Former President Clinton in his remarks at the London Business School, looks at the challenges facing the global community and how private citizens can make significant contributions in addressing those challenges.
March 28, 2006 London Business School Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you Laura. I am honored to be here. I want to begin by thanking Laura Tyson for the immeasurable contribution that she made to economic policy making when I was President. I intend to speak relatively briefly today, so we can leave maximum time for questions. I find that tends to be better, particularly in an academic setting. And besides that I’ve spent several years asking Laura Tyson questions; so I think its only fair that she spent a few minutes asking me some.
I was quite interested when I left the white house in what people who played important roles in my presidency would do. I was thrilled when Laura came here; because I actually believe that business schools are more important than ever in preparing people not only for private sector roles in the global economy, but also for understanding their roles as citizens in their own nations and communities. I would like to present an on overview. I just came from a meeting on globalization at Guild Hall with Gordon Brown where he and I talked and answered a few questions. But as I said, what I would like to do today is give you a basic outline.
Laura described part of what I try to do in my life now. When I got out of the White House, I wanted to find areas where I could still be effective that I cared about as President, where I could still have an impact. There are a lot of things I cared about as President where I can’t still have an impact. One nice thing about not being in office is that I can say whatever I think. Sadly not as many people care what I think anymore, but at least I can say it. I think it is quite important that all of you have a worldview. A sense of what this moment in history is, what its vast opportunities are and what its challenges are. It doesn’t have to be my worldview but you need one. Otherwise everyday when you pick up the paper you will feel that you are wading through the political equivalent of chaos theory in physics, that there apparently unrelated events.
I would also encourage you that when you read about things to try to distinguish between the headlines and the trend lines. If there is an item in the news, is it something that is part of a larger movement, and if so, how does it fit in? Most people talk about this being the age of globalization, I far prefer the term interdependence because it connotes things another than economics. The world economy was actually about as globalized as it is today before World War I, but there were a lot of other discontinuities that don’t exist today; and therefore I think that we are less likely to get into a nation state war or set of wars that could sweep the globe than we were over a hundred years ago. The interdependence that we have can be good or bad. It simply means that we can’t escape each other. If you look at this audience, you’ll see mostly good. Otherwise you couldn’t be here today; instead you’d be out scratching out a living somewhere. And if you look at the audience,
I am sure that it is much more diverse than it would have been, if a former American president were giving a speech like this 30 years ago. That too is a reflection of interdependence. Almost no mater what happens, most of you will do quite well, but there are negative aspects to a purely independent world where people can’t escape each other. 9/11 was an interdependent event. We had 19 people from The Middle East use open borders, easy travel, easy access to information and technology to come to the United States and embed themselves in our society and turn three, they hoped four, giant jet airplanes into massive chemical weapons. Those were chemical weapons of mass destruction. They could get the plans for the World Trade Center. They knew perfectly well that in order to build those buildings that high, they had to be able to float with the wind. And so the steel girders in the frame weren’t reinforced with concrete in the way the empire state building is, so if you hit them with that much fuel and they exploded, the frame of the building would melt and bring it down.
All because of globalization, the availability of information, the understanding of the basic architecture and the impact of certain amount of heat generated in the way it was. It seems to me fairly straightforward that the major mission of our time should be to move from an inheritably unstable and unequal interdependence, to a more integrated world locally, nationally and globally. And to me, every successfully integrated community or organization has three characteristics: you have equal opportunities, shared responsibilities and shared values, shared sense of belonging and community that crosses all the lines that would otherwise divide us. What is keeping us from that sort of movement and what we need to do? I think that there are four challenges all of which have economic components and other components. There is a security challenge. It has been warped by overemphasis on what happened in Iraq. But there is a security challenge from terror, weapons of mass destruction, slaughter of innocents in place like Darfur and from the threat of global epidemics in an interdependent world. The security challenges are best addressed cooperatively.
Our position should be that we will cooperate whenever we can, and act alone only when me must, not the reverse. That’s really what got so much opposition to the Iraq operation. It seemed that we will do what we want, and cooperate if we have to, and then after it was over we needed more help than we dreamed, but the fundamental fact is that the most important thing that happened in the war on terror since 9/11 is that over 3,500 people have been arrested because people none of you have ever met, or most of you never have, the thousands upon thousands of people working together in every country, over 95% of the people who were apprehended were apprehended outside of the United States by people other than American officials; because we were all working together, and we weren’t the only target. But you had terrorist operations here, Indonesia, Philippines all across the world. We have to deal with it cooperatively.
The same thing is true with an effort to control the production and distribution of materials which can be turned into dangerous weapons, biological, chemical and nuclear. With an emphasis on rebuilding nuclear power, the key question is not whether nuclear power is inherently dangerous, but whether the production of nuclear materials would be sufficiently subject to being made into weapons. If you use plutonium to run a power plant, you just take the splint fuel rods out; and if you have enough you can make a bomb. If you use enriched uranium, you have to enrich it much more to make a bomb. But we need to know what countries can and can’t do, what they are committed to do and what the inspection systems are. With regard to the problems of Darfur and similar problems, it’s clear to me that part of the UN reform ought to be the ability to raise and deploy a sufficiently muscular force with a sufficiently broad mandate to stop things like that.
Right now the African Union is in Darfur essentially at the sufferance at the Sudanese government who permits people to be killed and is now going into neighboring Chad, the Janjaweed are and they say that nobody but African troops can come here. The UN is beginning to get fed up with this, but we should have long since done something about it. All the NATO countries don’t have to send troops there, but we do have to provide logistics as we have already helped people to move in. There are lots of countries, even Muslim countries that would be willing to go there. I think that the Bangladeshis would.
The Indians and Pakistanis are getting along better; they should be asked to send a joint force there. And what we generally need is a much more automatic trigger to move into these places more quickly with a broader mandate. Otherwise we are going to have more Darfurs for political reasons. With regard to infectious disease, I think that the world did a good job with SARS. The Chinese were originally in denial. They turned on a dime, and they worked with the Canadians and others. SARS could have killed tens of thousands of people, and it was shut down in its tracks by international cooperation. There is a lot of vigilance now about avian influenza. There is a lot of work being done to stock pile vaccines and an enormous amount of information sharing. So that now if a chicken comes down with avian influenza in Romania, we all know that they killed every chicken within two square kilometers. We laugh about it, but it is a good thing that we know about it. And so far we are on top of this, but never forget that between 1918 and 1920 in a less much mobile world when the population were rendered mobile by World War I, soldiers were and then they all went back home. Somewhere between 25-50 million people died from an unchecked influenza virus. In today’s population’s terms, that could be 150 to 200 million people. This is a very serious thing. We even have cases of airport malaria where people are exposed passing each other at airports. That is the first issue we have to address. The second thing that I would like to talk briefly about is global warming. I believe that it is the only existential threat that, those of you who are students here, your generation faces.
It could literally undermine your ability to raise your children and grandchildren. A whole spade of new books and studies have come out in the last couple of months, and I will just cite two or three. A dig through the ice pac in Antarctica, deeper than any before it had achieved has enabled us to measure the pattern of climate warming in the last two hundred years. The climate is warming more rapidly than anytime in the last two hundred thousand years. Homosapiens stood up on the planes of the savannah in East Africa somewhere between 130,000-150,000 years ago. This goes back before the time when our species was on the planet. The last ice age receded 15,000 years ago that allowed people to move across the globe. They were five civilizations on earth five thousands years ago. We are playing with serious fire.
The Indians and Chinese are in this huge fight now to see who can get the most oil. We may be at a point of peak oil production. You may see $100 a barrel oil in the next two or three years, but what still is driving this globalization is the idea that is you cannot possibly get rich, stay rich and get richer; if you don’t release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That was true in the industrial era; it is simply factually not true. What is true is that the old energy economy is well organized, financed and connected politically. The new energy economy is underfinanced, under organized, entrepreneurial and in need of the type of research and development work that we routinely did when we were trying to sequence the human genome or go into space. But just with existing technologies for conservation and clean energy, we can more than meet the Kyoto protocols if we were remotely serious about the targets and in the process create jobs in the developed and developing world on a scale that is otherwise unimaginable to me. It is just a question of whether we accept this, but I can only tell you that I have studied this data seriously. I consider it an existential threat to your future. It may be the most remote security threat you face, but the only one who has the chance to change the life of everybody on the plant for the worst. And yet it is a phenomenal opportunity.
The third thing you have to face is that when you come to London Business School and equip yourself to do well and believe in the global economy over half the people are not benefiting from it. In the developing world, half the folks still live on $2 a day or less, a billion people on a dollar a day, a billion people go to bed hungry every night, a billion people have no access to clean water, 2.5 billion people have no access to sanitation, 1 in 4 deaths every year from AIDS, TB, Malaria, and infections related to unclean water mostly cholera and diarrhea. Three million people will die from water related illnesses this year; 80 percent of them are under than 5 years of age. Most of them will not make enough money in six months to buy what the nicest neck ties in this audience cost. So it is important to realize that if we really to live in an interdependent world; we have to get the 130 million kids who aren’t in school in school. We have to have a much more serious response to the epidemics that don’t kill anybody, for all practical purposes, in the UK and America anymore that are still ravaging the world. And we have to economically empower people who are just as smart and hardworking as you are but they don’t have the same access to education and opportunity.
And the fourth thing we have to do is keep improving our conditions here at home, wherever home is in the developed world, because there are many people in the developed world who feel very threatened by the large numbers of new jobs coming online in India and China. For the first time in my lifetime a really good education is no longer an absolute guarantee of lifetime employment at a fairly high level. We are seeing an outsourcing of jobs now from wealthy countries to developing ones particularly to China and India of higher education level jobs. In America the average person who loses his or her job, the next one they can find today pays a stunning 40 percent less than the one they lost. So if we lose the ability to guarantee both opportunity and a certain level of social security within developed countries; we will destroy the consciences in those countries for the investments in the developing world that are so important in bringing our world together. Therefore, you can’t view the economic angst that exist in the form of anti-immigration polices, anti- trade polices, and anti-labor reform polices as you are seeing in France and Germany with the imperative of doing more in the developing world. The two things are divided.
You simply can’t have a global economy without some notion of global political and social policy that will help to bring us together. I have a strong preference for markets they do well to create wealth and allocate goods and services. I have a strong conviction that you still have to have a government response to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to access the market, to limit its abuses, to hold it accountable and to get into new areas that clearly are required for our future prosperity, like the economic opportunities of China. The final thing that I want to say is that private citizens have more power to do public good than ever before because of the rise of in the NGOs as a global movement in the developed and developing world alike. It is no accident that TIME Magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono as their people of the year, people who have never had any political office, but had done enormous public good as private citizens. Laura talked about the Clinton Global Initiative; we raised two and a half billion dollars in two days for action to fight poverty by economic empowerment, to find economic opportunities in climate change, to improve governance in poor countries and to bridge the religious divides that are so wrenching for us everyday.
My AIDS project provides medicine to about 250, 000 people a day at the lowest cost in the world; because NGOs can operate more efficiently than governments can because we organize the market for medicine and cut the cost drastically. Now we are treating children, bringing rural healthcare, trying to build a structure that goes way beyond the ability to treat HIV and AIDS. But I will just give you one example of a big challenge. When you read in the papers that there are 44 million people who are HIV positive, it’s a guess. No one knows. Why? Because 90 percent of the HIV positive people in the world do not know that they are. All those numbers are extrapolations from the number of people on treatment or the number of people who die every year or who are being cared for sick in the hospital with full-blown AIDS. And you when extrapolate that in any given environment, 10-15% of the HIV positive people will have to have medicine to stay alive. So you take the number of people being cared for in a hospital, the number that are on medicine, the number of people who die and you extrapolate up, but no one knows because 90% of the people don’t know. So we worked hard to cut the cost of testing which is now virtually instantaneous.
You can find out in fifteen to twenty minutes, if you are HIV positive. From about three dollars to take to the test down to about 50 cents. And we need to test about 200 million people in the world. This was an unpopular thing the eighties because of the stigma attached to AIDS and because there wasn’t anything you could do about before the medicine existed. You were just telling people they were going to die. Now, it is irresponsible not to test everybody in high-risk groups in all the countries with significant instances of AIDS. Lesotho, a country of 2.2 million people surrounded by South Africa with the third highest infection rate in the world at 27 percent. This year will become the first country ever to test every single citizen over 12, and good for them, they are going to protect people from discrimination; and they have a chance to save their country. So these are the kinds of things that I think we should be doing that the NGO movement can have a big role in. The final thing that I want to say is fairly simple but maybe the most important of all. People ask me all the time, okay I get how we can push for equal and shared opportunities; I get how we can have shared responsibilities for security and climate change, but how in the world can we ever have a shared sense of community with all the different religious and other problems we have?
Look at the religious and Danish cartoons, and my answer is that first of all I did not have a problem with the legal right of the Danes to run whatever cartoons they wanted. And they were mild compared to some of cartoons that have been run against me. There were times when I thought my whole eight years was the subject of a cartoon. I did have a problem with the physical depiction of the Prophet because it blasphemy in Islam. And I am not even sure that the cartoonist or the publisher knew that when they did it, but the overreaction in several countries and the people that were there was a hideous mistake; because we blew an opportunity to launch a whole religious dialogue between Muslims and Christians, and Jews and Sikh and Buddhist, the whole nine yards. This could have been a phenomenal opportunity. Underneath all of this, most people who use religion as an excuse to kill are just politicians trying to get power. In every religion there is a conviction that there is a truth, but there is a very great deal of difference between saying there is a truth and saying that any person in this lifetime can be in full possession of it, much less turn it into a political program that is fully true, so that if you reject it you don’t deserve to live.
All we have to do it build a global community, an integrated global community, is to have people believe that every person is entitled to dignity and a chance, that competition is good but cooperation works better, that our differences are really important but our common humanity matters more. Because nobody is in full possession of the truth, that may be the most important struggle of all. And the question of whether those of us who are doing well are alive to the problems of people within our own societies who are not doing well and to that whole world out there that has been left behind. You can get up here about all the platitudes you want about who great this is, but if half the people aren’t a part of it in the end the system will collapse. So I ask all of you to think about that. Most of you will probably not go into government service. Most of you will go into the public sector. But you have an unprecedented opportunity to do public good. So I hope that whatever you do with your lifes part of your endeavors will involve being apart of non-governmental movement to deal with some of these challenges first because you can and second because you should.
Thank you very much.
