Translator: Chiara Maria Zambonin Reviewer: Chryssa Takahashi
(Greek) Thank you very much, Costas.
Thank you very much indeed, it is a great pleasure to be here.
I will try to stay in dimensions that I vaguely understand.
This is a necessary health-warning from J.K. Galbraith, the great economist;
I should also add one from Niels Bohr
the physicist, the Danish physicist of the last century who said:
"Prediction is difficult, especially if it's about the future".
(Laughter)
Nonetheless I will try
and I think you may find my five first predictions rather pessimistic.
The first one is that the future is fat.
If you look at the United States, which after all is the world's biggest economy,
in every single one of the 50 states,
at least 20% of the population is not just overweight, they are obese,
-- I'll hold my stomach in because my wife is watching in the audience --
and this is really a great problem
because it's a health problem.
Number one for the people involved
but it's an enormous cost:
147 billion dollars a year to the American economy
and there was a time, if you go back to the 1960s,
when American police in the race riots in the American south,
they were pretty slim.
Well these young ladies in New York,
I think they are very beautiful but they are not necessarily slim
and we have to hope that they don't end up like this lady here
and the worry of course is that where America leads the rest of us follow.
You see far too many obese people here in Europe,
you see them in Australia,
you see them in the Arab states of the Gulf,
you see them in India.
It is an obesity crisis that is certain to hit us for the next 14 years.
That's one nasty thing.
The second is global warming climate change,
the disaster that we human beings have wrought on our economy;
I think it is a man made danger and it is a very difficult one
because even with all the best will in the world
I frankly do not see climate change, global warming being halted,
let alone reversed by 2030.
The reason is that the developing world -- China, India etc. --
will need more and more energy
and that energy will continue for a long time to come from fossil fuels,
so we are condemned to a certain amount of dirt.
Now my third prediction: young love,
I speak as someone who will be having a birthday in 18 days time.
I will be 70, if you want to send me birthday cards please do.
Thank you very much indeed.
(Applause)
The problem with young love, as this couple here,
is that actually we demand more healthcare.
Who is going to provide the healthcare?
Well, there is a duty of care,
it has to be provided by the young.
The young are fewer proportionally
because the demography of the world is changing
and it means a big tax burden on them to provide for my pension, my healthcare etc.
So that is a third rather gloomy prediction.
Now this one actually doesn't really need much explanation.
We live in a world that will continue to be dangerous.
9/11 came literally out of a blue sky
but actually the antecedents were much further back.
The Western problems of tribulations with the Middle East
go back to the 1980s and well before,
and it's something that we will find very very difficult to deal with.
The gentleman on the right there, Osama Bin Laden is gone to meet his maker.
The gentleman on the left,
Ayman al-Zawahiri is still the head of Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda is still still with us and so of course is Islamic state, ISIS,
and that means that for all of us we are going to be vulnerable to terrorism.
The reason is that you have a ferment in the Arab world in particular
but you also have a conflict between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran;
until you have a reconciliation I don't think you're going to see an end to this,
nor will you see an end unless you'll provide more opportunities,
more jobs for the young in the Middle East and in North Africa.
So we're all going to be vulnerable.
And it's not a problem that NATO will be able to solve.
It's a problem that has to be solved from within the Muslim world itself
and it won't unfortunately be solved quickly.
Now, I think it's the last of my gloomy predictions.
We are very unequal.
A mere 0.7% of the world's adult population own 41% maybe 45%
of the world's wealth, that is the peak of the pyramid.
The bottom 71% of the world's population, 71%, more than 2/3,
they possess a mere 3% of the world's wealth.
Now is that a situation which is ultimately sustainable?
Probably not.
Now if you look at the words of Thomas Piketty,
he would say well inequality can be reduced if you have a big war.
That's the lesson of history
but we don't actually, I think, particularly want a big war.
The fact is we need to find other solutions to our inequalities,
and they are not just in terms of wealth.
We have problems dealing with race, with religion, with nationality
and we see these in our attitudes towards immigration.
Last year more than 1 million migrants entered the European Union
from Africa and from the Middle East.
Now, an awful lot of them were not actually seeking refuge from war.
They were seeking prosperity, sanctuary, a hope for the future
but there're also an awful lot coming from Syria, from Iraq, from Libya,
from warsome places, from Afghanistan.
And it's a shame on all of us that 4,000 perished crossing the Mediterranean.
The tragedy of course is that there are no easy solutions to that.
Now, can it be more pessimistic when we are here in Greece,
you are in the Eurozone, you are in your sixth year, I think it is, of recession.
The Euro has not been a happy experience for a lot of the countries that are in it.
Personally I love the Euro,
it's a privilege to move around most of Europe using one single currency,
but it is under real strain and it could well split.
Now, if the Euro fragments, what then happens to the European Union itself?
We have divisions between North and South, between West and East,
between rich and poor, between statist and liberal.
Unless of course we have this problem of immigration.
And so the British for example, my compatriots, have voted idiotically
in my humble opinion to leave the European Union.
Are we about to see the unraveling of an organisation
which has actually kept the peace in Europe ever since the 2nd World War
and which won the Nobel prize for peace as recently as 2012?
Well, it is a real possibility,
it's something that we should be aware of
and we really need to take attention,
and try to mend the features in the European Union.
Well, that's all the pessimistic stuff.
Let me try in the time remaining to be a little more optimistic.
Well, we're getting older now.
Previously I said that would be a big burden on healthcare etc etc.
But actually, would any of you really like to have left this planet, these dimensions
that we are familiar with at the age of 50,
which was the average age of death just over a century ago?
No, most of you in this audience will live into your eighties,
and plenty of you will make it past one hundred
and that surely is something to celebrate as is the expertise of our scientists.
I think it's entirely plausible
that scientists will find remedies for the problems that face us,
not least the problems of old age such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia.
And that is the great hope.
There is of course the other hope
that scientists will find some way of combatting climate change
within the foreseeable rather than the distant future.
That's what we have to hope for,
and it's not hopeless, that is the possibility.
A third cause for optimism is that actually
even though there are plenty of wars in the world,
and I know this because I just read a book about the conflict in the world,
but actually these conflicts no longer pit states against states.
If you look at the red line on the slide
that shows that right at the end
there are basically no wars actually pitting one state against another.
Wars now involve non-state actors
like the Taliban or ISIS or Bakaharam in Nigeria.
And their tactics, their weaponry etc.
suicide bombers, they cause terror, they cause pain
but not nearly as many deaths as before.
In the second world war
the average number of deaths per year from war was 10 million at least.
Now it's about 55 thousand, so that is a real improvement.
In the future, I think you're going to have cyber warfare,
but at least cyber warfare even though it may rob you of your bank accounts,
spoil water supplies and so on,
it probably won't kill so many people directly.
Let me just turn very briefly to the world of business.
We tend to disparage businessmen
but if you look at the amazing benefits that the digital world has brought us,
if you go back to, say Amazon was founded in I think 1994,
there was Google in 1998, Facebook in 2004.
The grander of them all of course is Apple founded way back in 1976 by three people,
you know Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs,
and there was a guy called Ronald Wayne,
who very foolishly sold out after just twelve days, foolish man.
But those companies and companies like them
in the next fourteen years will arise
and they will find remedies
to things that we haven't even considered that we might suffer from.
It is a brave new world
but not in the Aldous Huxley sense.
We could have a really beneficial new world, so let us not despair.
One final point.
What we are seeing now is actually a shift in the world economy
to the state the world was in before we in the west had our Industrial Revolution
just over two centuries ago.
At that time Asia contributed 50% of the world's GDP.
That is what is now going to have in the future,
and it's a good thing, it's not a bad thing.
We tend to look at the rise of China, India as a threat, it's not.
When Asia is richer and healthier we will all benefit,
so let us not despair.
And my last point is that we as human beings are creative.
We can even think about 11 dimensions,
even though frankly I find it difficult to think of more than 3.
But nevertheless, we are amazing and creative and that is our genius.
Now if you look at Greece,
Greece has suffered extraordinarily badly in the last 5 or 6 years,
but you Greeks have plenty of brain power.
I suspect that by 2030 you will be smiling again.
So thank you very much for your attention.
(Applause)