on cans of celluloid discarded by a Bollywood studio. And the first goat, chewing away, says, "You know, this film is not bad." And the second goat says, "No, the book was better." (Laughter)

I usually tend to think that the book is usually better, but, having said that, the fact is that Bollywood is now taking a certain aspect of Indian-ness and Indian culture around the globe, not just in the Indian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K., but to the screens of Arabs and Africans, of Senegalese and Syrians. I've met a young man in New York whose illiterate mother in a village in Senegal takes a bus once a month to the capital city of Dakar, just to watch a Bollywood movie. She can't understand the dialogue. She's illiterate, so she can't read the French subtitles. But, these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps, and she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action, she goes away with stars in her eyes about India, as a result.

And this is happening more and more. Afghanistan, we know what a serious security problem Afghanistan is for so many of us in the world. India doesn't have a military mission there. You what was India's biggest asset in Afghanistan in the last seven years? One simple fact: you couldn't try to call an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening. Why? Because that was the moment when the Indian television soap opera, [Hindi], dubbed into Dhurrie, was telecast on Todo T.V. And it was the most popular television show in Afghan history. Every Afghan family wanted to watch it. They had to suspend functions at 8:30. Weddings were reported to be interrupted so guests could cluster around the T.V. set, and then turn their attention back to the bride and groom. Crime went up at 8:30. I have read a Reuters dispatch -- so this is not Indian propaganda, a British news agency -- about how robbers in the town of Musarri Sharif* stripped a vehicle of its windshield wipers, its hubcaps, its sideview mirrors, any moving part they could find, at 8:30, because the watchmen were busy watching the T.V. rather than minding the store. And they scrawled on the windshield in a reference to the show's heroine, "Tulsi Zindabad": "Long live Tulsi." (Laughter)

That's soft power. And that is what India is developing through the "E" part of TED: its own entertainment industry. The same is true of course -- we don't have time for too many more examples -- but it's true of our music, of our dance, of our art, yoga, ayurveda, even Indian cuisine. I mean, the proliferation of Indian restaurants since I first went abroad as a student, in the mid '70s, and what I see today, you can't go to a mid-size town in Europe or North America and not find an Indian restaurant. It may not be a very good one. But, today in Britain, for example, Indian restaurants in Britain employ more people than the coal mining, ship building and iron and steel industries combined. So the empire can strike back. (Applause)

But, with this increasing awareness of India, with you and with I, and so on, with tales like Afghanistan, comes something vital in the information era, the sense that in today's world it's not the side of the bigger army that wins, it's the country that tells a better story that prevails. And India is, and must remain, in my view, the land of the better story. Stereotypes are changing. I mean, again, having gone to the U.S. as a student in the mid '70s, I knew what the image of India was then if their was an image at all.

Today, people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere speak of the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Technology with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT. This can sometimes have unintended consequences. OK. I had a friend, a history major like me, who was accosted at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, by an anxiously perspiring European saying, "You're Indian, you're Indian! Can you help me fix my laptop?" (Laughter)

We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus. But that too is transforming the Indian story around the world. But, there is something more substantive to that. The story rests on a fundamental platform of political pluralism. It's a civilizational story to begin with. Because India has been an open society for millennia. India gave refuge to the Jews, fleeing the destruction first temple by the Babylonians, and said thereafter by the Romans.

In fact, legend has is that when doubting Thomas, the Apostle, Saint Thomas landed on the shores of Kerala, my home state, somewhere around 52 A.D., he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. And to this day remains the only Jewish diaspora in the history of the Jewish people, which has never encountered a single incident of anti-semitism. (Applause) That's the Indian story. Islam came peacefully to the south, slightly more differently complicated history in the north. But, all of these religions have found a place and a welcome home in India.

You know, we just celebrated, this year, our general elections, the biggest exercise in democratic franchise in human history. And the next one will be even bigger, because our voting population keeps growing by 20 million a year. But, the fact is that the last elections, five years ago, gave the world extraordinary phenomenon of an election being won by a woman political leader of Italian origin and Roman Catholic faith, Sonia Gandhi, who then made way for a sikh, Mohan Singh, to be sworn in as prime minister, by a Muslim, President Abdul Kalam, in a country 81 percent Hindu. (Applause)

This is India, and of course it's all the more striking because it was four years later that we all applauded the U.S., the oldest democracy in the modern world, more than 220 years of free and fair elections, which took till last year to elect a president or a vice president, who wasn't white, male or Christian. So, maybe, -- oh sorry, he is Christian, I beg your pardon -- and he is male, but he isn't white. All the others have been all those three. (Laughter) All his predecessors have been all those three, and that's the point I was trying to make. (Laughter)

But, the issue is that when I talked about that example, it's not just about talking about India, it's not propaganda. Because ultimately, that electoral outcome had nothing to do with the rest of the world. It was essentially India being itself. And ultimately, it seems to me, that always works better than propaganda. Governments aren't very good at telling stories. But, people see a society for what it is, and that, it seems to me, is what ultimately will make a difference in today's information era, in today's TED age.

So India now is no longer the nationalism of ethnicity or language or religion, because we have every ethnicity known to mankind, practically, we've every religion know to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism. Though that has some Hindu elements somewhere. We have 23 official languages that are recognized in our constitution. And those of you who cashed your money here might be surprised to see how many scripts there are on the rupee note, spelling out the denominations. We've got all of that. We don't even have geography uniting us. Because the natural geography of the subcontinent framed by the mountains and the sea was hacked by the partition with Pakistan in 1947. In fact, you can't even take the name of the country for granted. Because the name "India" comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan.

But, the whole point is that India is the nationalism of an idea. It's the idea of an ever-ever-land, emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, but sustained, above all, by pluralist democracy. That is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one. And it's the nationalism of an idea that essentially says you can endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, consonant, for that matter, and still rally around a consensus. And the consensus is of a very simple principle, that in a diverse plural democracy like India you don't really have to agree on everything all the time, so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree. The great success story of India, a country that so many learned scholars and jounalists assumed would disintegrate, in the '50s and '60s, is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus.

Now, that is the India that is emerging into the 21st century. And I do want to make the point that if there is anything worth celebrating about India, it isn't military muscle, economic power. All of that is necessary, but we still have huge amounts of problems to overcome. Somebody said we are super poor, and we are also super power. We can't really be both of those. We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the hardware of development, the ports, the roads, the airports, all the infrastructural things we need to do, and the software of development, the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India to be able to have a couple of square meals a day, to be able to send his or her children to a decent school, and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in their lives that can transform themselves.

But, it's all taking place, this great adventure of conquering those challenges, those real challenges which none of us can pretend don't exist. But, it's all taking place in an open society, in a rich and diverse and plural civilization, in one that is determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. that's why India belongs at TED, and that's why TED belongs in India. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Joseph Nye on global power shifts

2010-11-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century. And basically, what I'd like to tell you is that power is changing, and there are two types of changes I want to discuss. One is power transition, which is change of power amongst states. And they are the simple version of the message, is it's moving from West to East. The other is power diffusion, the way power is moving from all states, West or East, to non-state actors. Those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century. And I want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why, in the end, there may be some good news.

When we talk about power transition, we often talk about the rise of Asia. It really should be called the recovery, or return, of Asia. If we looked at the world in 1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world's product. Now fast forward to 1900: half the world's people -- more than half -- still live in Asia, but they're making only a fifth of the world's product. What happened? The Industrial Revolution, which meant that all of a sudden, Europe and America became the dominant center of the world. What we're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world's population and more than half of the world's product. That's important, and it's an important shift. But let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that I'm talking about, which is power diffusion.

To understand power diffusion put this in your mind: computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century. Now that's a big, abstract number, but to make it more real, if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power, you could buy a car today for five dollars. Now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down; anybody can play in the game. So in 1970, if you wanted to communicate from Oxford to Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously, you could do it, the technology was there. But to be able to do it, you had to be very rich -- a government, a multinational corporation, maybe the Catholic Church -- but you had to be pretty wealthy. Now, anybody has that capacity, which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors, if they have the price of entry into an internet cafe -- the last time I looked, it was something like a pound an hour -- and if you have Skype, it's free. So capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone. And what that means is not that the age of the State is over. The State still matters. But the stage is crowded. The State's not alone. There are many, many actors. Some of that's good. Oxfam, a great non-governmental actor. Some of it's bad. Al Qaeda, another non-governmental actor. But think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts. We think in terms of war and interstate war. And you can think back to 1941, when the government of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. It's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in 1941. You might think of that as the privatization of war. So we're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power.

Now the problem is that we're not thinking about it in very innovative ways. So let me step back and ask: what's power? Power is simple the ability to effect others to get the outcomes you want, and you can do it in three ways. You can do it with threats, of coercion -- sticks, you can do it with payments -- carrots, or you can do it by getting others to want what you want. And that ability to get others to want what you want, to get the outcomes you want, without coercion or payment, is what I call soft power. And that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood. And yet it's tremendously important. Indeed, if you can learn to use more soft power, you can save a lot on carrots and sticks. Traditionally, the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power. For example, the great Oxford historian who taught here at this university, A.J.P. Taylor, defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war. But we need a new narrative if we're to understand power in the 21st century. It's not just prevailing at war, though war still persists. It's not whose army wins; it's also whose story wins. And we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective.

Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what's happening there. the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers. And the current narrative is all about the rise of China and the decline of the United States. Indeed, with the 2008 financial crisis, many people said this was the beginning of the end of American power. The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting. And president Medvedev of Russia, for example, pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of United States power. But in fact, this metaphor of decline is often very misleading. If you look at history, in recent history, you'll see the cycles of belief in American decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so. In 1958, after the Soviets put up Sputnik, it was "That's the end of America." In 1973, with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window, that was the end of America. In the 1980s, as America went through a transition in the Reagan period, between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of California, that was the end of America. But in fact, what we've seen is none of those were true. Indeed, people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s, thinking America could do anything, which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures, and now we're back to decline again.

The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality. If we try to focus on the reality, then what we need to focus on is what's really happening in terms of China and the United States. Goldman Sachs has projected that China, the Chinese economy, will surpass that of the U.S. by 2027. So we've got, what, 17 more years to go or so before China's bigger. Now someday, with a billion point three people getting richer, they are going to be bigger than the United States. But be very careful of these projections such as the Goldman Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century. Let me mention three reasons why it's too simple. First of all, it's a linear projection. You know, everything says, here's the growth rate of China, here's the growth rate of the U.S., here it goes -- straight line. History is not linear. There are often bumps along the road, accidents along the way. The second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in, let's say, 2030, which it may it, that will be a measure of total economic size, but not of per capita income -- won't tell you about the composition of the economy. China still has large areas of underdevelopment. And per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy. And that the Chinese won't catch up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part, after 2050, of this century.

The other point that's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is. You know, it looks at economic power measured by GDP. Doesn't tell you much about military power, doesn't tell you very much about soft power. It's all one-dimensional. And also, when we think about the rise of Asia, or return of Asia, as I called it a little bit earlier, it's worth remembering Asia's not one thing. If you're sitting in Japan, or in New Delhi, or in Hanoi, your view of the rise of China is a little different than if you're sitting in Beijing. Indeed, one of the advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China. It's as though Mexico and Canada were hostile neighbors to the United States, which they're not. So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition.

But you might ask, well so what, in any case? Why does it matter? Who cares? Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play? The answer is it matters quite a lot. Because, if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this, the facts, not the myths, you may have policies which are very dangerous. Let me give you an example from history. The Peloponnesian War was the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago. What caused it? Thucydides, the great historian of the the Peloponnesian War, said it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. Notice both halves of that explanation.

Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century, in which World War One, the great conflagration in which the European state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world, that that was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear that it created in Britain. So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today, that what we're going to see is the same thing now in this century. No. I think that's wrong. It's bad history. For one thing, Germany had surpassed Britain in Industrial strength by 1900. And as I said earlier, China has not passed the United States. But also, if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear, it leads to overreaction. And the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the East is fear. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt from a different context, the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself. We don't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia. And if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective, we're going to be able to manage this process.

Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together. If you ask how is power distributed in the world today, it's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game. Top board: military power among states. The United States is the only superpower, and it's likely to remain that way for two or three decades. China's not going to replace the U.S. on this military board. Middle board of this three-dimensional chess game: economic power among states. Power is multi-polar. There are balancers. The U.S., Europe, China, Japan can balance each other. The bottom board of this three-dimensional, the board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, things like climate change, drug trade, financial flows, pandemics, all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments, there nobody's in charge. It makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar. Power is chaotically distributed. And the only way you can solve these problems -- and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century -- is through cooperation, through working together, which means that soft power becomes more important, that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation.

Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum -- my gain in your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain. If China develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions, that's good for us as well as good for China as well as good for everybody else. So empowering China to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody, and it's not a zero sum, I win, you lose. It's one in which we can all gain. So as we think about power in this century, we want to get away from this view that it's all I win, you lose. Now I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about this. Wars persist. Power persists. Military power is important. Keeping balances is important. All this is still persists. Hard power is there, and it will remain. But unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power, you're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we're facing.

So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods, things from which all of us can benefit? How do we define our national interests so that it's not just zero sum, but positive sum. In that sense, if we define our interests, for example, for the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th century, keeping an open trading system, keeping a monetary stability, keeping freedom of the seas -- those were good for Britain, they were good for others as well. And in the 21st century, you have to do an analogue to that. How do we produce global public goods, which are good for us, but good for everyone at the same time? And that's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century.

There are ways to define our interests in which, while protecting ourselves with hard power, we can organize with others in networks to produce, not only public goods, but ways that will enhance our soft power. So if one looks at the statements that have been made about this, I am impressed that when Hillary Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration, she said that the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power, as she put it, "using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box." And if we're going to deal with these two great power shifts that I've described, the power shift represented by transition among states, the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states, we're going to have to develop a new narrative of power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power. And that's the good news I have. We can do that.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Weekly Address on November 06, 2010

2010-11-07T06:56:00.000-08:00

Transcript: The White House

This week, Americans across the country cast their votes and made their voices heard. And your message was clear.

You’re rightly frustrated with the pace of our economic recovery. So am I.

You’re fed up with partisan politics and want results. I do too.

So I congratulate all of this week’s winners – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. But now, the campaign season is over. And it’s time to focus on our shared responsibilities to work together and deliver those results: speeding up our economic recovery, creating jobs, and strengthening the middle class so that the American Dream feels like it’s back within reach.

That’s why I’ve asked to sit down soon with leaders of both parties so that we can have an extended discussion about what we can do together to move this country forward.

And over the next few weeks, we’re going to have a chance to work together in the brief upcoming session of Congress.

Here’s why this lame duck session is so important. Early in the last decade, President Bush and Congress enacted a series of tax cuts that were designed to expire at the end of this year.

What that means is, if Congress doesn’t act by New Year’s Eve, middle-class families will see their taxes go up starting on New Year’s Day.

But the last thing we should do is raise taxes on middle-class families. For the past decade, they saw their costs rise, their incomes fall, and too many jobs go overseas. They’re the ones bearing the brunt of the recession. They’re the ones having trouble making ends meet. They are the ones who need relief right now.

So something’s got to be done. And I believe there’s room for us to compromise and get it done together.

Let’s start where we agree. All of us want certainty for middle-class Americans. None of us want them to wake up on January 1st with a higher tax bill. That’s why I believe we should permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for all families making less than $250,000 a year. That’s 98 percent of the American people.

We also agree on the need to start cutting spending and bringing down our deficit. That’s going to require everyone to make some tough choices. In fact, if Congress were to implement my proposal to freeze non-security discretionary spending for three years, it would bring this spending down to its lowest level as share of the economy in 50 years.

But at a time when we are going to ask folks across the board to make such difficult sacrifices, I don’t see how we can afford to borrow an additional $700 billion from other countries to make all the Bush tax cuts permanent, even for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. We’d be digging ourselves into an even deeper fiscal hole and passing the burden on to our children.

I recognize that both parties are going to have to work together and compromise to get something done here. But I want to make my priorities clear from the start. One: middle class families need permanent tax relief. And two: I believe we can’t afford to borrow and spend another $700 billion on permanent tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

There are new public servants in Washington, but we still face the same challenges. And you made it clear that it’s time for results. This a great opportunity to show everyone that we got the message and that we’re willing, in this post-election season, to come together and do what’s best for the country we all love.

Thanks.

R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products

2010-11-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Video and Transcript: TED

The big residual is always value for money. All the time we are trying to get value for money. What we don't look for is value for many, while we are generating value for money. Do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day, the so-called bottom of the pyramid? What are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many? We have described here in terms of the performance and the price. If you have money, of course, you can get the value. You can a Mercedes for a very high price, very high performance. But if you don't have money, what happens? Well, you are to ride a bicycle, carrying your own weight and also some other weight, so that you can earn the bread for the day. Well, poor do not remain poor; they become lower-middle-class. And if they do so, then, of course, the conditions improve, and they start riding on scooters. But the challenge is, again, they don't get much value, because they can't afford anything more than the scooter. The issue is, at that price, can you give them some extra value? A super value, in terms of their ability to ride in a car, to get that dignity, to get that safety, looks practically impossible, isn't it.

Now, this is something that we see on Indian streets all the time. But many people see the same thing and think things differently, and one of them is here, Ratan Tata. The great thing about our leaders is that, should they not only have passion in their belly, which practically all of them have, they're also very innovative. An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done. They believe that things can be done. But great leaders like Ratan have compassion. And what you said, Lakshmi, is absolutely true: it's not just Ratan Tata, it's the house of Tatas over time. Let me confirm what she said. Yes, I went barefoot until I was 12. I struggled to [unclear] day was a huge issue. And when I finished my SSC, the eleventh standard, I stood eleventh among 125,000 students. But I was about to leave the school, because my poor mother couldn't afford schooling. And it was [unclear] Tata Trust, which gave me six rupees per month, almost a dollar per month for six years. That's how I'm standing before you. So that is the House of Tata. (Applause) Innovation, compassion and passion. They combine all that.

And it was that compassion which bothered them, because when he saw -- in fact, he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car -- he drives his own car by the way -- and he saw in the rain, a family like the one that I showed to you getting drenched with an infant. And then he said, "Well, I must give them a car that they can afford, one lakh car, $2,000 car." Of course, as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible, and that's what was said by Suzuki. He said, oh, probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney. And you can see the cartoon here. Well they didn't build that. They built a proper car. Nano. And mind you, I'm six feet half an inch, Ratan is taller than me, and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car. And incredible car. And of course, nothing succeeds like success; the cynics then turned around, and one after the other they also started saying, "Yes, we also want to make a car in the Nano Segment. We'll manufacture a car in the Nano Segment."

How did this great story unfold, the making of Nano? Let me tell you a bit about it. For example, how we started: Ratan just began with a five-engineer team, young people in their mid-twenties. And he said, "Well, I won't define the vehicle for you, but I will define the cost for you. It is one lakh, 100,000 rupees, and you are to make it within that." And he told them, "Question the unquestionable. Stretch the envelope." And at a point in time, he got so engrossed in the whole challenge, that he himself became a member of the team. Can you believe it? I still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated. Until midnight, he'd be thinking. Early morning he'll be coming back with sort of solutions. But who was the team leader? The team leader was Girish Wagh, a 34 year-old boy in [unclear]. And the Nano team average age was just 27 years.

And they did innovation in design and beyond. Broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time. For example, that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft. Adhesives were replacing the rivets. There was a co-creation, a huge co-creation, with vendors and suppliers. All ideas on board were welcome. 100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plans, and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed. Imagine that a fellow who sells cloth, for example, will be selling Nano. I mean, it was incredible innovation. Seeking solutions for non-auto sectors. It was an open innovation, ideas from all over were welcome. The mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used, by the way, as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers. The fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers.

And the crux of the matter was, however, getting more from less. All the time, you have been given an envelope. You can't cross that envelope, which is 100,000 rupees, 2,000 dollars. And therefore, each component had to have a dual functionality. And the seat riser, for example, serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity. Half the number of parts are contained in Nano in comparison to a typical passenger car. The length is smaller by eight percent by the way. But the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less, but 21 percent more inside space.

And what happened was that -- more from less -- you can see how much more for how much less. When the Model T was launched -- and this is, by the way, all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices -- Model T was 19,700 by Ford. Volkswagon was 11,333. And British Motor was around 11,000. And Nano was, bang, $2,000. This is why you started actually a new paradigm shift, where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car, who were carrying their entire family in a scooter, started dreaming of being in a car. And those dreams are getting fulfilled. This is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home. The driver's name is Naran. He has bought his own Nano. And you can see, there is a physical space that has been created for him, parking that car, along with the owner's car, but more importantly, they've created a space in their mind that "Yes, my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it." And that's why I call it a transformational innovation. It is not just technological, it is social innovation that we talk about.

And that is where, ladies and gentlemen, this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important. I remember talking about this for the first time in Australia, about one and a half years ago, when their academy honored me with a fellowship. And unbelievably, in 40 years, I was the first Indian to be honored. And the title of my talk was therefore "Indian innovation from Gandhi to Gandhian engineering." And I titled this more from less for more and more people as Gandhian engineering. And Gandhian engineering, in my judgment, is the one which is going to take the world forward, is going to make a difference, not just for a few, but for everyone. Let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs. Here is an American citizen and his son having an artificial foot. What is its price? $20,000. And of course, these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads.

Unfortunately, that's not the case in India. You can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land, sometimes in a marshy land, and so on and so forth. More importantly, they not only walk far to work, and not only do they cycle to work, but they cycle for work, as you can see here. And they climb up for their work. You have to design an artificial foot for such conditions. A challenge, of course. Four billion people, their incomes are less then two dollars a day. And if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe, you're talking about 10,000 days of income. You just don't have it. And therefore, you ought to look at alternatives.

And that is how Jaipur Foot was created in India. It had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system, a quick molding and modular components, enabling custom-made, on-the-spot limb fitments. You could feel it actually in an hour, by the way, whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day, as so on. Outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes, rather than using heated sheets. And unique high-ankle design and human-like looks, [unclear] and functions. And I like to show how it looks and how it works. (Music) See, he jumps. You can see what stress it must have.

(Text: ... any person with a below the knee limb could do this. ... above the limb, yes, it would be difficult ... "Did it hurt?" "No ... not at all." ... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds ...)

One kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds. (Applause) So that's what it is all about. And therefore Time took notice of this 28-dollar foot, basically. (Applause) An incredible story.

Let's move on to something else. I've been talking about getting more from less for more. Let's move to health. We've talked about mobility and the rest of it, let's talk about health. What's happening in the area of health? You know, you have new diseases that require new drugs. And if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now, what has happened? 10 years ago, it used to cost about a quarter billion. Today it costs 1.5 billion dollars. Time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace, after all the human and animal testing, was 10 years, now it is 15 years. Are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money? No, I'm sorry. We used to have 40, now they have come down to 30. So actually we are getting less from more for less and less people. Why less and less people? Because it is so expensive, so very few will be able to basically afford that.

Let us just take an example. Psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin. The cost of treatment, $20,000. 1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin, by the way, and 20 of them. Time for development -- it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars. Let's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets. For example, we don't want $20,000; we don't have it. Can we do it [for] $100? Time for development, not 10 years. We are in a hurry. Five years. Cost of development -- $300 million dollars. Sorry. I can't spend more than 10 million dollars. Looks absolutely audacious. Looks absolutely ridiculous.

You know something? This has been achieved in India. These targets have been achieved in India. And how they have been achieved ... Sir Francis Bacon once said, "When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before." And therefore, the standard process, where you develop a molecule, put it into mice, into men, are not yielding those results -- the billions of dollars that have been spent. The Indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge, however, scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men, not molecule to mice to men, you know. And that is how this difference has come. And you can see this blending of traditional medicine, modern medicine, modern science. I launched a big program [unclear] CSIR about nine years ago. He is giving us not just for Psoriasis, for cancer and a whole range of things, changing the whole paradigm. And you can see this Indian Psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of [unclear] by doing things differently. You can see before treatment and after treatment. This is really getting more from less for more and more people, because these are all affordable treatments now.

Let me just remind you of what Mahatma Gandhi had said. He had said, "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." So the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people, not only the current generation, but the future generations. And he also said, "I would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all." So he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people, not just a few people. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, this is the theme, getting more from less for more. And mind you, it is not getting just a little more for just a little less. It's not about low cost. It's about ultra-low cost. You cannot say it's a mere treatment $10,000, but because you are poor I'll give it for 9,000. Sorry, it doesn't work. You have to give it for $100, $200. Is it possible? I has been made possible, by the way, for certain other different reasons. So you are not talking about low cost, you are talking about ultra-low cost. You are not talking about affordability, you are talking about extreme affordability. Because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day. You're not talking exclusive innovation. You're talking about inclusive innovation. And therefore, you're not talking about incremental innovation, you're talking about disruptive innovation. The ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms. And I would also add, it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people, the whole world working for it.

I was very touched when I saw a breakthrough the other day. You know, incubators for infants, for example. They're not available in Africa. They're not available in Indian villages. And infants die. And incubator costs $2,000. And there's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created. And by whom? By young students from Standford University on an extreme affordability project that they had, basically. Their heart is in the right place, like Ratan Tata. It's not just innovation, compassion and passion -- compassion in the heart and passion in the belly. That's the new world that we want to create. And that is why the message is that of Gandhian engineering.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to end before time. I was also afraid of those 18 minutes. I've still one and a half to go. The message, the final message, is this: India gave a great gift to the world. What was that? [In the] 20th century, we gave Gandhi to the world. The 21st century gift, which is very, very important for the whole world, whether it is global economic meltdown, whether it is climate change -- any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more -- not only the current generations, for the future generations. And that can come only from Gandhian engineering. So ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy to announce, this gift of the 21st century to the world from India, Gandhian engineering.

(Applause)

Lakshmi Pratury: Thank you, Dr. Mashelkar. (R.A. Mashelkar: Thank you very much.)

LP: A quick question for you. Now, when you were a young boy in this school, what were your thoughts, like what did you think you could become? What do you think that drove you? Was there a vision you had? What is it that drove you?

RAM: I'll tell you a story that drove me, that transformed my life. I remember, I went to a poor school, because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees, that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time. It was [unclear] high school. But it was a poor school with rich teachers, honestly. And one of them was [unclear] who taught us physics. One day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens. The lens was here. The piece of paper was there. He moved it up and down. And there was a bright spot up there. And then he said, "This is the focal length." But then he held it for a little while, Lakshmi. And then the paper burned. When the paper burned, for some reason he turned to me, and he said, "Mashelkar, like this, if you do not diffuse your energies, if you focus your energies, you can achieve anything in the world." That gave me a great message: focus and you can achieve. I said, "Whoa, science is so wonderful, I have to become a scientist." But more importantly, focus and you can achieve. And that message, very frankly, is valuable for society today.

What does that focal length do? It has parallel lines, which are sun rays. And the property of parallel lines is that they never meet. What does that convex lens do? It makes them meet. This is convex lens leadership. You know what today's leadership is doing? Concave length. They divide them farther. So I learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that. And when I was at National Chemical Laboratory [unclear]. When I was at Council of Scientific Industry Research -- 40 laboratories -- when two laboratories were not talking to each other, I would [unclear]. And currently I'm president of Global Research Alliance, 60,000 scientists in nine counties, right from India to the U.S. I'm trying to build a global team, which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing. That was the lesson. That was the inspirational moment.

LP: Thank you very much. (RAM: Thank you.)

(Applause)

President Obama on Bilateral Mideast Peace Meetings, on September 01, 2010

2010-10-28T23:39:00.000-07:00

Transcript: The White House

Good afternoon, everybody.

Upon taking office, I declared that America is a friend of each nation and every person who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that the United States was ready to lead in pursuit of that future. At the beginning of my administration, I stated that it was our policy to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as a comprehensive peace between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors. And to support my outstanding Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s leadership, I appointed a special envoy and one of our nation’s finest statesmen, former Senator George Mitchell, to guide our efforts.

As I’ve said many times, our goal is a two-state solution that ends the conflict and ensures the rights and security of both Israelis and Palestinians. And despite the inevitable challenges, we have never wavered in pursuit of this goal. I’ve met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on numerous occasions. Between them, Secretary Clinton and Senator Mitchell have made countless trips to the region.

Over the past year, both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have taken important steps to build confidence. And with Senator Mitchell’s support, Israelis and Palestinians have engaged in several rounds of proximity talks -— even in the face of difficult circumstances. But we’ve always made it clear that the only path to lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians is direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

Tomorrow, after nearly two years, the parties will relaunch those direct talks.

Today, I had a series of very productive meetings with key partners in this effort. I urged Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas to recognize this as a moment of opportunity that must be seized. I thanked President Mubarak of Egypt and His Majesty King Abdullah of Jordan, for their valuable leadership and for the support that will be necessary going forward. And I look forward to hosting these four leaders at a private working dinner at the White House tonight.

I also want to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to many friends and allies, especially our Quartet partners. And former Prime Minister Tony Blair will be joining us as representing the Quartet at the dinner this evening.

The purpose of these talks is clear. These will be direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. These negotiations are intended to resolve all final status issues. The goal is a settlement, negotiated between the parties, that ends the occupation which began in 1967 and results in the emergence of an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security with a Jewish state of Israel and its other neighbors. That’s the vision we are pursuing.

Now, I know these talks have been greeted in some quarters with skepticism. We are under no illusions. Passions run deep. Each side has legitimate and enduring interests. Years of mistrust will not disappear overnight. Building confidence will require painstaking diplomacy and trust by the parties. After all, there’s a reason that the two-state solution has eluded previous generations —- this is extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily difficult.

But we know that the status quo is unsustainable -- for Israelis, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world. It is in the national interests of all involved, including the United States, that this conflict be brought to a peaceful conclusion.

So even as we are clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, so, too, do we see the foundation for progress. The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority are already cooperating on a daily basis to increase security and reduce violence, to build institutions and improve conditions on the ground.

Among the Israeli and Palestinian publics, there is wide support for a two-state solution, the broad outlines of which are well known to both peoples. And even in the midst of discord, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians -— faith leaders, civil society groups, doctors, scientists, businessmen, students -- find ways to work together every day. Their heroic efforts at the grassroots show that cooperation and progress is possible and should inspire us all.

In addition, Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas are two leaders who I believe want peace. Both sides have indicated that these negotiations can be completed within one year. And as I told each of them today, this moment of opportunity may not soon come again -— they cannot afford to let it slip away. Now is the time for leaders of courage and vision to deliver the peace that their people deserve.

The United States will put our full weight behind this effort. We will be an active and sustained participant. We will support those who make difficult choices in pursuit of peace. But let me very clear. Ultimately the United States cannot impose a solution, and we cannot want it more than the parties themselves. There are enormous risks involved here for all the parties concerned, but we cannot do it for them. We can create the environment and the atmosphere for negotiations, but ultimately it’s going to require the leadership on both the Palestinian and the Israeli sides, as well as those in the region who say they want a Palestinian state.

A lot of times I hear from those who insist that this is a top priority and yet do very little to actually support efforts that could bring about a Palestinian state.

So only Israelis and Palestinians can make the difficult choices and build the consensus at home for progress. Only Israelis and Palestinians can prove to each other their readiness to end this conflict and make the compromises upon which lasting peace deserves.

What the rest of us can do, including the United States, is to support those conversations, support those talks, support those efforts -- not try to undermine them.

So the hard work is only beginning. Neither success nor failure is inevitable. But this much we know: If we do not make the attempt, then failure is guaranteed. If both sides do not commit to these talks in earnest, then the longstanding conflict will only continue to fester and consume another generation. And this we simply cannot allow.

We know that there will be moments that test our resolve. We know that extremists and enemies of peace will do everything in their power to destroy this effort —- as we saw in the heinous attacks near Hebron, which we have strongly condemned. But we also know this: Too much blood has already been shed. Too many lives have already been lost. Too many hearts have already been broken.

And despite what the cynics say, history teaches us that there is a different path. It is the path of resolve and determination, where compromise is possible, and old conflicts, at long last, can end. It is the path traveled by those who brought peace to their countries, from Northern Ireland -- where Senator Mitchell was so deeply involved -- to the Balkans, to Africa, Asia, to those who forged peace between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan.

This path is open to Israelis and Palestinians. If all sides persevere, in good faith and with a sense of purpose and possibility, we can build a just, lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East.

Thank you very much.

Remarks by the President on the Economy on August 30, 2010

2010-10-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

Transcript: The White House

Good afternoon, everybody. I just finished a meeting with my economic team about the current state of our economy and some of the additional steps that we should take to move forward.

It’s been nearly two years since that terrible September when our economy teetered on the brink of collapse. And at the time, no one knew just how deep the recession would go, or the havoc that it would wreak on families and businesses across this country. What we did know was that it took nearly a decade -- how we doing on sound, guys? Is it still going in the press -- okay. What we did know was that it was going to take nearly a decade in order -- can you guys still hear us? Okay. Let me try this one more time.

What we did know was that it took nearly a decade to dig the hole that we’re in -– and that it would take longer than any of us would like to climb our way out. And while we have taken a series of measures and come a long way since then, the fact is, that too many businesses are still struggling; too many Americans are still looking for work; and too many communities are far from being whole again.

And that’s why my administration remains focused every single day on pushing this economy forward, repairing the damage that’s been done to the middle class over the past decade, and promoting the growth we need to get our people back to work.

So, as Congress prepares to return to session, my economic team is hard at work in identifying additional measures that could make a difference in both promoting growth and hiring in the short term, and increasing our economy’s competitiveness in the long term -- steps like extending the tax cuts for the middle class that are set to expire this year; redoubling our investment in clean energy and R&D; rebuilding more of our infrastructure for the future; further tax cuts to encourage businesses to put their capital to work creating jobs here in the United States. And I’ll be addressing these proposals in further detail in the days and weeks to come.

In the meantime, there’s one thing we know we should do -– something that should be Congress’ first order of business when it gets back -- and that is making it easier for our small businesses to grow and hire.

We know that in the final few months of last year, small businesses accounted for more than 60 percent of the job losses in America. That’s why we’ve passed eight different tax cuts for small businesses and worked to expand credit for them.

But we have to do more. And there’s currently a jobs bill before Congress that would do two big things for small business owners: cut more taxes and make available more loans. It would help them get the credit they need, and eliminate capital gains taxes on key investments so they have more incentive to invest right now. And it would accelerate $55 billion of tax relief to encourage American businesses, small and large, to expand their investments over the next 14 months.

Unfortunately, this bill has been languishing in the Senate for months, held up by a partisan minority that won’t even allow it to go to a vote. That makes no sense. This bill is fully paid for. It will not add to the deficit. And there is no reason to block it besides pure partisan politics.

The small business owners and the communities that rely on them, they don’t have time for political games. They shouldn’t have to wait any longer. In fact, just this morning, a story showed that small businesses have put hiring and expanding on hold while waiting for the Senate to act on this bill. Simply put, holding this bill hostage is directly detrimental to our economic growth.

So I ask Senate Republicans to drop the blockade. I know we’re entering election season, but the people who sent us here expect us to work together to get things done and improve this economy.

Now, no single step is the silver bullet that will reverse the damage done by the bubble-and-bust cycles that caused our economy into this slide. It’s going to take a full-scale effort, a full-scale attack that not only helps in the short term, but builds a firmer foundation that makes our nation stronger for the long haul. But this step will benefit small business owners and our economy right away. That’s why it’s got to get done.

There’s no doubt we still face serious challenges. But if we rise above the politics of the moment to summon an equal seriousness of purpose, I’m absolutely confident that we will meet them. I’ve got confidence in the American economy. And most importantly, I’ve got confidence in the American people. We’ve just got to start working together to get this done.

Thank you very much.

Weekly Address on August 28, 2010

2010-10-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

Transcript : The White House

On Tuesday, after more than seven years, the United States of America will end its combat mission in Iraq and take an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war.

As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war. As President, that is what I am doing. We have brought home more than 90,000 troops since I took office. We have closed or turned over to Iraq hundreds of bases. In many parts of the country, Iraqis have already taken the lead for security.

In the months ahead, our troops will continue to support and train Iraqi forces, partner with Iraqis in counterterrorism missions, and protect our civilian and military efforts. But the bottom line is this: the war is ending. Like any sovereign, independent nation, Iraq is free to chart its own course. And by the end of next year, all of our troops will be home.

As we mark the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq, a grateful nation must pay tribute to all who have served there. Because part of responsibly ending this war is meeting our responsibility to those who have fought it.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now make up America’s longest continuous combat engagement. For the better part of a decade, our troops and their families have served tour after tour with honor and heroism, risking and often giving their lives for the defense of our freedom and security. More than one million Americans in uniform have served in Iraq – far more than any conflict since Vietnam. And more than one million who have served in both wars have now finished their service and joined the proud ranks of America’s veterans.

What this new generation of veterans must know is this: our nation’s commitment to all who wear its uniform is a sacred trust that is as old as our republic itself. It is one that, as President, I consider a moral obligation to uphold.

At the same time, these are new wars; with new missions, new methods, and new perils. And what today’s veterans have earned – what they have every right to expect – is new care, new opportunity, and a new commitment to their service when they come home.

That’s why, from the earliest days of my Administration, we’ve been strengthening that sacred trust with our veterans by making our veterans policy more responsive and ready for this new century.

We’re building a 21st century VA, modernizing and expanding VA hospitals and health care, and adapting care to better meet the unique needs of female veterans. We’re creating a single electronic health record that our troops and veterans can keep for life. We’re breaking the claims backlog and reforming the process with new paperless systems. And we are building new wounded warrior facilities through the Department of Defense

But for many of our troops and their families, the war doesn’t end when they come home. Too many suffer from Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – the signature injuries of today’s wars – and too few receive proper screening or care. We’re changing that. We’re directing significant resources to treatment, hiring more mental health professionals, and making major investments in awareness, outreach, and suicide prevention. And we’re making it easier for a vet with PTSD to get the benefits he or she needs.

To make sure our troops, veterans, and their families have full access to the American Dream they’ve fought to defend, we’re working to extend them new opportunity. Michelle and Jill Biden have forged a national commitment to support military families while a loved one is away. We’ve guaranteed new support to caregivers who put their lives on hold for a loved one’s long recovery. We’re funding and implementing the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which is already helping some 300,000 veterans and their family members pursue their dream of a college education.

And for veterans trying to find work in a very tough economy, we’ve devoted new resources to job training and placement. I’ve directed the federal government to hire more veterans, including disabled veterans, and I encourage every business in America to follow suit. This new generation of veterans has proven itself to be a new generation of leaders. They have unmatched training and skills; they’re ready to work; and our country is stronger when we tap their extraordinary talents.

New care. New opportunity. A new commitment to our veterans.

If you’d like to send our troops and veterans a message of thanks and support, just visit whitehouse.gov. There, you’ll find an easy way to upload your own text or video.

Let them know that they have the respect and support of a grateful nation. That when their tour ends; when they see our flag; when they touch our soil; they’ll always be home in an America that is forever here for them – just as they’ve been there for us. That is the promise our nation makes to those who serve. And as long as I’m Commander-in-Chief, it’s a promise we’ll keep. Thank you.

Patrick Chappatte: The power of cartoons

2010-10-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

Video and Transcript: TED

So yeah, I'm a newspaper cartoonist -- political cartoonist. I don't know if you've heard about it -- newspapers? It's a sort of paper-based reader. (Laughter) It's lighter than an iPod. It's a bit cheaper. You know what they say? They say the print media is dying. Who says that? Well, the media. But this is no news, right? You've read about it already.

(Laughter)

Ladies and gentlemen, the world has gotten smaller. I know it's a cliche, but look, look how small, how tiny it has gotten. And you know the reason why, of course. This is because of technology. Yeah. (Laughter) Any computer designers in the room? Yeah well, you guys are making my life miserable, because track pads used to be round, a nice round shape. That makes a good cartoon. But what are you going to do with a flat track pad, those square things? There's nothing I can do as a cartoonist. Well, I know the world is flat now. That's true. And the Internet has reached every corner of the world, the poorest, the remotest places. Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe. (Laughter) Don't go asking for a Frappuccino there. So we are bridging the digital divide. The Third World is connected. We are connected. And what happens next? Well, you've got mail. Yeah. Well, the Internet has empowered us. It has empowered you, it has empowered me, and it has empowered some other guys as well.

(Laughter)

You know, these last two cartoons, I did them live during a conference in Hanoi. And they were not used to that in communist 2.0 Vietnam. (Laughter) So I was cartooning live on a wide screen -- it was quite a sensation -- and then this guy came to me. He was taking pictures of me and of my sketches, and I thought, "This is great, a Vietnamese fan." And as he came the second day, I thought, "Wow, that's really a cartoon lover." And on the third day, I finally understood, the guy was actually on duty. So by now, there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the Vietnamese police.

(Laughter)

No, but it's true: the Internet has changed the world. It has rocked the music industry. It has changed the way we consume music. For those of you old enough to remember, we used to have to go to the store to steal it. (Laughter) And it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application. So be careful with that Facebook account. Your momma told you, be careful. And technology has set us free. This is free WiFi. but yeah, it has. It has liberated us from the office desk. This is your life. Enjoy it. (Laughter) In short, technology, the internet, they have changed our lifestyle. Tech guru, like this man -- that a German magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century -- they are shaping the way we do things. They are shaping the way we consume. They are shaping our very desires. (Laughter) (Applause) You will not like it. And technology has even changed our relationship to God.

(Laughter)

Now I shouldn't get into this. Religion and political cartoons, as you may have heard, make a difficult couple, ever since that day in 2005, when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world, demonstrations, fatwa. They provoked violence. People died in the violence. This was so sickening. People died because of cartoons. I mean -- I had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides, actually. They were used first by a Danish newspaper, which wanted to make a point on Islam. A Danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet. 12 of them refused. Did you know that? He told me, "Nobody has to tell me what I should draw. This is not how it works." And then, of course, they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side. They wanted to stir up controversy. You know the story. We know that cartoons can be used as weapons. History tells us, they've been used by the Nazis to attack the Jews. And here we are now. In the United Nations, half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion -- they call it the defamation of religion -- while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech. So the clash of civilizations is here, and cartoons are at the middle of it? This got me thinking. Now you see me thinking at my kitchen table. And since you're in my kitchen, please meet my wife.

(Laughter)

In 2006, a few months after, I went Ivory Coast -- Western Africa. Now, talk of a divided place. The country was cut in two. You had a rebellion in the north, the government in the south -- the capital, Abidjan -- and in the middle, the French army. This looks like a giant hamburger. You don't want to be the ham in the middle. I was there to report on that story in cartoons. I've been doing this for the last 15 years. It's my side job, if you want. So you see the style is different. This is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning. I went to places like Gaza during the war in 2009. So this is really journalism in cartoons. You'll hear more and more about it. This is the future of journalism, I think.

And of course, I went to see the rebels in the north. Those were poor guys fighting for their rights. There was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in Africa. And I went to see the Dozo. The Dozo, they are the traditional hunters of West Africa. People fear them. They help the rebellion a lot. They are believed to have magical powers. They can disappear and escape bullets. I went to see a Dozo chief. He told me about his magical powers. He said, "I can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life." I said, "Well, maybe we don't have time for this right now." (Laughter) "Another time."

So back in Abidjan, I was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there, and I thought, yes, in a context like this, cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side. I mean, the press in Ivory Coast was bitterly divided. It was compared to the media in Rwanda before the genocide. So imagine. And what can a cartoonist do? Sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see, and the guy has to feed his family, right. So the idea was pretty simple. We brought together cartoonists from all sides in Ivory Coast. We took them away from their newspaper for three days. And I asked them to do a project together, tackling the issues affecting their country in cartoons, yes, in cartoons. Show the positive power of cartoons. It's a great tool of communication for bad or for good. And cartoons can cross boundaries, as you have seen. And humor is a good way, I think, to address serious issues. And I'm very proud of what they did. I mean, they didn't agree with each other -- that was not the point. And I didn't ask them to do nice cartoons. The first day, they were even shouting at each other. But they came up with a book, looking back at 13 years of political crisis in Ivory Coast.

So the idea was there. And I've been doing projects like this, in 2009 in Lebanon, this year, in Kenya, back in January. In Lebanon, it was not a book. The idea was to have -- the same principal, a divided country -- take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together. So in Lebanon, we enrolled the newspaper editors, and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page, addressing the issue affecting Lebanon, like religion in politics and everyday life. And it worked. For three days, almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together -- anti-government, pro-government, Christian, Muslim, of course, English-speaking, well, you name it. So this was a great project. And then in Kenya, what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity, which is a poison in a lot of places in Africa. And we did video clips. You can see them if you go to Youtube/kenyatunes.

So, preaching for freedom of speech is easy here, but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division, again, what can a cartoonist do? He has to keep his job. Well I believe that in any context anywhere, he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred. And that's the message I try to convey to them. I think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing. But we need to support these [unclear], critical, responsible voices in Africa, in Lebanon, in your local newspaper, in the Apple store. Today, tech companies are the world's largest editors. They decide what is too offensive to too provocative for you to see. So really, it's not about the freedom of cartoonists; it's about you're freedoms. And for dictators all over the world, the good news is when cartoonists, journalists and activists shut up.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Melinda French Gates: What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola

2010-10-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

Video and Transcript: TED

One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, I'm really struck by the things that we have in common. They want what we want for our children, and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. But I also see lots of poverty, and it's quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world. So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola.

Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. And so when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home, and I'm thinking, "We're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations," you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing? And I'm not the first person to ask this question. But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. It's staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. That's like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. So why does this matter? Well, if we're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we're set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good.

Coke's success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. So that's why I took a bit of time to study Coke. And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. So let's start with the data. Coke has a very clear bottom line. They report to a set of shareholders. They have to turn a profit. So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. They have this very continuous feedback loop. They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. They have a whole team called "Knowledge and Insight." It's a lot like other consumer companies. So if you're running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue.

Let's contrast that for a minute to development. In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. I've sat in a lot of those meetings. And by then, it is way too late to use the data. I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. They said, "You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. It's dark, you can't see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact." Real-time data turns on the lights.

So what's the second thing that Coke's good at? They're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. Coke's been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldn't reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. And in Africa, the remote places, it's hard to find a good road. But Coke noticed something. They noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training they local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers. And those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Coke's sales. Let's look at the development side.

What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. I think a great example of this is Ethiopia's new health extension program. The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic, they were over a day's travel away from a health clinic. So if you're in an emergency situation, or if you're a mom about it deliver a baby, forget it, to get to the health care center. They decided that wasn't good enough, so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this, and they adapted it for Ethiopia. And in 2003, the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country. They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people. In just five years, their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people.

Now, think about how this can change people's lives. Health extension workers can help with so many things, whether it's family planning, prenatal care, immunizations for the children, or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery. That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia, and it's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008. In Ethiopia, there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program. So what's the next step for Ethiopia? Well, they're already starting talk about this. They're starting to talk about, "How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas? How do you incent them based on the impact that they're getting out in those remote villages?" That's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people's potential.

The third component of Coke's success is marketing. Ultimately, Coke's success depends on one crucial fact, and that is that people want a Coca-Cola. Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow. So, they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing. And what's the secret to their marketing? Well, it's aspirational. It is associates that product with a kind of life that people want to live. So even though it's a global company, they take a very local approach. Coke's global campaign slogan is "Open Happiness." But they localize it. And they don't just guess what makes people happy, they go to places like Latin America, and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life. And in South Africa, they associate happiness with [unclear] or community respect. Now, that played itself out in the World Cup campaign. Let's listen to this song that Coke created for it, "Wavin' Flag" by a Somali hip hop artist.

(Video) K'Naan: ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫Give you freedom, give you fire♫ ♫ Give you reason, take you higher ♫ ♫ See the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ You define us, make us feel proud ♫ ♫ In the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ As we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ Celebration, it's around us ♫ ♫ Every nation, all around us ♫

Melinda French Gates: It feels pretty good, right? Well, they didn't stop there. They localized it into 18 different languages. And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries. It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," that also went number one on the pop charts. Both songs have something in common: that same appeal of celebration and unity. So how does health and development market? Well, it's based on avoidance, not aspirations. I'm sure you've heard some of these messages. "Use a condom, don't get AIDS." "Wash you hands, you might not get diarrhea." It doesn't sound anything like "Wavin' Flag" to me.

And I think we make a fundamental mistake, we make an assumption, that we think that, if people need something, we don't have to make them want that. And I think that's a mistake. And there's some indications around the world that this is starting to change. One example is sanitation. We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea, and a lot of it is because of open defecation. But there's a solution: you build a toilet. But what we're finding around the world, over and over again, is, if you build a toilet and you leave it there, it doesn't get used. People reuse it for a slab for their home. They sometimes store grain in it. I've even seen it used for a chicken coop. (Laughter) But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea? Well, you work with the community. You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn't be done in the village, and they agree to that. But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern, trendy convenience. One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship. And it works. Look at these headlines. (Laughter) I'm not kidding. Women are refusing to marry men without toilets. No loo, no "I do."

(Laughter)

Now, it's not just a funny headline. It's innovative. It's an innovative marketing campaign. But more importantly, it saves lives. Take a look at this. This is a room full of young men and my husband, Bill. And can you guess what the young men are waiting for? They're waiting to be circumcised. Can you you believe that? We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men. And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation, I have to admit, Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit, and we were saying, "But who's going to volunteer for this procedure?" But it turns out the men do, because they're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it, and the men also believe it improves their sex life. So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development, we can change communities and we can change whole nations.

So why is all of this so important? So let's talk about what happens when this all comes together, when you tie the three things together. And polio, I think, is one of the most powerful examples. We've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years. So if you look back to 1988, there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year. In 2009, we're down to 1,600 cases. Well how did that happen? Let's look at a country like India. They have over a billion people in this country, but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis, and clinicians, a huge reporting system in chemists. They have two and a half million vaccinators. But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you. Let me tell you the story of Shriram, an 18 month boy in Bihar, a northern state in India. This year on August 8th, he felt paralysis, and on the 13th, his parents took him to the doctor. On August 14th and 15th, they took a stool sample, and by the 25th of August, it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio. By August 30th, a genetic test was done, and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had.

Now it could have come from one of two places. It could have come from Nepal, just to the north, across the border, or from Jharkhand, a state just to the south. Luckily, the genetic testing proved that, in fact, this strand came north, because, had it come from the south, it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission. So many more people would have been affected. So what's the endgame? Well on September 4th, there was a huge mop-up campaign, which is what you do in polio. They went out and, where Shriram lives, they vaccinated two million people. So in less than a month, we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program. And I'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio. That's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading, and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands; they can save lives.

Now one of the challenges in polio, still, is marketing, but it might not be what you think. It's not the marketing on the ground. It's not telling the parents, "If you see paralysis, take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated." We have a problem with marketing in the donor community. The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years, but we're starting to have something called polio fatigue, and that is that the donor nations aren't willing to fund polio any longer. So by next summer, we're sighted to run out of money on polio. So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal, and we're about to run short of money. And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational, if we could focus as a community on how far we've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease, we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us. And if we could do that, we could stop vaccinating everybody, worldwide, in all of our countries for polio. And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. And we are so close. And this victory is so possible.

So if Coke's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness, I'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms. To me, that is deep happiness. And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector, then in the future we make together, that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Anna Deavere Smith's American character

2010-10-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Video and Transcript: TED

So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, "If you say a word often enough, it becomes you." And having grown up in a segregated city, Baltimore, Maryland, I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder -- thank God for technology -- to interview people, thinking that if I walked in their words -- which is also why I don't wear shoes when I perform -- if I walked in their words, that I could sort of absorb America. I was also inspired by Walt Whitman, who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him.

So these four characters are going to be from that work that I've been doing for many years now, and well over -- I don't know, a couple of thousand people I've interviewed. Anybody out here old enough to know Studs Terkel, that old radio man? So I thought he would be the perfect person to go to to ask about a defining moment in American history. You know, he was "born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, greatest ship every built. Hits the tip of an iceberg, and bam, it went down. It went down and I came up. Wow, some century." (Laughter)

So this is his answer about a defining moment in American history. Defining moment in American history, I don't think there's one; you can't say Hiroshima, that's a big one -- I can't think of any one moment I would say is a defining moment. The gradual slippage -- slippage is the word used by the people in Watergate, moral slippage -- it's a gradual kind of thing, combination of things. You see, we also have the technology. I say, less and less the human touch.

Oh, let me kind of tell you a funny little play bit. The Atlanta airport is a modern airport, and they should leave the gate there. These trains that take you out to a concourse and on to a destination. And these trains are smooth, and they're quiet and they're efficient. And there's a voice on the train, you know the voice was a human voice. You see in the old days we had robots, robots imitated humans. Now we have humans imitating robots. So we got this voice on this train: Concourse One: Omaha, Lincoln. Concourse Two: Dallas, Fort Worth. Same voice. Just as a train is about to go, a young couple rush in and they're just about to close the pneumatic doors. And that voice, without losing a beat, says, "Because of late entry, we're delayed 30 seconds." Just then, everybody's looking at this couple with hateful eyes and the couple's going like this, you know, shrinking. Well, I'd happened to have had a couple of drinks before boarding -- I do that to steel my nerves -- and so I imitate a train call, holding my hand on my -- "George Orwell, your time has come," you see. Well, some of you are laughing. Everybody laughs when I say that, but not on this train. Silence. And so suddenly they're looking at me. So here I am with the couple, the three of us shrinking at the foot of Calvary about to be up, you know.

Just then I see a baby, a little baby in the lap of a mother. I know it's Hispanic because she's speaking Spanish to her companion. So I'm going to talk to the baby. So I say to the baby, holding my hand over my mouth because my breath must be 100 proof, I say to the baby, "Sir or Madam, what is your considered opinion of the human species?" And the baby looks, you know, the way babies look at you clearly, starts laughing, starts busting out with this crazy little laugh. I say, "Thank God for a human reaction, we haven't lost yet."

But you see, the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. You know, you see, you've got to question the official truth. You know the thing that was so great about Mark Twain -- you know we honor Mark Twain, but we don't read him. We read Huck Finn, of course, we read Huck Finn of course. I mean, Huck, of course, was tremendous. Remember that great scene on the raft, remember what Huck did? You see, here's Huck, he's an illiterate kid, he's had no schooling, but there's something in him. And the official truth, the truth was, the law was, that a black man was a property, was a thing, you see.

And Huck gets on the raft with a property named Jim, a slave, see. And he hears that Jim is going to go and take his wife and kids and steal them from the woman who owns them, and Huck says, "Ooh, oh my God, ooh, ooh -- that woman, that woman never did anybody any harm. Ooh, he's going to steal, he's going to steal, he's going to do a terrible thing." Just then, two slavers caught up, guys chasing slaves, looking for Jim. "Anybody up on that raft with you?" Huck says, "Yeah." "Is he black or white?" "White." And they go off. And Huck said, "Oh my God, oh my God, I lied, I lied, ooh, I did a terrible thing, did a terrible thing -- why do I feel so good?"

But it's the goodness of Huck, that stuff that Huck's been made of, you see, all been buried, it's all been buried. So the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. So you ask about a defining moment. Ain't no defining moment in American history for me. It's an accretion of moments that add up to where we are now, where trivia becomes news. And more and more, less and less awareness of the pain or the other. Huh. You know, I don't know if you could use this or not, but I was quoting Wright Morris, a writer from Nebraska, who says, we're more and more into communications and less and less into communication. Okay, kids, I got to scram, got to go see my cardiologist. And that's Studs Terkel. (Applause)

So, talk about risk taking. I'm going to do somebody that nobody likes. You know most actors want to do characters that are likeable -- well, not always, but the notion, especially at a conference like this, I like to inspire people. But since this was called risk taking, I'm doing somebody who I never do, because she's so unlikeable that one person actually came backstage and told me to take her out of the show she was in. And I'm doing her because I think we think of risk, at a conference like this, as a good thing.

But there are certain other connotations to the word risk, and the same thing about the word nature. What is nature? Maxine Greene, who's a wonderful philosopher who's as old as Studs, and was the head of a philosophy -- great, big philosophy kind of an organization, I went to her and asked her what are the two things that she doesn't know, that she still wants to know. And she said, "Well, personally, I still feel like I have to curtsey when I see the president of my university. And I still feel as though I've got to get coffee for my male colleagues, even though I've outlived most of them." And she said, "And then intellectually, I don't know enough about the negative imagination. And September 11th certainly taught us that that's a whole area we don't investigate."

So this piece is about a negative imagination. It raises questions about what nature is, what Mother Nature is, and about what a risk can be. And I got this in the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women. Everything I do is word for word off of a tape. And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems, and this is called "A Mirror to Her Mouth." And this is an inmate named Paulette Jenkins.

"I began to learn how to cover it up, because I didn't want nobody to know that this was happening in my home. I want everybody to think we were a normal family. I mean we had all the materialistic things, but that didn't make my children pain any less; that didn't make their fears subside. I ran out of excuses about how we got black eyes and busted lips and bruises. I didn't had no more excuses. And he beat me too. But that didn't change the fact that it was a nightmare for my family, it was a nightmare. And I failed them dramatically, because I allowed it to go on and on and on.

But the night that Myesha got killed -- and the intensity just grew and grew and grew, until one night we came home from getting drugs, and he got angry with Myesha, and he started beating her, and he put her in a bathtub. Oh, he would use a belt. He had a belt because he had this warped perverted thing that Myesha was having sex with her little brother and they was fondling each other -- that would be his reason. I'm just talking about the particular night that she died. And so he put her in the bathtub, and I was in the bedroom with the baby.

And four months before this happened, four months before Myesha died, I thought I could really fix this man. So I had a baby by him -- insane -- Thinking that if I gave him his own kid, he would leave mine alone. And it didn't work, didn't work. And I ended up with three children, Houston, Myesha and Dominic, who was four months old when I came to jail.

And I was in the bedroom. Like I said, he had her in the bathroom and he -- he -- every time he hit her, she would fall. And she would hit her head on the tub. It happened continuously, repeatedly. I could hear it, but I dared not to move. I didn't move. I didn't even go and see what was happening. I just sat there and listened. And then he put her in the hallway. He told her, just set there. And so she set there for about four or five hours. And then he told her, get up. And when she got up, she says she couldn't see. Her face was bruised. She had a black eye. All around her head was just swollen; her head was about two sizes of its own size. I told him, let her go to sleep. He let her go to sleep.

The next morning she was dead. He went in to check on her for school, and he got very excited. He says, she won't breathe. I knew immediately that she was dead. I didn't even want to accept the fact that she was dead, so I went in and I put a mirror to her mouth -- there was no thing, nothing, coming out of her mouth. He said, he said, he said, we can't, we can't let nobody find out about this. He say, you've got to help me. I agree. I agree.

I mean, I've been keeping a secret for years and years and years, so it just seemed like second hand to me, just to keep on keeping it a secret. So we went to the mall and we told a police that we had, like, lost her, that she was missing. We told a security guard that she was missing; though she wasn't missing. And we told the security guard what we had put on her and we went home and we dressed her in exactly the same thing that we had told the security guard that we had put on her.

And then we got the baby and my other child, and we drove out to, like, I-95. I was so petrified and so numb, all I could look was in the rear-view mirror. And he just laid her right on the shoulder of the highway. My own child, I let that happen to. So that's an investigation of the negative imagination. (Applause)

When I started this project called On the Road: A Search For an American Character with my tape recorder, I thought that I was going to go around America and find it in all its aspects -- bull riders, cowboys, pig farmers, drum majorettes -- but I sort of got tripped on race relations, because my first big show was a show about a race riot. And so I went to both -- two race riots, one of which was the Los Angeles riot. And this next piece is from that. Because this is what I would say I've learned the most about race relations, from this piece. It's a kind of an aria, I would say, and in many tapes that I have.

Everybody knows that the Los Angeles riots happened because four cops beat up a black man named Rodney King. It was captured on video tape -- technology -- and it was played all over the world. Everybody thought the four cops would go to jail. They did not, so there were riots. And what a lot of people forget, is there was a second trial, ordered by George Bush, Sr. And that trial came back with two cops going to jail and two cops declared innocent. I was at that trial. And I mean, the people just danced in the streets because they were afraid there was going to be another riot. Explosion of joy that this verdict had come back this way.

So there was a community that didn't -- the Korean-Americans, whose stores had been burned to the ground. And so this woman, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, I suppose will have taught me the most that I have learned about race. And she asks also a question that Studs talks about: this notion of the official truth, to question the official truth. So what she's questioning here, she's taking a chance and questioning what justice is in society. And this is called, "Swallowing the Bitterness."

I used to believe America was the best. I watched in Korea many luxurious Hollywood lifestyle movie. I never saw any poor man, any black. Until 1992, I used to believe America was the best -- I still do, I don't deny that because I am a victim. But at the end of '92, when we were in such turmoil, and having all the financial problems, and all the mental problems, I began to really realize that Koreans are completely left out of this society and we are nothing. Why? Why do we have to be left out? We didn't qualify for medical treatment, no food stamp, no GR,

no welfare, anything. Many African-Americans who never work got minimum amount of money to survive. We didn't get any because we have a car and a house. And we are high taxpayer. Where do I find justice? OK. OK. OK. OK. Many African-Americans probably think that they won by the trial. I was sitting here watching them the morning after the verdict, and all the day they were having a party, they celebrated, all of South Central, all the churches. And they say, well, finally justice has been done in this society. Well, what about victims' rights? They got their rights by destroying innocent Korean merchants. They have a lot of respect, as I do, for Dr. Martin King. He is the only model for black community; I don't care Jesse Jackson. He is the model of non-violence, non-violence -- and they would all like to be in his spirit.

But what about 1992? They destroyed innocent people. And I wonder if that is really justice for them, to get their rights in that way. I was swallowing the bitterness, sitting here alone and watching them. They became so hilarious, but I was happy for them. I was glad for them. At least they got something back, OK. Let's just forget about Korean victims and other victims who were destroyed by them. They fought for their rights for over two centuries, and maybe because they sacrifice other minorities, Hispanic, Asian, we would suffer more in the mainstream. That's why I understand, that's why I have a mixed feeling about the verdict.

But I wish that, I wish that, I wish that I could be part of the enjoyment. I wish that I could live together with black people. But after the riot, it's too much difference. The fire is still there. How do you say it? [Unclear]. Igniting, igniting, igniting fire. Igniting fire. It's still there; it can burst out any time. Mrs. Young-Soon Han. (Applause)

The other reason that I don't wear shoes is just in case I really feel like I have to cuddle up and get into the feet of somebody, walking really in somebody else's shoes. And I told you that in -- you know, I didn't give you the year, but in '79 I thought that I was going to go around and find bull riders and pig farmers and people like that, and I got sidetracked on race relations.

Finally, I did find a bull rider, two years ago. And I've been going to the rodeos with him, and we've bonded. And he's the lead in an op-ed I did about the Republican Convention. He's a Republican -- I won't say anything about my party affiliation, but anyway -- so this is my dear, dear Brent Williams, and this is on toughness, in case anybody needs to know about being tough for the work that you do. I think there's a real lesson in this. And this is called "Toughness."

Well, I'm an optimist. I mean basically I'm an optimist. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like my wife, Jolene, her family's always saying, you know, you ever think he's just a born loser, it seems like he has so much bad luck, you know. But then when that bull stepped on my kidney, you know, I didn't lose my kidney -- I could have lost my kidney, I kept my kidney, so I don't think I'm a born loser. I think that's good luck. (Laughter)

And, I mean, funny things like this happen. I was in a doctor's office last CAT scan, and there was a Reader's Digest, October 2002. It was like, seven ways to get lucky. And it says if you want to get lucky, you know, you've got to be around positive people. I mean, like even when I told my wife that you want to come out here and talk to me, she's like, she's just talking, she's just being nice to you. She's not going to do that.

And then you called me up and you said you wanted to come out here and interview me and she went and looked you up on the Internet. She said, look who she is. You're not even going to be able to answer her questions. (Laughter) And she was saying you're going to make me look like an idiot because I've never been to college, and I wouldn't be talking professional or anything. I said, well look, the woman talked to me for four hours. You know, if I wasn't talking -- you know, like, you know, she wanted me to talk, I don't think she would even come out here.

Confidence? Well, I think I ride more out of determination than confidence. I mean, confidence is like, you know, you've been on that bull before you know you can ride him. I mean, confidence is kind of like being cocky, but in a good way. But determination, you know, it's like just, you know, "Fuck the form, get the horn." (Laughter) That's Tuff Hedeman, in the movie 8 Seconds. I mean, like, Pat O'Mealey always said when I was a boy, he say, you know, you got more try than any kid I ever seen. And try and determination is the same thing. Determination is like, you're going to hang on that bull, even if you're riding upside down. Determination's like, you're going to ride till your head hits the back of the dirt.

Freedom? It would have to be the rodeo.

Beauty? I don't think I know what beauty is. Well, you know, I guess that'd have to be the rodeo too. I mean, look how we are, the roughy family, palling around and shaking hands and wrestling around me. It's like, you know, racking up our credit cards on entry fees and gas. We ride together, we, you know, we, we eat together and we sleep together. I mean, I can't even imagine what it's going to be like the last day I rodeo. I mean, I'll be all right. I mean, I have my ranch and everything, but I actually don't even want to think the day that comes. I mean, I guess it will just be like -- I guess it will be like the day my brother died.

Toughness? Well, we was in West Jordan, Utah, and this bull shoved my face right through the metal shoots in a -- you know, busted my face all up and had to go to the hospital. And they had to sew me up and straighten my nose out. And I had to go and ride in the rodeo that night, so I didn't want them to put me under anesthesia, or whatever you call it. And so they sewed my face up. And then they had to straighten out my nose, and they took these rods and shoved them up my nose and went up through my brains and felt like it was coming out the top of my head, and everybody said that it should have killed me, but it didn't, because I guess I have a high tolerance for pain. (Laughter) But the good thing was, once they shoved those rods up there and straightened my nose out, I could breathe, and I hadn't been able to breathe since I broke my nose in the high school rodeo.

Thank you. (Applause)

Tim Jackson's economic reality check

2010-10-08T19:30:00.000-07:00

Video and Transcript: TED

I want to talk to you today about prosperity, about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity. And not just us, but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished. And hope actually is at the heart of this. In fact, the Latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity. "Pro-speras," "speras," hope -- in accordance with our hopes and expectations. The irony is, though, that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth. And we've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope -- running down resources, cutting down rainforests, spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, changing the climate -- and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession. And recession, of course, isn't exactly a recipe for hope either, as we're busy finding out. So we're caught in a kind of trap. It's a dilemma, a dilemma of growth. We can't live with it; we can't live without it. Trash the system or crash the planet. It's a tough choice. It isn't much of a choice. And our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently. Now I haven't got anything against efficiency. And I think we are a clever species sometimes. But I think we should also just check the numbers, take a reality check here.

So I want you to imagine a world, in 2050, of around nine billion people, all aspiring to Western incomes, Western lifestyles. And I want to ask the question -- and we'll give them that two percent hike in income, in salary each years as well, because we believe in growth. And I want to ask the question: how far and how fast would be have to move? How clever would we have to be? How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets? And here in my chart. On the left-hand side is where we are now. This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment. It's around about 770 grams of carbon. In the world I describe to you, we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon. It's a 130-fold improvement, and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we've ever achieved in industrial history. Maybe we can do it, maybe it's possible -- who knows? Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which is what we're going to need to be doing by the end of the century. But shouldn't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement?

So I want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics. It's a bit complex, and I apologize for that. What I'll try and do, is I'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms. So it looks a little bit like this. Firms produce goods for households -- that's us -- and provide us with incomes, and that's even better, because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services. That's called the circular flow of the economy. It looks harmless enough. I just want to highlight one key feature of this system, which is the role of investment. Now investment constitutes only about a fifth of the national income in most modern economies, but it plays an absolutely vital role. And what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth. It does this in a couple of ways -- chasing productivity, which drives down prices and encourages us to buy more stuff. But I want to concentrate on the role of investment in seeking out novelty, the production and consumption of novelty. Joseph Schumpeter called this "the process of creative destruction." It's a process of the production and reproduction of novelty, continually chasing expanding consumer markets, consumer goods, new consumer goods.

And this, this is where it gets interesting, because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty. We love new stuff -- new material stuff for sure -- but also new ideas, new adventures, new experiences. But the materiality matters too. Because, in every society that anthropologists have looked at, material stuff operates as a kind of language, a language of goods, a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories -- stories, for example, about how important we are. Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty. And here, all of a sudden, we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic -- the economic institutions, and who we are as people, locked together to drive an engine of growth. And this engine is not just economic value; it is pulling material resources relentlessly through the system, driven by our own insatiable appetites, driven in fact by a sense of anxiety. Adam Smith, 200 years ago, spoke about our desire for a life without shame. A life without shame: in his day, what that meant was linen shirts, and today, well, you still need the shirt, but you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the netbook and iPad, the list goes on -- an almost inexhaustible supply of goods, driven by this anxiety. And even if we don't want them, we need to buy them, because, if we don't buy them, the system crashes. And to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades, we've expanded the money supply, expanded credit and debt, so that people can keep buying stuff. And of course, that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis.

But this -- I just want to show you some data here. This is what it looks like, essentially, this credit and debt system, just for the U.K. This was the last 15 years before the crash. And you can see there, consumer debt rose dramatically. It was above the GDP for three years in a row just before the crisis. And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted. The savings ratio, net savings, were below zero in the middle of 2008, just before the crash. This is people expanding debt, drawing down their savings, just to stay in the game. This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economists behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down. They want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" -- saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even farther, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.

Here's another one -- completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after -- actually, to be honest, too long after -- we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" (Laughter) "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.

(Laughter)

What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist depicted in Rembrandt's lovely, lovely sketch here? Well psychology actually says there is a tension, a tension between self-regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors. And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots. So selfish behavior is adaptive in certain circumstances -- fight or flight.

But other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings. And perhaps even more interesting from our point of view, another tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and tradition or conservation. Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself. Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups. So here, all of a sudden, we're looking at a map of the human heart. And it reveals to us, suddenly, the crux of the matter. What we've done is we've created economies. We've created systems, which systematically privilege, encourage, one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded. And in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because this isn't, therefore, about changing human nature. It isn't, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It is about opening up. It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the debt and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect Rembrandt's fragile altruist within.

What does all this mean for economics? What would economies look like if we took that vision of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche? Well, it might look a little bit like the 4,000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States, enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their heart, companies, in fact, like this one, Ecosia. And I just want to, very quickly, show you this. Ecosia is an Internet search engine. Internet search engines work by drawing revenues from sponsored links that appear when you do a search. And Ecosia works in pretty much the same way. So we can do that here. We can just put in a little search term. There you go, Oxford, that's where we are. See what comes up. The difference with Ecosia though is that, in Ecosia's case, it draws the revenues in the same way, but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon. And we're going to do it. We're just going to click on Naturejobs.uk. In case anyone out there is looking for a job in a recession, that's the page to go to. And what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to Ecosia, and Ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project. It's taking profits from one place and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources.

It's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy. It's a form, if you like, of ecological altruism -- perhaps something along those lines. Maybe it's that. Whatever it is, whatever this new economy is, what we need the economy to do, in fact, is to put investment back into the heart of the model, to re-conceive investment. Only now, investment isn't going to be about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth. Investment has to be a different beast. Investment has to be, in the new economy, protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends. It has to be about transition. It has to be investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures. We have to invest, in fact, in the idea of a meaningful prosperity, providing capabilities for people to flourish.

And of course, this task has material dimensions. It would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they didn't have food, clothing and shelter. But it's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this. It has social and psychological aims -- family, friendship, commitments, society, participating in the life of that society. And this too requires investment, investment, for example, in places, places where we can connect, places where we can participate, shared spaces, concert halls, gardens, public parks, libraries, museums, quiet centers, places of joy and celebration, places of tranquility and contemplation, sites for the "cultivation of a common citizenship" in Michael Sandel's lovely phrase. An investment -- investment, after all, is just such a basic economic concept -- is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future, a shared present and a common future. And we need that relationship to reflect, to reclaim hope.

So let me come back, with this sense of hope, to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door. What can we offer those people? It's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty. It's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations. And it's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model. So this is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy. In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when "Prosperity Without Growth" was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu says, "I am because we are." Prosperity is a shared endeavor. Its roots are long and deep. Its foundations, I've tried to show, exist already, inside each of us. So this is not about standing in the way of development. It's not about overthrowing capitalism. It's not about trying to change human nature. What we're doing here is we're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose. And at the heart of that economics, we're placing a more credible, more robust, and more realistic vision of what it means to be human.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: While they're taking the podium away, just a quick question. First of all, economists aren't supposed to be inspiring, so you may need to work on the tone a little. (Laughter) Can you picture the politicians every buying into this? I mean, can you picture a politician standing up in Britain and saying, "GDP fell two percent this year. Good news! We're actually all happier, and a country's more beautiful, and our lives are better."

Tim Jackson: Well that's clearly not what you're doing. You're not making new out of things falling down. You're making news out of the things that tell you that we're flourishing. Can I picture politicians doing it? Actually, I already am seeing a little bit of it. When we first started this kind of work, politicians would stand up, treasury spokesmen would stand up, and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves. And actually in the period through which we've been working over the last 18 years -- partly because of the financial crisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economics -- actually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world.

CA: But is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together, or is it going to be more just civil society and companies?

TJ: It has to be companies. It has to be civil society. But it has to have political leadership. This is a kind of agenda, which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma, because they're hooked on the growth model themselves. But actually opening up the space to think about different ways of governing, different kinds of politics, and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operate differently -- absolutely vital.

CA: And if someone could convince you that we actually can make the -- what was it? -- the 130-fold improvement in efficiency, of reduction of carbon footprint, would you then actually like that picture of economic growth into more knowledge-based goods?

TJ: I would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century, in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water. If you can convince me we can do all that, then, yes, I would take the two percent.

CA: Tim, thank you for a very important talk. Thank you.

(Applause)

Inaugural address of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961 (Part 1/2)

2010-10-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

Transcript: American Rhetoric

Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, reverend clergy, fellow citizens:

We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom -- symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning -- signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge -- and more.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do -- for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom -- and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -- not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge: to convert our good words into good deeds, in a new alliance for progress, to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support -- to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective, to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak, and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.

Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course -- both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.

So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms, and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

Read Part 2