Fareed Zakaria

Transcription

Our speaker this afternoon is a celebrated thought leader on international affairs named by Foreign Policy as one of the top one hundred global thinkers perhaps most visible as the host of CNN's flagship international affairs program a role he's held since 2008 he's also editor-at-large at Time Magazine, a Washington Post columnist and a New York Times best-selling author. He was introduced as Time Editor at Large in 2010 after a decade as editor of Newsweek International overseeing all the magazines' editions abroad. Before this, he was hired at the age of twenty eight as the managing editor of Foreign Affairs He's the author of numerous books, articles and columns and the recipient of equally numerous honors including a National Magazine Award in 2001 for his influential Newsweek cover story, "Why They Hate Us". Born in Mumbai our speaker did venture to Yale to receive his bachelor's degree but continued on to harvard Thus perhaps dashing poor Eli's hopes as we all just sang a moment ago starting with Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffman to earn a Ph.D in political science. He's a respected scholar, a talented journalist, and one of our foremost alumni voices on global affairs. Please join me in welcoming Fareed Zakaria. thank you so much President Faust, members of the Corporation, members of the Board of Overseers, ladies and gentlemen Above all, students, graduating students, thank you so much for asking me to do this. I have to say to the students here you are already way ahead of me you see I actually have never made my commencement either from college or from my Ph.D. program i did as you heard there was a small college south of here in the little town called New Haven uh... and I perhaps got it wrong and celebrated a little bit too much the night before commencement uh... so the honest truth is I slept through my college commencement when I finally made it to harvard I got a job before commencement and had to be working in New York and couldn't take the day off. I got my degree in the mail. Some 19 years later I'm finally honored to receive in person a Harvard degree. Thank you. Harvard was for me a dazzling revelation contrary to the conventional wisdom on this campus it is possible to get a fine education at Yale, which i did but the great graduate programs of Harvard in their scope, in their scale, in their worldliness and ambition were just an electric experience and i soaked it in Now, to get a Ph.D. involves many many hours of grueling work it also involves many hours of goofing off acquiring hobbies and interests and uh... exploiting the great resources of this university i mean the libraries and the cafes and I did all of that and gained from it immeasurably. I learned from faculty, from students, from visitors but what I remember most was that Harvard is the place that I learned to think and owe this university as a result a deep debt of gratitude something I think all of you share with me and something the development office will remind you all from time to time I've always been wary of making commencement speeches. I don't think of myself as old enough to really have any wisdom to impart, but there's nothing like having children to remind you of how old you are. My nine-year-old daughter is here with me now uh... or to remind you about deeply uncool you are so I'm gonna take on this task with some trepidation. The best commencement speech I ever heard, or heard of was by Art Buchwald, the humorist. His address was short, was brief. He simply said ladies and gentlemen remember we are leaving you a perfect world don't screw it up. Now you are not likely to hear that message much these days. Instead you're likely to hear that we are living in green economic times the graduates are going to be told that they are graduating into the slowest, economic recovery since World War Two and it's not just economic worries ever since nine eleven we have been worried about terrorism, fearful of the dangers of new attacks, that have in many ways altered our daily lives. Then there are larger concerns you hear about the earth is getting hotter, we're running out of water, a billion people are trapped in terrible poverty. So I want to sketch out for you perhaps with a little bit of historical perspective the world as I see it. The world we live in his first of all at peace profoundly so the richest countries of the world are not in major geopolitical, geomilitary competition with one another no arms races, no proxy races, no wars, no cold wars among the richest countries of the world. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find an equivalent period of political stability. I know that you see a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in New York and worry about the safety and security of our times. But here is the data: the number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and yes, terrorism, is down fifty percent this decade from the 1990s it is down seventy five percent from the preceding five decades. It is down of course the ninety nine percent from the decade before that which was World War Two. Steven Pinker argues that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history. And he should know because he is a Harvard professor. The political stability that we've experienced has allowed the creation of a single global economy that has allowed countries from all over the world to participate and flourish. In 1980 the number of countries that were growing up four percent a year, with robust growth was about sixteen. By 2007 that number had doubled and even after the financial crisis that number stands today at about eighty. Countries around the world are thriving and flourishing in a way that was previously unimaginable. Even in the current decade with all its slow growth the global economy as a whole would grow ten to twenty percent faster than it did last decade sixty-percent faster than it did two decades ago and five times as fast as it did three decades ago. The result is that the united nations estimates in the last fifty years poverty has been reduced more than in the preceding five hundred years. Most of that reduction has taken place in the last twenty. The average Chinese person is today ten times richer that he or she was fifty years ago with twenty five years more of life expectancy. Life expectancy has risen across the world dramatically. we gain five hours of life expectancy everyday. Imagine that, without even exercising! a court of all the babies born in the developed world this year will live to be a hundred. All this is, of course, because of rising standards of living of hygiene and medicine. Atul Gawande, another Harvard professor who was also a practicing surgeon, who also writes for the New Yorker magazine tells of a nineteenth century operation perhaps not so one common In this case, the surgeon was trying to amputate the patient's leg. He succeeded. He also, however, amputated his assistant's hand. The two patients, I suppose one would call them died of sepsis. An onlooker died of shock. It is the only known medical procedure to have a three hundred percent fatality. We've come a long way. To understand the astonishing age of progress just look at the cell phones you have in your pockets. and yes, I know many of you don't have them in your pockets -- they are already out, and you are looking at them right now. That cell phone has more computing power than the Apollo space capsule that went to the moon. That capsule couldn't even tweet. So imagine the opportunities that lie ahead. Moore's Law, which says that computing power will double every eighteen months while costs have may be petering out in the realm of information technology. But there are other arenas in which it is accelerating. The human genome is being sequenced at a pace faster than Moore's Law. A third industrial revolution involving material science and the customization of manufacturing is yet in its infancy. And all of these fields are beginning to intersect and produce new opportunities in ways that we can't even imagine. The good news goes on. Look at the number of graduates globally from colleges. That number has risen four-fold in the last forty years for men. It has risen sevenfold for women. And if you're wondering whether or not that age old question how women smarter than men has been answered, the evidence is now overwhelming. The answer is yes. My favorite example of this is that there was a study done That over the last twenty five years female representatives, members of the House of Representatives have had managed to get forty nine million dollars more in federal grant money than their male counterparts. So even at pork barrel spending it turns out women are better than men. And so i look forward from the villages in Africa to the board rooms of America To the increasing participation of women which is going to enrich and ennoble our world. Now you might listen to all this and say You might listen to all this and say, well, this is all a very good for the world but what does it mean for America? Well, a world at peace brought prosperity, the rise of the rest is going to be particularly good for the United States because let me remind you this is the country with the largest and most dynamic economy in the world that hosts hundreds of the world's greatest companies that dominates the age of technology It has almost all of the world's great universities There is in China and India no Harvard and there will not be for decades, perhaps ever. the United States is also a vital society It is the only country in the industrialized world that is demographically vibrant. We add three million people to this country every year. That is itself a powerful life force, and it is made stronger by the fact that so many of these people are immigrants. They... I should say, we come to this country with aspirations, with drive, with determination and we develop a fierce love of this country. America in 2050 will have a better demographic profile than China. So this country has its problems, but i would rather have America's problems than most any other countries in the world. When I tell you that we're living in an astonishing age of progress, I am not urging complacency, far from it. We have been through a century of extraordinary troubles: world wars depressions cold wars and dozens of other smaller challenges but each of those challenges has been matched by a response. Human action and human achievement have managed to take on and best terrible problems. We forget our successes in 2009 the H1N1 virus broke out in Mexico. Now, if you look back at the trajectory of these kinds of viruses it's quite conceivable that this one would have spread like the asian flu of 1957 or 1968 which cost four million lives. But this time, the Mexican health authorities identified the problem early, shared the information with the World Health Organization learned best practices tracked down where the outbreak took place, quarantined people, vaccinated others. The country went on a full-scale alert in a very Catholic country it was not allowed to go to church for three Sundays. Perhaps more importantly you couldn't go to a soccer game for three weeks. But the result was that the virus was contained to the point where three months later people asked what was the fuss and wondered whether we had overreacted. We hadn't overreacted. We had reacted. We have responded. And we had dealt with the problem. There are other examples. In the twelve months following the economic peak in 2008 industrial production worldwide fell as much as it did in the first year of the great depression. Equity prices and global trade actually fell more. Yet this time no great depression followed. Why? Because of the coordinated actions of governments around the world. 9/11 did not usher in an age of terrorism with Al Qaeda going from strength to strength. Why? Because countries cooperated in fighting them and other terrorists around the world with considerable success. When we come together when we put aside our petty differences when we cooperate the results are astounding. So when we look at all these problems we face economic crises, terrorism, climate change, resource scarcity- keep in mind that these are real problems but that the human reaction and response to them will be real. you can easily map out the big problem but it's much more difficult to map out the thousands of individual actions that governments, firms, organizations, researchers, scientists, and ordinary people will take that will collectively constitute the solution. In a sense I'm betting on the graduates of this great university. I believe that your actions will have consequences. your efforts will make a difference. And according to the graduates I know of this kind of event, I'm supposed to provide some advice. So, should you go into nanotechnology or bioengineering and the answer is that I haven't a clue. I honestly don't know what the great trends of the future or industries of the future will be. But I do know one thing: that human beings will probably continue to reward those talents of heart and mind that they have always rewarded for thousands of years. Intelligence, hard work, discipline, courage, perhaps above all love and faith these are the things that at the end of the day make for a great life; one that is rewarded by the outside world. An equally importantly a good life one that is rewarded by only those you know best. These are the virtues that people honor. These are the virtues that people have built statues for five thousand years and to which they will be statues for the next five thousand years... well nobody does statues anymore. They build weird, metal, modernist sculptures with strange doodads hanging off them but you get my general point. Trust yourself. You know what kind of life you should live. You don't need an ethics course to tell you what not to do. Trust in your instincts and you will build a great life you will build a good life and you will change the world. You know, I said at my age that I don't have written much specific wisdom to impart I have one final piece of advice for the graduates and it is a piece of advice that is gained from experience not books. Trust me about this. You will never understand how much your parents love you until you have children of your own. Once you have children of your own, once you have children of your own, all that strange behavior- the stalking, the worrying- it all makes sense. But do me a favor don't wait so long. My mother lives eight thousand miles away and I think about this every day. Don't wait so long. Get up today of all days and hug your parents and tell them you love them. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, and to the graduates of Harvard, godspeed.