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.