Transcript:

Well economics is a very under appreciated way of looking at the problems that face poor people, and face human beings in general operating in society. It’s really just a set of common sense principals that have gotten refined over time through a lot of trial and error, a lot of thinking by a lot of people over the last two centuries since Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations”. About very simple concepts like how we can both mutually benefit if we trade with each other. You know, if I give you something that you want more in return for something that I want more, we both benefit. And there are positive gains from that trade. That’s a very simple insight, but that has been an enormous engine for human progress, a simple insight like that coming out of economics. Or the whole idea of the invisible hand. A complex economy that creates riches is not designed by anyone. There’s nobody who designed it. It just arises spontaneously through the free market, and the invisible hand through the decentralized actions of lots of just self-seeking, selfish individuals who are each just pursuing their own interests. That’s how people achieve wealth. And those kinds of simple insights which have been so neglected throughout the history of fighting world poverty . . . because we’re always . . . The approach in fighting world poverty is, “Oh, we have to come up with some government expert plan. We have to get someone to devise the expert plan that will lift poor people out of poverty.” Well that’s not what economics says. Economics says there’s this genius of the invisible hand that makes wealth happen without anyone intending it through individuals operating in the free market, trading with each other specializing in what their good at. And they create wealth, and the wealth spreads, and people are lifted out of poverty.

Well these days I’m best known for the critique of foreign aid to lift poor areas of the world like Africa out of poverty. And the critique is . . . it comes from kind of a bitter experience. I spent 16 years at the World Bank working to fight world poverty. I’m very much an idealist wanting to help the world’s poor, and really seeing a lot of those efforts fail. A lot of the official foreign aid efforts fail to help the world’s poor. I saw 2.3 trillion dollars spend on foreign aid over the last 50 years, and I saw the results of that on the World Bank trips that I went on that were just nightmares of bureaucracy, and ineffective experts flying in, and thinking that they were experts in the problems of Africans after spending a week in a luxury hotel room in Africa. Frankly there was a moment of disillusionment, and then there was a desire to change things. A desire to change the foreign aid system so that it would work better so that more of that 2.3 trillion dollars that’s been spent over the last 50 years would reach poor people, and not be dissipated in luxury missions from World Bank headquarters, or in ineffective government bureaucracies on the other end.

The critical thing that makes foreign aid fail so often – and this is really heartbreaking – is simply that the poor who are the intended customers of foreign aid, just like you are the intended customer of the Pepsi Corporation when they sale you Pepsis . . . But unlike your relationship with Pepsi, the poor have no right to complain and no right to turn down the product if they don’t like it. The poor just get foreign aid foisted on them by these ill-informed “experts”, and there’s no feedback from the poor – whether they’re satisfied or not, whether their money even reached them or not. There’s no accountability on the part of these official aid agencies for whether they got the money to the poor, whether they made the poor better off by getting them a drink of clean water when they previously didn’t have access to clean water. Or by getting them an essential immunization to prevent their child from getting measles. Or to get them a bed net to prevent them from getting bit by a malarial mosquito. There’s no accountability for these basic things, and so these basic things don’t happen. Where there are no incentives and no accountability, then that’s another insight of economics. And then that doesn’t happen, and that’s indeed what has happened in foreign aid tragically.

You know the money sort of leaks out all along the chain that starts in Washington and New York with the United Nations, or the World Bank, or other official aid agencies, and it gets sort of lost all along the way. Because on the part of the rich country public, they’re mainly concerned with how much aid money is spent and then they’re satisfied. “Well we spent 2.3 trillion to help the world’s poor, so our job is done.” And they’re pretty much not paying attention after the money is spent. So with a long chain of officials in charge of the money with no one looking over their shoulder to see how they’re spending it, there’s plenty of ways that it leaks. It leaks into expensive salaries for the people working at headquarters like me. I have to admit I was one of those who benefited from this gravy train. There’s all the administrative costs in which huge amounts of money are wasted of the official aid agencies. The World Bank has a budget of one billion dollars to help the world’s poor, even though it only disperses about seven billion dollars in aid to help the world’s poor. It has an administrative budget of one billion dollars. Then the money is given to the government in the poor country, and then the money there either gets dissipated in an ineffective bureaucracy where it’s just paying the salaries of unmotivated civil servants who have no incentive to help the poor. Or it’s outright stolen through corrupt officials. There’s an estimate that something like 40 to 60 percent of drugs meant for health clinics in West Africa get stolen before they ever reach the clinics, and get sold on the free market . . . on the black market. So that’s where the money disappears. And then at the end of the day, unfortunately nobody seems to care. That’s the tragedy that breaks my heart over and over again – that no one cares that this money is not actually reaching the most desperate people in the world for whom it is intended, people who live on less than a dollar a day. It’s just an unbelievable measure of deprivation. People living on less than a dollar a day, and that’s who the money was intended for but it never reaches them.

Well people just assume if the money is budgeted for helping the poor that it goes to help the poor. Unfortunately there’s not a very strong incentive to . . . If you’re just the average taxpayer in the U.S. or in Europe, there’s not much incentive to investigate whether some poor village off in Ghana, West Africa received the money or not. You can’t mount your own investigation to find out. The press, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have enough motivation to really dig deep into whether the money reaches the poor, because they are mainly providing stories for U.S. consumption that are mainly mostly about disasters striking Africa, wars and earthquake, and famines and droughts, and not about the more kind of pedestrian matter of, you know, did a dollar of aid money get to a baby in time to give them a re-hydration treatment so they wouldn’t die from dehydration due to a disease that kills 2 million babies a year due to dehydration?

Well I think that Jeff Sachs makes two fundamental errors, I think. People might feel some qualms about us having such a vigorous debate about this, but my feeling is the poor deserve vigorous debate just as much as the rich country tax payers vigorously debate domestic programs on whether they’re working or not. And just like we vigorously debated whether hurricane Katrina victims were being helped or not, I think we should vigorously debate whether foreign aid victims . . . victims of poverty are being helped by foreign aid or not. And so Professor Sacks makes two fundamental errors, I think. First is with Professor Sacks, it’s all about the money. It’s always about the money. It’s just, you know, spend more money and that will solve the problem. But we’ve already seen $2.3 trillion spent, and that has not solved the problem. You know two million babies are still dying from dehydration. Another million are still dying from measles for lack of a simple vaccination. Economic growth and living standards of the average African was basically zero in the four decades since independence despite Africa getting $568 billion dollars of that 2.3 trillion in foreign aid. So we’ve seen this movie already Professor Sacks, and it didn’t have a happy ending. We’ve seen the movie in which money was spent and yet it didn’t reach the poor. And yet he seems to want to reinvent the wheel and say, “Oh yes. Let’s just spend more money,” and not paying attention to the history where we’ve already spent money and it didn’t reach the poor. And then the second mistake that I think he makes is to assume that expert plans can solve poor people’s problems. His approach to ending world poverty was to assemble 300 of the world’s leading experts on all fields that affect poverty: agriculture to talk about green manure; and infant care to talk about breast feeding and infant formula; and agriculture to talk about nitrogen and fixing leguminous trees to restore soil fertility . . . and get all these experts together and draw up an expert plan that was designed by 12 task forces of 300 experts that produced a 3,000 page report. “And this is our expert plan that we’ve devised in New York at UN Headquarters to end world poverty.” Well that’s just ridiculous. That’s not how you solve the problems of poor people. They’re not solved by expert plans. That’s not how the problems of poor people have ever been solved anywhere else. The poor in Asia who have escaped poverty were not rescued by an expert plan. They were rescued by market driven, free trade driven, economic growth. We just have to look at ourselves even. The people of West Virginia, my home state, were not rescued by an expert plan. They were rescued by American economic growth over the last two centuries. And even though West Virginians are still only 80 percent of U.S. per capita income, it’s a much, much higher per capita income – 20 times higher than it was at the time of our independence. And that’s what rescued West Virginians out of poverty. And that’s how poverty has always ended. It’s through private sector, free market, economic growth, Not through expert plans devised by experts who think that they know poor people’s problems better than the poor people do themselves.

I confess I’m really kind of tired of hearing this argument that Africa is different. Africa needs special help. Africa is this unusually sort of war torn place. A lot of this is exaggerated by the media. Of course there are wars in Africa, and the victims of those wars, my heart goes out to. I would love to see the people of Darfur be rescued from the genocide and experience peace. But this is not an unusually war torn continent by historic standards, or even by contemporary standards. And the problem is nowhere as near widespread has people would have you think from the media. Actually over last 40 years, on average about one in every 10,000 Africans every year dies in a war. So we’re not talking about something that is killing off the great bulk of the population every year. We’re talking about a 1 in 10,000 event that is affecting a small part of the population every year. And Europe had its wars when it was starting to develop. It had murderous wars in the 20th century, and the 16th century, and the 17th century, every century. America has had its share of wars during its development. Africa is not different. It can benefit just as much from free trade, and markets, and globalization as any other continent. It’s not stuck in some kind of trap. That’s one of the favorite words of the people who analyze Africa. There’s some kind of special trap that Africa is stuck in. Well there’s no evidence for that. Countries at Africa’s level of income, yes they’ve had war, and they’ve had bad institutions, and they’ve had corruption; but they’ve managed to escape that level of poverty, and I fully expect Africa will escape that level of poverty also.

Well there’s a lot of complicated limiting factors that Africans have had to struggle with since independence. Now the colonial . . . The legacy of the slave trade and the colonial error was very bad for Africa. There’s a lot of violence involved in that by Europeans not by Africans. At independence these artificial states were created out of no where that did not have any previous sort of national identification, national identity. And so Africa has done not so bad for a continent that was created under such inauspicious circumstances. Some economic historians have compared them recently to Latin America which was created under similar conditions early in the 19th century, early in the 1800s. Also rather artificial nations at first, and Latin America. And Latin America also had a half century of war, and poverty, and not much growth. And then eventually it got it’s act together, and now has had much more growth and much more escape from poverty where now only 10 percent of the population of Latin America is in poverty, whereas 50 percent of the population in Africa is in poverty. So homegrown economic development does happen. It does happen everywhere sooner or later. Some countries are unlucky; but the answers have to be homegrown. They cannot be parachuted in by experts. Success in escaping poverty everywhere always has been homegrown, not driven by expert advice by outsiders.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Technology is something that is very seductive to a lot of people. They too quickly jump to the conclusion that, oh, “We have all this great technology now. So the answer to all the world’s problems of war, and poverty, and disease and everything is just technological.” Just apply the right technology version 7.0 and you fix problem. Well that’s not how problems actually get solved – by technology. The technology only works when it’s embedded in the actions of, guess again, free individuals operating in free markets that have the incentives to find the right technology to solve the problem at hand. Or democratically accountable governments that have the incentive to find the right technology to solve the problem at hand. Technology is not a disembodied force that will solve problems on its own. It requires human beings to solve problems. So I don’t buy into this kind of Thomas Freedman worldview that we have this great technology, and all you have to do is sort of plug into the Internet, and globalization will take over and solve all the world’s problems. I don’t think things work that way. I think they require lots and lots of supporting human institutions that respect individual rights, free markets, democracy. These things unfortunately build up more slowly than technological quick fixes. They only evolved over a couple of centuries in the west, and they’re evolving slowly in the rest of the world now too.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007

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I think the divergence between the success of the west and the rest was again this issue of individual values versus collectivism, that the rest continued to embrace a kind of collective approach to society where they valued clan, or nation, or ethnic group above the individual. And the individual’s kind of sacrificed to the well being of the clan, or ethnic group, or nation. To where I think of the great breakthrough in the west was to place the value on the individual instead of the nation, the collective; to value the individual more than collective. And of course individuals in the west are also patriotic and feel a group pride and group loyalty; but the fundamental unit of value is the individual. That’s what I think really made the big difference in the success of the west.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007

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Well the government of Sudan is perpetrating these atrocities obviously. Everyone around the world who values peace, and respect freedoms, and human rights cries out for these atrocities to stop immediately. The people of Sudan have already been fighting against this government oppression. The rebel movements have resisted the government’s oppression and they’re slowing working their way toward peace, which I think they’re mainly going to achieve on their own. And it’s not going to be much that the west can do to accelerate peace in Darfur and the rest of Sudan, including South Sudan which has already achieved a peace agreement; but it’s fairly fragile at the moment that’s something that the people of South Sudan and North Sudan have to continue to work very hard on – maintaining that fragile peace agreement, and then holding their own governments accountable for respecting their freedoms, and respecting their human rights, respecting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, so that they can hold their governments accountable. They can call them to account for war crimes or atrocities.

Well I’m certainly in favor of humanitarian aid to help the refugees from Darfur that are in desperate straights. I think it’s a no brainer. I can’t see who could be against that. But we’re gonna have to be humble once again as what we can do from the outside. We can’t figure out other people’s problems for them. The realities on the ground in Darfur are a lot more complex than the way they’re portrayed in the western media. And some westerner who goes in with the media stereotypes of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, are more likely make things worse. Things are a lot more complex than that. There are a mixture of good guys and bad guys on each side, and you have to sort of let them sort it out by themselves.

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Well first do no harm. There is a diet plan that somebody told me about that was being marketed a while ago which was called “Stop the Insanity.” Just stop the insanity. Stop invading other countries. Stop pouring bushel fulls of money on corrupt governments. Stop twisting countries’ arms to adopt the kind of reform that experts in Washington and New York think they ought to adopt, which is really the wrong way to go about implementing any free markets or democracy. It can’t be imposed and coerced on other societies. Other societies have to freely choose their own freedom. It’s a ridiculous thing to think that we, the west, can impose freedom on other people. That contradicts the very idea of freedom. Freedom arises when people freely choose to protect their own freedoms, to seize their own freedoms, to assert their own freedoms. And so a lot of what the west can do is just stop doing the stupid thing we’re doing now. And once we get to that point, then I think there’s some positive things the west can do as far as exchanging intellectual ideas, exchanging technologies, making available technologies, making available our institutions of higher learning to students from all over the world, allowing free trading goods so that African cotton farmers can sell their cotton in our markets, which we’re not letting them into at the moment. That kind of thing, I think, is what mainly the west can do.

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Well if I had to give a one-sentence answer as to what drives human progress, which is the biggest question of all time, I would have to say individual freedom. It was really the freedom of creative individuals to figure out how to solve their own problems, how to solve other people’s problems that led to remarkable discoveries like the accidental discovery of penicillin by a guy just tinkering around in a laboratory. That kind of individual creativity is the mainspring of all human progress, I think. And it’s a society that values the individual, that lets individuals be free to find their own solutions – those are the societies that progress, that value individual freedom.

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I think a life well lived is one where you combine a desire to help other people, and to put your skills and your talents at the service of other people that you want to see helped, whose problems you want to see alleviated. Combined with kind of a ruthless, intellectual honesty that you are not going to be intellectually lazy and go in for kind of the clichéd solutions, the tried and true clichés that have always been repeated but have never been actually tested to see whether they worked or not. That you resist clichés. You resist tired, old formulas. And you’re intellectually honest about what works, what doesn’t work. You’re pragmatic. You’re fiercely pragmatic about what works. And you confront the bad news when you need to when something’s not working, and you try to fix it.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Well there are plenty of good organizations that are working on the ground that are searching on the ground for practical solutions to poor people’s problems, involving poor people themselves as the main actors. You know like the program in Malawi that figured out a way to get bed nets not only delivered to people who were at risk of malaria, but actually used by people who are at risk of malaria. The kind of central planning approach to malaria prevention is the plan decides that you need million of bed nets, and they are dropped out of helicopters and trucks all over Africa, and nobody uses them because nobody educates the poor people that . . . when they need to be used, how they need to be used, what you need to do to use them. When you involve poor people themselves in solving their own problems, then they figure it out. You help supply a bed net and some modest resources; but you have poor people themselves devise a solution that spreads the education on the importance of the bed nets, and how to use the bed nets. A program like this in Malawi by an international nongovernment organizations succeeded in getting bed net use way up so that bed net use went up from a third to over 80 percent in Malawi.

RecordedOn: 7/6/07

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Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Well there’s a lot of complicated limiting factors that Africans have had to struggle with since independence. Now the colonial . . . The legacy of the slave trade and the colonial error was very bad for Africa. There’s a lot of violence involved in that by Europeans not by Africans. At independence these artificial states were created out of no where that did not have any previous sort of national identification, national identity. And so Africa has done not so bad for a continent that was created under such inauspicious circumstances. Some economic historians have compared them recently to Latin America which was created under similar conditions early in the 19th century, early in the 1800s. Also rather artificial nations at first, and Latin America. And Latin America also had a half century of war, and poverty, and not much growth. And then eventually it got it’s act together, and now has had much more growth and much more escape from poverty where now only 10 percent of the population of Latin America is in poverty, whereas 50 percent of the population in Africa is in poverty. So homegrown economic development does happen. It does happen everywhere sooner or later. Some countries are unlucky; but the answers have to be homegrown. They cannot be parachuted in by experts. Success in escaping poverty everywhere always has been homegrown, not driven by expert advice by outsiders.

Transcript:

Well there’s a lot of complicated limiting factors that Africans have had to struggle with since independence. Now the colonial . . . The legacy of the slave trade and the colonial error was very bad for Africa. There’s a lot of violence involved in that by Europeans not by Africans. At independence these artificial states were created out of no where that did not have any previous sort of national identification, national identity. And so Africa has done not so bad for a continent that was created under such inauspicious circumstances. Some economic historians have compared them recently to Latin America which was created under similar conditions early in the 19th century, early in the 1800s. Also rather artificial nations at first, and Latin America. And Latin America also had a half century of war, and poverty, and not much growth. And then eventually it got it’s act together, and now has had much more growth and much more escape from poverty where now only 10 percent of the population of Latin America is in poverty, whereas 50 percent of the population in Africa is in poverty. So homegrown economic development does happen. It does happen everywhere sooner or later. Some countries are unlucky; but the answers have to be homegrown. They cannot be parachuted in by experts. Success in escaping poverty everywhere always has been homegrown, not driven by expert advice by outsiders.

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Well I think that Jeff Sacks makes two fundamental errors, I think. People might feel some qualms about us having such a vigorous debate about this, but my feeling is the poor deserve vigorous debate just as much as the rich country tax payers vigorously debate domestic programs on whether they’re working or not. And just like we vigorously debated whether hurricane Katrina victims were being helped or not, I think we should vigorously debate whether foreign aid victims . . . victims of poverty are being helped by foreign aid or not. And so Professor Sacks makes two fundamental errors, I think. First is with Professor Sacks, it’s all about the money. It’s always about the money. It’s just, you know, spend more money and that will solve the problem. But we’ve already seen $2.3 trillion spent, and that has not solved the problem. You know two million babies are still dying from dehydration. Another million are still dying from measles for lack of a simple vaccination. Economic growth and living standards of the average African was basically zero in the four decades since independence despite Africa getting $568 billion dollars of that 2.3 trillion in foreign aid. So we’ve seen this movie already Professor Sacks, and it didn’t have a happy ending. We’ve seen the movie in which money was spent and yet it didn’t reach the poor. And yet he seems to want to reinvent the wheel and say, “Oh yes. Let’s just spend more money,” and not paying attention to the history where we’ve already spent money and it didn’t reach the poor. And then the second mistake that I think he makes is to assume that expert plans can solve poor people’s problems. His approach to ending world poverty was to assemble 300 of the world’s leading experts on all fields that affect poverty: agriculture to talk about green manure; and infant care to talk about breast feeding and infant formula; and agriculture to talk about nitrogen and fixing leguminous trees to restore soil fertility . . . and get all these experts together and draw up an expert plan that was designed by 12 task forces of 300 experts that produced a 3,000 page report. “And this is our expert plan that we’ve devised in New York at UN Headquarters to end world poverty.” Well that’s just ridiculous. That’s not how you solve the problems of poor people. They’re not solved by expert plans. That’s not how the problems of poor people have ever been solved anywhere else. The poor in Asia who have escaped poverty were not rescued by an expert plan. They were rescued by market driven, free trade driven, economic growth. We just have to look at ourselves even. The people of West Virginia, my home state, were not rescued by an expert plan. They were rescued by American economic growth over the last two centuries. And even though West Virginians are still only 80 percent of U.S. per capita income, it’s a much, much higher per capita income – 20 times higher than it was at the time of our independence. And that’s what rescued West Virginians out of poverty. And that’s how poverty has always ended. It’s through private sector, free market, economic growth, Not through expert plans devised by experts who think that they know poor people’s problems better than the poor people do themselves.

Well I think it’s making it a two-sided debate. Jeff Sacks and the people who think like him have gotten sort of a free pass for quite a while in the media, because they’re intentions are definitely very good and very admirable. And people tend to give you a lot of slack if you have good intentions. There’s something about me that I’m not willing to give people with good intentions a lot of slack if they’re not getting good results. I think if the good intentions are to help poor people, I’d like to see good intentions plus results, not just intentions. And so far we’ve seen lots and lots of intentions, and very little by the way of results. And I think it’s time that we called the Jeff Sackses and the Bonos of the world on that.

I think Jeffrey Sacks view is actually pretty much a minority view within the economics profession – that it requires some kind of top down administrative plan to solve poverty. I think myself as just being a spokesman and a popularizer for the mainstream economics’ view – that the end of poverty is achieved through homegrown free markets.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

Transcript:

Recorded On: 7/6/07

Transcript:

Well economics is a very under appreciated way of looking at the problems that face poor people, and face human beings in general operating in society. It’s really just a set of common sense principals that have gotten refined over time through a lot of trial and error, a lot of thinking by a lot of people over the last two centuries since Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations”. About very simple concepts like how we can both mutually benefit if we trade with each other. You know, if I give you something that you want more in return for something that I want more, we both benefit. And there are positive gains from that trade. That’s a very simple insight, but that has been an enormous engine for human progress, a simple insight like that coming out of economics. Or the whole idea of the invisible hand. A complex economy that creates riches is not designed by anyone. There’s nobody who designed it. It just arises spontaneously through the free market, and the invisible hand through the decentralized actions of lots of just self-seeking, selfish individuals who are each just pursuing their own interests. That’s how people achieve wealth. And those kinds of simple insights which have been so neglected throughout the history of fighting world poverty . . . because we’re always . . . The approach in fighting world poverty is, “Oh, we have to come up with some government expert plan. We have to get someone to devise the expert plan that will lift poor people out of poverty.” Well that’s not what economics says. Economics says there’s this genius of the invisible hand that makes wealth happen without anyone intending it through individuals operating in the free market, trading with each other specializing in what their good at. And they create wealth, and the wealth spreads, and people are lifted out of poverty.

Transcript:

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Well first do no harm. There is a diet plan that somebody told me about that was being marketed a while ago which was called “Stop the Insanity.” Just stop the insanity. Stop invading other countries. Stop pouring bushel fulls of money on corrupt governments. Stop twisting countries’ arms to adopt the kind of reform that experts in Washington and New York think they ought to adopt, which is really the wrong way to go about implementing any free markets or democracy. It can’t be imposed and coerced on other societies. Other societies have to freely choose their own freedom. It’s a ridiculous thing to think that we, the west, can impose freedom on other people. That contradicts the very idea of freedom. Freedom arises when people freely choose to protect their own freedoms, to seize their own freedoms, to assert their own freedoms. And so a lot of what the west can do is just stop doing the stupid thing we’re doing now. And once we get to that point, then I think there’s some positive things the west can do as far as exchanging intellectual ideas, exchanging technologies, making available technologies, making available our institutions of higher learning to students from all over the world, allowing free trading goods so that African cotton farmers can sell their cotton in our markets, which we’re not letting them into at the moment. That kind of thing, I think, is what mainly the west can do.

Well the government of Sudan is perpetrating these atrocities obviously. Everyone around the world who values peace, and respect freedoms, and human rights cries out for these atrocities to stop immediately. The people of Sudan have already been fighting against this government oppression. The rebel movements have resisted the government’s oppression and they’re slowing working their way toward peace, which I think they’re mainly going to achieve on their own. And it’s not going to be much that the west can do to accelerate peace in Darfur and the rest of Sudan, including South Sudan which has already achieved a peace agreement; but it’s fairly fragile at the moment that’s something that the people of South Sudan and North Sudan have to continue to work very hard on – maintaining that fragile peace agreement, and then holding their own governments accountable for respecting their freedoms, and respecting their human rights, respecting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, so that they can hold their governments accountable. They can call them to account for war crimes or atrocities.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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At the end of the day I’m an optimist, because I believe that the power of the ideas of individual freedom, of democracy, of free markets, that those are such powerful ideas and they’ve worked so well for so many people for so long, that I think those ideas will carry the ­­­day.  Because they are so much better ideas than the other ideas of nationalism, and socialism, and fascism, and fundamentalism and the other ideas that just keep people in misery.  So I think that the war of ideas will be won eventually.  And I hope they will be won not only in the rest of the world but also back here in the west.  That we will return to our founding values and respect other people’s liberties just as much as we value our own liberties.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

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Well I think the big intellectual battle of our time is going to be individualism versus collectivism.  And that battle is not totally won in the west yet either.  I think the actions of the U.S. in doing things like invading Iraq have turned out to be a very poor advertisement for western freedoms and democracy, because we’ve gone around and meddled in the affairs of another society and created this awful hornet’s net by our meddling.  That’s not a great advertisement for the virtues of letting people solve their own problems, letting them figure it out for themselves, letting people rule themselves.  That’s a debate that right now I’m afraid the west may be losing, because the actors like the U.S. government under the Bush Administration have been doing things that are not consistent with the values of individual freedom.

Recorded On: 7/6/07

Transcript:

Well if I had to give a one-sentence answer as to what drives human progress, which is the biggest question of all time, I would have to say individual freedom. It was really the freedom of creative individuals to figure out how to solve their own problems, how to solve other people’s problems that led to remarkable discoveries like the accidental discovery of penicillin by a guy just tinkering around in a laboratory. That kind of individual creativity is the mainspring of all human progress, I think. And it’s a society that values the individual, that lets individuals be free to find their own solutions – those are the societies that progress, that value individual freedom.

Well I think the divergence between the success of the west and the rest was again this issue of individual values versus collectivism, that the rest continued to embrace a kind of collective approach to society where they valued clan, or nation, or ethnic group above the individual. And the individual’s kind of sacrificed to the well being of the clan, or ethnic group, or nation. To where I think of the great breakthrough in the west was to place the value on the individual instead of the nation, the collective; to value the individual more than collective. And of course individuals in the west are also patriotic and feel a group pride and group loyalty; but the fundamental unit of value is the individual. That’s what I think really made the big difference in the success of the west.

Recorded On: 7/6/07