SPEAKER 1: To lead the discussion of this topic, it's
natural and fortunate that Google.org's own Dr. Larry
Brilliant would be our guide.
He's the Executive Director of Google.org, which is Google's
radical new approach to social responsibility and good
works around the world.
He's an entrepreneur in his own right as co-founder
of The Well.
He's a medical doctor and expert in public health, and a
person who has become a kind of public philosopher of
the new responsibility.
He will introduce his fellow panel members, but for now
please join me in welcoming Dr. Larry Brilliant.
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LARRY BRILLIANT: Thank you very much.
Let me add my welcome as well to Google and to Zeitgeist.
As you heard, Google.org, is the part of Google that tries
to affect change in the areas of global health,
poverty, and climate.
We live at the intersection of business and philanthropy.
And we are an experiment in active philanthropy.
So I think it's appropriate that what I try to do now as
part of Zeitgeist is to tell you a little bit about what's
on the mind of people in philanthropy, what's the
Zeitgeist, if it were the right way to say that,
of philanthropy?
And to do that we've taken a topic of social justice,
economic and social justice.
We will have an absolutely fantastic panel of people who
spent their life at the interface of social justice
and the world of business.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
And they will explore this issue with you.
And to kick it off I'm going to give you a quote, and then I'm
going to try to tell you a little bit about the history of
one part of social justice, which is economic disparities.
And the quote is from President Bill Clinton, who at the TED
Conference in Monterey, when he received a TED prize-- in his
acceptance speech he said, "The greatest threat facing humanity
in the 21st century is the increasing gulf between
the rich and the poor.
It is unprecedented, unfair, unequal, unstable, and
unsustainable." That'll be our question for our panel today.
First, let me tell you a little bit about the history
of income disparity.
If you go back into antiquity-- in fact, if you go back to any
time before the 18th century, you would find that the major
explanatory variable of the difference between the rich and
the poor was class and caste.
You were born as a patrician or a plebe.
You were a ruler, a king, an emperor, or you worked in the
field on land that you didn't know.
After the industrial revolution the major explanatory
variable is what country you were born in.
The differences which previously had been almost
exclusively intra-country become inter-country.
Now, in today's globalized flat world we have a multivariate,
much more complex algorithm for determining who's
rich and who's poor.
But however you look at it we are today facing the largest
disparity between the rich and the poor in human history, and
it takes the question of if President Clinton's comment,
"it is unequal, unfair, unstable, and unsustainable,"
is not true.
It's certainly the zeitgeist of the philanthropic world.
If you look at this graph, which illustrates what I just
said, if you go all the way back into time and you look for
when there is recorded data on income, you'll see that there's
almost no difference in GDP-- one measure of wealth-- between
Latin America, Africa and the developed world, the OECD
countries until around 1750, 1800 when we have had this
tremendous transformative change in wealth.
And here you can see that the difference between the west
and the south is enormous.
Let me try to show that to you another way, courtesy of Hans
Rosling, who is in the audience here and his remarkable
Gapminder, which some of you may have seen in the past.
We're going to try to illustrate, what are the
components of wealth and poverty over time,
and then by region?
So first, let's define our terms.
We're going to look at dollars per day of income, and we're
going to look at it across this matrix.
And we're going to build it into a mountain, and now we're
going to use the magic of Gapminder and we're going to
say, income is unequally distributed because the top 20%
of the world controls three-quarters of
the world's wealth.
The bottom 80% controls one-quarter.
But that's not the real disparity when we're talking
about poverty, and we're talking about the poorest of
the poor because they get literally just a sliver.
The bottom 20% of the income pyramid gets
only 2% of the income.
Let's look at that regionally.
Let's see what the different areas are.
Now remember, I have to say that when I first went to
India, which was the 1970s, there were 300 million people
living under $1 a day.
Today, there are 300 million people in India living
under $1 a day.
Have things gotten better, or have they gotten worse?
The same number of people are poor.
But as a percentage of the population it has dropped from
half of the population of India to about one-quarter.
But let's define poor as living on less than $1 a day, and
today that's 19% of the population of the world.
And let's take a look at what are the components
of that group of poverty?
So here's Africa.
And what you really have here is a slightly elongated bell
shaped curve as we put it over the curve of the whole world.
And you can see that really, the average income in Africa is
hardly more than $1 a day, and in fact, two-thirds of people
living in Africa live on less than $1 a day.
Let's take a look here at the OECD countries, at Europe
and the United States.
By that definition, almost no one is poor,
living on $1 a day.
These are two totally different worlds.
But as you add in the other middle income countries-- Latin
America, 8% of the population lives in poverty;
east Europe, 2%.
Now we get interesting.
This is China.
And China of course is growing so quickly that 300 million
people have been brought out of poverty.
I would argue it is an accomplishment greater than
the building of the pyramids.
But the problem is there's 300 million people behind them
waiting for their chance, and 300 million people behind
them, and 300 million people behind them.
And that is this long tail, both a tail to the right of
wealth, a tail to the left of poverty.
Look at the extent at which there is intra-country
disparities between the rich and the poor-- and now, my
adopted and beloved India, South Asia.
Where Indians justifiably brag that there are more
billionaires in Bombay than there are in New York, and
hardly 300 meters away from their homes are another
300 million people living on less than $1 a day.
That is the challenge that we face when we look at one
measure of social injustice and income inequality.
And that's the challenge I'm going to put to my panel, is
President Clinton's comment.
What do we need to think about it?
Is it unfair?
Is it unequal?
Is it increasing?
Does it destabilize the world?