Robert Gordon and Erik Brynolfsson debated their opposing views of where the economy is headed at TED2013. Last week, they brought the debate to a TED Conversation. Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Last week, TED speakers Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson joined us for a live, one-hour debate on the future of the US economy.  It was a furious hour of typing, with both speakers contributing just over 1,500 words in response to a wide variety of user questions.  A few highlights:

Ryan Zeigler asks:

Mr. Brynjolfsson, you stated in your talk that you feel that we need to “race with machines” rather than against them. In what manner do you feel that this effects the future of education?

Erik Brynjolfsson responds:

We really need to reinvent education. My industry has lagged other industries in digitizing. Far behind music and other media, finance, manufacturing, retailing, etc.  But that’s good news: lots of room to improve.  Digitization of education will do two things:

1. Much higher quality and lower cost as very best teachers and methods reach larger audiences. Examples: superstars like Sal Khan of Khan Academy or physics lessons from best MIT profs at EdX.
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2. More importantly, gather enormous data about what’s working and not working. Apply big data techniques to improve teaching methods and to personalize how things are taught. Adapt pace and methods, based on students unique situation. Continuous learning by the educators, not just students. My students are already doing this to optimize ad clicks – can soon do it for education.

Michael Noyes asks:

Capitalism has created more wealth by far for more people than any other system. However, have we reached a point in our technological history when the pendulum must swing back toward more socialist economics to achieve more prosperity for more people?

Robert J. Gordon responds:

You have to distinguish between “socialism” and the capitalist welfare state as exemplified by Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. Socialism involves government ownership of the means of production and was practiced by the postwar UK Labour government which nationalized steel, transport, etc. It was Thatcher’s achievement to reverse all that, and Britain went from being a laggard to one of Europe’s most dynamic economies.

Yes, we need more of a welfare state, particularly to prepare children in poverty to compete in our educational system. Now they are dropping out of high school and condemning themselves to lives of manual labor and unemployment.

Theresa Sanker asks:

When are America’s economic priorities going to shift toward education, saving, and long-term investment, and away from excessive reliance on military power and cheap energy?

Erik Brynjolfsson responds:

When more people like you demand it. Simple as that.

Robert Gordon adds:

Heckman has shown that the problem is not that we don’t spend enough resources on education. Reducing class sizes has no effect. The problem is that educational resources are not distributed evenly. In an ideal world we would get rid of property taxation as the basis for educational finance, since that gives an advantage to communities with wealthy residents. We should have education funded by a nationwide value-added tax.

The problem with our military, besides the needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the endless buckets of cash poured into ridiculous projects like the F-35 fighter which has no known enemy to justify its cost. We built the B-17 in WWII for $250,000 per plane!

Finally, what’s wrong with cheap energy? Are you in favor of expensive energy?

With 113 excellent questions and answers, this was a fascinating and informative debate. Don’t miss the rest of the responses, available on TED Conversations »

Robert Gordon: The death of innovation, the end of growthEconomists Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolffson see very different things when they look at the stagnation of the U.S. economy in recent years. It’s almost as if they’re looking at an optical illusion image – one seeing a candlestick while the other sees two faces just inches apart. In today’s talks, they both outlined their thoughts.

Gordon sees the candlestick — he believes that the growth could be tapering off for good and that our best innovations may be behind us. As he points out, between 1900 and 1960, we went from traveling by a horse and buggy to taking Boeing 707s. But in the sixty years since, we haven’t learned to go any faster at a mass commercial level. What’s wrong? In his talk, he outlines four headwinds which are keeping us from continued growth at the pace of the past two centuries: demographics, education, debt and inequality.

Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machinesMeanwhile, Brynjolfsson sees the faces. He says that the stagnation may simply be growing pains as we move from an economy based on production to one based on ideas. He also looks to the past for an example, taking us back 120 years to the Second Industrial Revolution. While all the tools were in place for mass production, it took three decades for productivity to skyrocket. The first generation of managers — who had old ideas about systems and workflows – had to age out of the system for growth to start. This is where Brynjolfsson thinks we are now. He sees another wave of innovation in our future — if humans can learn to work alongside computers and robots in more symbiotic ways.

Click the links above to watch these two fascinating talks. And then watch this 12-minute debate between the Gordon and Brynjolfsson on what it means to work today … and what it will mean in the future.

Do you think we are witnessing the end of innovation? Is growth over? Did either speaker here change your opinion? Explain in the comments.

At TEDGlobal, Loretta Napoleoni gave a fascinating talk on her exclusive opportunity to speak with members of the secretive Italian terrorist group, the Red Brigades, and the startling insight she’s gained over decades of studying the economics of terrorism. Before her talk posted, she chatted with the TEDBlog and shared a little more of her unusual knowledge of the world of terrorism.

The direct interactions you had with the Red Brigades were fascinating. Since that time, have you had that kind of direct interaction with other terrorist groups?

Oh, yes. I wrote a book on Iraq. In fact, it’s called Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation. To write that book, which came out in 2005, I actually interviewed members of the Al-Zarqawi group. These were people who were very close to insiders in Iraq. I interviewed people in Amman, and some of them had met him before when he was growing up, some of them had met in prison, and it all helped me to get an idea of his personality. I also interviewed people in Spain who came mostly from Syria and they were part of the Salafi movement, which was also close to this group.

Of course, these interviews were conducted in a different way from the Red Brigades interviews. I interviewed the Red Brigades when their armed struggle was finished, so I did those interviews in prison. Obviously, the atmosphere was very different because I had a legal kind of access. I was allowed inside the prison where I was allowed to talk to them, whereas the interviews with the Al-Zarqawi group were done in secret, often through an intermediary who also was a translator. A lot of interviews were conducted by email.

The interesting thing is that there was a sort of personality profile that became evident. Now, I am not saying that there is one single type of individual who is a better type of terrorist than another. What I am saying is that the circumstances that push certain individuals over the edge, to become terrorists, are generally very, very similar. There are of course, people that resist this kind of temptation and people that don’t. I found a lot of similarity between Al-Zarqawi and his inner group and some members of the Red Brigades, for example. That, from a psychological point of view is very interesting.

Now, a lot of armed organizations will talk to me, and I have had contact with others in a less detailed and in-depth context. Once you have been allowed to discuss certain issues with one armed organization, then a sort of trust is built, and so other armed organizations will talk to you.

In order to establish trust, did you sometimes have to withhold information? Essentially, are there things you know that you can’t tell the world?

Not really, because they will never tell you anything that they shouldn’t tell you. The interviews are always conducted about issues that belong to the past or that are already known. They’ll never tell you confidential information, because they don’t know you.

Also, I wouldn’t ask these kinds of questions. I would never ask, “Did you actually mastermind the bombing of the Amman hotels in 2005?” I would never do that, because that would put me in a very awkward situation. I’m more interested in the way they actually operate and also in the root causes and ideology of their group. They’re very happy to talk about that. They want to tell you why they’re doing what they’re doing.

I never met one single member of an armed organization that was a psychopath, somebody that really wanted to kill for the pleasure of killing or somebody that was motivated only by vengeance. I never met anybody like that. There was always a very strong political background, and this is what they want to talk to you about.

Another TED speaker, Diane Benscoter, talks about her time in a cult and there are moments when you are talking about the people who make good terrorists that sound very similar to what she describes when talking about people who make good cult members. Do you see similarities here as well?

Yes. I think generally the heads of terrorist groups are very, very smart people. They’re also great manipulators. I would presume that cult leaders are identical. These sort of individuals are very strong, they have very strong charisma.

I have a story that I think is very interesting from this psychological perspective. While I was interviewing the Red Brigades, I met this guy who had learned how to paint in jail and showed me a few of his paintings. The paintings were beautiful. You looked at the paintings and couldn’t believe that the person who did them had also killed people. There was a certain kind of sensitivity, there was also a certain kind of peaceful message in these paintings. So, I became interested and spoke a lot with him, and I found him to be an incredibly gentle person. You would not have believed that this guy was actually a terrorist. Then, later on, I met somebody else from his specific group, recruited more or less at the same time, and this other member of the Red Brigades told me that everybody within that group knew that this guy had been lured into terrorism by the leader of that region. The leader of that region was a very charismatic individual and he realized that that guy was easily manipulated, and he used him.

It was quite a sad story from the human point of view. The life of this individual was now completely destroyed, because he had to spend over twenty years in jail when he really is, basically a non-violent individual. Later on, he realized that. He realized his mistakes and he told me, “If I could go back, I would never do what I did again.” Now, very few of them actually said that.

Really?

Oh, absolutely. Most of them won’t say that at all.

So, the ideology is so strong for most members that they don’t regret violent behavior?

Well, I don’t think it’s the ideology. I think that anybody can become a terrorist. That’s my point of view. But, not everybody can actually kill. In order to reach that level, you have to be deeply convinced. So very few people — even when they give up the armed struggle, end up in jail or whatever and abandon that part of their life — very few question their position, because if they did their lives would be totally destroyed.

Now the individual I was speaking about from the Red Brigades was a particularly gentle and sensitive individual. I think he could have been easily manipulated by his sect. All he wanted was to be part of something, to belong to something, to be accepted by the others. He found a way to achieve all of these goals, and it happened to be the Red Brigades. It could have been anything. It could have been any sect that fulfilled these goals for him.

What are some of the most economically powerful terrorist groups in the world today and what are some of the traits they have in common?

Well, today I think the most powerful group is the Taliban. Al Qaeda is also very powerful, but the Taliban is slowly but surely taking back Afghanistan, so that there is now a sort of mix that exists there of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Another very powerful group is the Colombian FARC, which has merged with the Colombian cartel.

The new type of terrorist we’re seeing today is a terrorist that is linked to narcotics traffickers, and whose primary source of economic power is actually narcotics. That’s different from 9/11. You see, before 9/11 it was very different because you had somebody like Osama Bin Laden, who was very wealthy and had sponsors — he had money diverted from the Gulf to fund Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was born in the 1980s, a sort of offspring of the first mujahideen. There was a different history there, and funding primarily came from sponsors or people who were a part of the organization and who were very wealthy. Today, we’re dealing with a completely different animal. Now, we have this mix of classic criminal behavior and terrorism and that is actually quite dangerous. These guys are not only fighting for an ideal or to achieve a certain goal, but also to maintain a certain kind of economy within the criminal economy. This also makes them harder and harder to track down.

The day that the Taliban manages to re-conquer Afghanistan, hypothetically, they are not going to become something different. And now, they are criminals and not only in the sense of being terrorists. That is a degeneration of the criminal and terrorist models, linked of course to globalization, that I think is going to make things much worse in the future.

READ MORE: Loretta Napoleoni discusses the funding of Hezbollah, revolutionary ways to counteract terrorism and her lifelong fascination with political violence. Do you think that there’s a difference between groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda and groups like Hezbollah and Hamas that seem to be a little bit more localized?

No. I don’t think there’s a huge difference. I think that Hezbollah and Hamas are not in a situation where crime and narcotics can sustain them 100 percent, but there are links with crime and narcotics. For example, we know that cocaine now comes from Colombia or Venezuela, is flown to West Africa and from there is distributed to Europe in various ways. One way is inland, and inland traffic is controlled by Nigerian organized crime, and part of this business is handled by groups that report to Hezbollah. These are primarily criminal groups who are part of the diaspora of Lebanon — there are a lot of Lebanese living in West Africa.

Why would criminal groups fund the Hezbollah? Because they’re all part of the same world. The diaspora in West Africa is not so interested in what is happening back home. They’re not planning to come back home. But, it’s a bit like supporting a football team — this is what I’m going to support because I’m Lebanese and I don’t want this government in place. I send the money because Hezbollah are my people.

In reality, when you look at the religious principles that the members of Hezbollah say they aspire to, they all condemn criminal behavior. Yet, everybody is doing it. You see the contradiction? I think because you can make money so quickly through crime, because crime pays so well, you end up becoming a criminal and using part of this money to support your family, which in a way are the Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is the chain.

It really is scary. Terrorists are changing tactics almost daily. What I said in July at TED is only valid today up to a certain point, because so much has changed even since then. And, we’re not really doing anything. We’re failing to understand the connections, in part because it is quite complex. But, I think we’re also failing to understand the connections because we don’t want to see them, because they are too scary and too close to home.

What are some steps that you think we should be taking to help counteract terrorism, economically or otherwise?

First of all, I want to note again, that whatever I say today about this will be different in six months. But, I will say that I think that one of the first things that should be done today to fight terrorism is to stop considering it a threat to national security, because it’s not. None of these organizations have the power to destroy a state. If we did this, it would bring terrorism back to the domain of crime. This would solve many problems. For example, right now the US is attempting to bring the people imprisoned at Guantanamo to trial, but this is a legal nightmare — they’ve created a monster and now they don’t know how to get rid of it. So that is the first step.

The second step is to look at where the funds are coming from, and for sure narcotics today is one of, if not the most important source of revenue. So, I would legalize drugs. I know that this is never going to happen. I sit on so many committees on this issue and I can tell you that the world’s experts on narcotics, every single one, in private will tell you, “Yes, that’s the solution. We legalize drugs, we control the drugs, we tax them and we make sure that those who are being supported by drug revenue don’t get that money anymore.” But, the real issue is the moral issue. Which government is going to tell its citizens that it’s going to legalize drugs because this is the only way to create a safer world? They’ve used the argument that drugs destroy society for so long. This would require a completely different worldview and approach to politics. However, it would cut out a lot of these illegal revenues and therefore a lot of crime.

The third step would be to interrupt the funding. We know that money goes from the Gulf regularly to fund the Taliban. We know that money goes to Afghanistan and to Pakistan. We know that India is also involved. There’s a lot of state-sponsored terrorism going on and we know that. So, if we really wanted to inconvenience terrorists then we would denounce these kinds of relationships. But again, that would put the foreign policy of the United States and Europe on a completely different foot, and it’s not going to happen. So, I think in the long run, at least in Central Asia, I think China will intervene. You see, the latest is that the narcotics traffickers that are in business with the Taliban are targeting China as a new primary market.

In your TEDTalk, you explain that you changed your life completely to study terrorism. Do you ever regret this decision?

Well, I know that this is what I was meant to do. This is me. But, I’m a very strange person. I’ve always been very interested in political violence. When I finished high school, I did a small dissertation about political violence and fascism in Italy. I feel fulfilled because I feel like this is what I am meant to do.

But, sometimes I do wish I were a more normal person and that I was ignorant of these things, because it’s very depressing knowledge. It’s also very depressing to meet these people and see their humanity. Most people are able to live their lives with an understanding of the world that is basically black and white, but I have learned to see it in infinite shades of gray.

Last week, Parag Khanna sat with the TED Blog to discuss no less than the political future of the world we live in. He works in the expansive field of geopolitics, and his TEDTalk discusses the history and future of some of the world’s most troubled states and the possibilities of a borderless world. In this interview, he expanded on his theories, delving into the causes of terrorism, the impact of the G20, a solution for Sudan and more.

Can you explain exactly what it is that you do? Your title is Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, and I’m not sure that we all know precisely what that means.

It’s essentially designed to be misleading so that no one will ever actually know what I truly do. (Laughter) And most of the ambiguity rests in the fact that what people struggle to grasp is that at think tanks a lot of people, like me, actually get paid to do whatever we want. So that explains it, partially.

But let me start at the top level — the New America Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, and it’s one of the youngest and definitely the hottest think tank in Washington. And it has, as in other places, a mix of domestic and foreign policy experts, and it’s run by Steve Coll, the former Washington Post editor, and the chairman of the board is Eric Schmidt of Google, and it’s a very dynamic and lively place.

The American Strategy Program is the foreign-policy wing of the think tank, and it has people like Peter Bergen from CNN and myself and others. And the Global Governance Initiative is my particular program, in which I’m exploring the future of diplomacy, not just from the perspective of what happens to intergovernmental relations and the United Nations and standing institutions like the World Bank, but rather how do all of the important actors in the world today, like News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, Bill Clinton and the Clinton Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the US government — all of these players exist in a very complicated diplomatic knit. And my project is intended to clarify what the new patterns of diplomacy are among them: How are they cooperating? What issues are they cooperating on? What’s their purpose? Diplomacy is the future of understanding how we run the world, basically.

That’s a very interesting position to be in. Have you seen any of your work creating any influence or ripples in the world around you?

Should I speak for myself or New America Foundation as a whole?

Both, if you can.

Well, what I do is I tend to go to countries and interview the leaders, but I don’t interview them like a journalist. I talk to their leaders as someone who’s developed a certain knowledge or expertise on emerging markets or rising powers. And I don’t so much interview people as I debate with them, and I argue with them, and I get them to say what they really believe, not what they want to see in the newspaper tomorrow. And that’s how I gathered the material for my book, in addition to reading a hell of a lot and traveling around countries and talking to all sorts of people.

I can’t take responsibility for the policies that other countries develop, but I’ve built up a substantial network of young and current leaders in a lot of countries and I have regular interactions with them on important issues. With the US government, I’ve worked with the Department of Defense advising on the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t actually talk about the specific things that went on there. As with many people who’ve been involved in the conflicts over there, I’ve tried to assert a certain way in which things should go, but influence is a very complicated landscape. We keep on pushing and pushing on certain issues, in the hope of seeing some kind of change.

New America Foundation has had a lot of success in areas like education policy, tax policy, climate policy as well — it’s a very progressive place. But the question of influence is very interesting, and I think people should ask themselves more seriously — whether they’re journalists or think tank people or academics — “What’s the measure of my influence?” Is someone influential because millions of people read his column, or does anything actually ever change according to what he suggested or recommended? We tend to conflate the two measurements of visibility versus a change. I, for one, I like to set the bar very high and say, “Did something change?”

That’s very inspiring. I’d like to delve some more into application and talk about relatively current events. Obama’s been in office for a little over half a year, and when he was elected the global attitude toward him was much friendlier. Do you think that this friendlier global climate really will prove advantageous to the United States in diplomacy and foreign relations?

I think when people are struggling to understand public opinion toward the United States between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, there’s a very simple explanation that I never hear people give, which is that when Obama was running for President, he didn’t represent America, he represented the anti-Bush and a different America. But now that he’s President and represents America, he’s conflated again, so that Obama equals America. If American policy is still bad, now Obama takes the blame rather than Bush taking the blame. So if you want to explain the fall-off or drop-off in popularity or approval for Obama, that is how you’d explain it. Because people want or expect change instantaneously, and obviously they’re not going to get that because the power of inertia is so great.

Not only is the power of inertia great, in the case of the war in Iraq — where in fact he’s been very fast, he’s been pulling troops out — but it still takes time. In Afghanistan, his very controversial decision is that he’s trying to increase the number of troops there. In many people’s eyes that means deepening an occupation, digging in deeper, and that obviously also isn’t necessarily popular.

Now, I do believe he was quite revolutionary in his early diplomacy. He reached out within the first 100 days to the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and a whole host of countries that the Bush administration considered rogue states. And he said, “Look, it’s time to start anew, it’s time to work on pragmatic interests.” He canceled this whole missile defense plan that had no strategic defense whatsoever and that had been hampering American relations with Russia for years and years. And overnight, he just changed it. So I think he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for quickstarting a process in the first 100 days. And, of course, people will be disappointed if they don’t see reciprocal results right away. But they’re just not going to. That’s not the way it works. I still have a lot of faith in the process that he has initiated.

READ MORE: Parag Khanna discusses the G20, a solution for Sudan, terrorism and borders, explains who’s really going to address climate change and how we may yet come to live in a borderless world.We’re about to head into the G20, and there are many predictions about what’s to be discussed at the summit. I was wondering if you have any comment or insight into this?

Yeah, I spend a lot of time working on G20 issues. I’m part of a group of people who go to each host country of the G20 before they host it, and we spend time in the foreign ministry, with the sherpas and other diplomats to help them figure out what it is they hope to achieve in their one year as chair of the G8 or G20. So I’ve been doing this with Italy last year, Korea next year and so forth.

I think that the G20 is remarkable in that it emerged sort of from nowhere. It did technically exist for more than 10 years, but no one really knew about it till last year. And all of a sudden, it’s become the new rock concert of diplomacy, where everyone is descending on Pittsburgh and making a big show out of it. There’s protesters and poetry and God knows what else. So, whereas the G20 initially was just focused on financial stability and monetary policy issues, now, all of a sudden, it’s expected to save the world, run the world and take care of the world at the same time. It simply can’t do that.

It needs to really focus on achieving certain things, one by one, or whatever it has capacity for, instead of taking on a hundred issues at the same time. Achieving progress on global multilateral opening of trade, poverty reduction in Africa, climate change policy, financial regulation, Iran and the nuclear issue — all of those things are being dumped on the agenda at the same time, as if they’re all going to be solved at once in two days in Pittsburgh. The problem with thinking of diplomacy in terms of these summits is that you wind up with people just having a big scrum and absolutely nothing comes out.

I worry about the G20’s fate, because its main advantages are that it’s flexible, it’s lean, it’s representative. It’s not even a legal entity. It’s just an informal coordinating mechanism. I think informal coordinating mechanisms are very important; I think they are the future of diplomacy, quite frankly. Not legal or treaty-based sorts of institutions, like the UN Security Council — which has a lot of legal authority, but no one trusts it anymore and it’s become basically useless. I would like to see the G20 focus on one or two things at a time and get those right, before it starts to bounce around to 100 different issues at once.

Conflict in Southern Sudan has been on the rise. Is there any way out of these types of conflicts in Africa that are essentially happening, as you pointed out, because of borders that were drawn through the continent in colonial eras?

Technically, there are multiple scenarios, both in the case of south Sudan and also in the generic question of African conflicts. One is independence and partition, but always with an eye toward survivability. To me, that’s always the question for a particular conflict. I talk about Pakistan’s problems with territorial integrity and people are like, “Hey, you didn’t mention Kashmir.” But one of the questions you always have to ask is about survivability. I talk about Kurdistan — it’s a land-locked entity, but I still think it can survive, because I think there are enough pipeline routes already flowing from it. Kashmir has no infrastructural links to oceans, to other bodies of water, and no major allies that would support its independence. So its independence as such is problematic, whereas Kurdistan is really way ahead.

With south Sudan, because they have oil and they’re relatively close to the sea, they can have sustainable exports and energy, and survive as an independent state of Africans — of Christian black Africans — independent of the Arab regime in the north. So I believe that they could have independence. The attacks that you heard about yesterday, quite frankly are happening every day and are really just emblematic of what happens when regimes agree to kick a decision down the road — all that does is lead to more death along the way, because they can’t agree on the ultimate outcome. In the TEDTalk, I said, “Look, whether it’s yesterday or 2011 the official referendum happens, south Sudan is going to be independent.” So the northern regime says, “Let’s just have a referendum three years later, and in the next three years we’ll just torture and kill a lot of people, we’ll fund another war, send a lot of militias in and try and break up your pipeline operation.” What’s the point of doing that? Why cause more harm?

There have been stupidly partitioned states in history, and the one of India and Pakistan, in term of its geography, obviously stands out as a shining example. But that doesn’t mean that right now we don’t have enough data, analysis, material, on-the-ground feedback and opinion. This isn’t 1947. We know now, today, exactly how and where to divide certain places. And the Balkans are no different, except that we would not repeat 1947 if we divided certain countries today.

There’s a great irony in people knowing that their colonial borders are absolutely illegitimate and imposed and forced on them by ignorance, by retreating colonial (now nonexistent) empires, and blaming those empires, but on the other hand today defending those borders as if they’re utterly sacred. And I think we have to break out of that irony if we’re going to have territorial peace in any of these places. That’s not an opinion. Quite frankly, it’s fact. If borders aren’t one of the reasons we have these conflicts, then please, give me another reason. We have this notion that resolving borders would not contribute to conflict resolution, and it’s obviously ludicrous. I think that we should tackle the problem of borders and territorial issues head-on. That was the purpose of my TED Talk.

How do you then deal with the problem of terrorist organizations, these stateless entities? How does that fit into your theory of how the world interacts?

It’s very important to point out that literally almost all terrorism is locally rooted, with local political agendas and often very territorial-rooted agendas. Yes, terrorists cross borders and can strike internationally and appear to be territory-free, but that’s a description of how they act, not an analysis of what they want. When you analyze what they want, and you look at the patterns of global terrorism in the last decade, you find that the countries that are most affected by terrorism — those are very concretely India, Pakistan and Iraq — you find that literally 100 percent of the terrorist activity is about a specific political, geographic, historic, territorial reason.

So just because terrorists fly around in planes and have bank accounts in many countries and operate in these loose networks and don’t have an office that you can attack, it doesn’t in the least bit mean that they’re not political actors in the way that others are. I think it’s really essential to understand that. Whether it’s Kashmir or Belugistan or Pashtunistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Kurdistan or Palestine — the list goes on and on — there is in fact a political, territorial grievance or basis that is at stake. I don’t deal with it any differently than I deal with anything else. I think that the mistake people make is to go too far in the opposite direction and argue that terrorism means that it’s a border-free world. That’s not true, because most terrorists are fighting for borders and about borders and occupations.

It’s been surmised that the central enemy of climate change could bring the world together to work against it. What do you think about that? Do you think that climate change could impact and improve diplomatic relations?

I think it’s a very vague assertion that the crisis of climate change is going to pull countries together to combat it. Quite frankly, the perception of the threat really varies based on the impact that people calculate for themselves. And even if they know it to be true that it will hurt them — like India or China — they are also calculating two things: First, whether their growth is more important than addressing the issue, and secondly, if the Western countries feel passionate enough about it, they’ll pay them to deal with the issue. So, in negotiations, you’re not really representing what you know to be true, you’re representing a position that is going to gain you the maximum amount of resources and leverage.

There’s a great sort of joke or analogy used to represent Iran that’s also at work here. You know, in Arab culture or Persian culture, it’s all about bargaining and the bazaar. You go, you want to buy a carpet and you look at every single carpet except the one you want and then you end up getting a good price because it seems like you don’t want the carpet that you wanted all along. So the US says, “No nuclear proliferation. No nuclear proliferation. No nuclear weapons.” And Iran maybe didn’t want nuclear weapons that badly, but when they realized just how much the US wants to prevent them from getting them, they focus on that. The same thing goes for climate change. The more the US begins to argue that climate change is by far its greatest priority, well, that means that it has to put its money where its mouth is, and China and India can sit back and wait for America to pay them to confront climate change. We all know that China is by some measures the richest country in the world. Certainly, it has two trillion dollars of foreign exchange reserves, and could certainly spend its way toward a more manageable approach to climate change.

I’m afraid that the notion of some kind of holistic, global, political unity on climate change falls apart if you observe the official diplomacy. Unofficially — and again I get back to this notion of informal, consultative networks — unofficially, I think there’s phenomenal things happening. To hell with Pittsburgh, Copenhagen and all these things — I’ve just come from a meeting where even climate experts were saying exactly that — to hell with those things. It’s all about companies innovating new solutions and selling them cheap to mayors and factory owners and governments around the world. The more you do that, the more you’ll be addressing a problem, while negotiators sit and argue about trivial rhetoric.

Really, truly, concretely, do you think that we will ever live in a borderless world?

The answer is, as I said at the very end of my talk, it’s about pushing toward equilibrium. Equilibrium doesn’t mean a borderless world, it means a world in which borders align in ways that are peaceful and sensible with respect to populations and resources. That’s the definition of equilibrium.

When you say a borderless world, I take it to mean a peaceful world of free movement and communities that feel secure. Communities feel secure when borders are shifted to align population with the resources. As far as I’m concerned, we can move closer and closer toward that world. Infrastructure is key because building infrastructure across those borders makes it easier to cross them. You don’t assume a borderless world, you build a borderless world by building lines across borders instead of borders across lines.

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Dr. Okonjo-Iweala will oversee the World Bank’s work in Africa, South Asia, and Europe and Central Asia. “Her commitment to the developing world is unparalleled,” said Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank. She’s been working with the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) initiative to help poor countries reclaim assets lost to corruption, and with Bono’s DATA organization on historic debt-relief programs. Bono said of her last week, “She’s the kind of leader we all want to work for.” (And as Portfolio.com commented, she’s as much a rock star as that Irish gentleman.)

In a recent draft paper (full text in PDF) that she wrote with Robert Jensen of Brown University after a three-year study, she argues that "the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women’s status" and finds "significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preferences", this last point being about sex-selective abortions (rural families prefer boys). They also found "increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing)."

The effects are large, the two researchers argue, "equivalent in some cases to about five years of education" within the surveyed population.

These changes are "accomplished despite there being little or no direct targeted appeals" such as public-service announcements. Which brings Oster and Jensen to speculate that "it may be that cable television, with programming that features lifestyle both in urban areas and in other countries, is an effective form of persuasion, because people emulate what they perceive to be desirable behavior and attitudes".

Levitt spoke at TED2004 offering a preview of a chapter of "Freakonomics" titled "Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?" (watch the video) and exposing his very unconventional approach to economic analysis.

The migration of the blog wouldn’t be a remarkable event (even though the blog is very interesting and highly interactive, attracting hundreds of readers’ comments) were it not for two facts. The move, in a way, closes a circle: "Freakonomics" was born from a profile that Dubner wrote about Levitt for the New York Times Magazine in 2003, "The Economist of Odd Questions". It also underscores a nascent trend, that of well-known bloggers moving into newspapers’ and magazines’ websites, creating synergies and pooling readerships — another step towards the hybridization of the media. The NYT is not the first to try this strategy: France’s Le Monde, for example, has been doing so for a while.

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First of all, let me thank America for, as a matter of fact, TED Global, for putting this conference together. And, this conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century. Think African governments will put together a conference like this? Think the AU will put together a conference like this? Even before they will do that, they will ask for foreign aid. (laughter) Also I would like to pay homage and honor to the TED fellows June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew and the other TED fellows. I call them the ‘cheetah generation.’ The cheetah generation is a new breed of Africans. Who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is. They’re not going to wait for government to do things for them. That’s the cheetah generation. And Africa’s salvation rests on the backs of these cheetahs.

In contrast, of course, we have the ‘hippo generation.’ (laughter) The hippo generation are the ruling elites. They are stuck in their intellectual patch, complaining about colonialism and imperialism. They wouldn’t move one foot. You ask them to reform the economies, they’re not going to reform it, because they benefit from the rotten status quo.

Now, there are a lot of Africans who are very angry. Angry at a condition of Africa. Now, we’re talking about a continent, which is not poor. It is rich in mineral resources, natural mineral resources. But the mineral wealth of Africa has not been utilized to lift its people out of poverty. That’s what makes a lot of Africans very angry. And, in a way, Africa is more than a tragedy, more ways than one. There’s another enduring tragedy and that tragedy is there are so many people, so many governments, so many organizations who want to help the people in Africa. They don’t understand.
Now, we’re not saying don’t help Africa, helping Africa is noble. But helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd. It’s like the blind leading the clueless. There are certain things that we need to recognize. Africa’s begging bowl leaks. Did you know that 40% off the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa? It’s taken out of Africa. That’s what the World Bank says. Look at Africa’s begging bowl. It leaks, horribly. There are people who think that we should pour more money, more aid into this bowl, which leaks.

What are the leakages? Corruption alone costs Africa more than 148 billion dollars a year. Yet, put that aside, capital flight out of Africa, 80 billion a year. Put that aside, let’s take food imports. Every year, Africa spends 20 billion dollars to import food. Just add that up, all these leakages. That’s far more than the 50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa.

Now, back in the 1960s, Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food. Not anymore. We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong. You know it. I know it. But let’s not waste our time talking about these mistakes, because we spent all day here. Let’s move on and flip over to the next chapter. And that’s what this conference is all about, the next chapter.

The next chapter begins with, first of all, asking ourselves this fundamental question: Who do we want to help in Africa? There’s the people and then there’s the government or leaders. Now, the speaker before me, the previous speaker before me, Idris Mohammed, indicated that we’ve had abysmal leadership in Africa. That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable. I belong to an Internet discussion forum, an African internet discussion forum, and I ask them – I said, since 1960, we’ve had exactly 204 African heads of state, since 1960. And I asked them to name me just 20 good leaders. Just 20 good leaders. Maybe, you may want to take this, you know, leadership challenges, you know, yourself. I asked them to name me just 20. Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course, Kwame Nkrumah, (Julius) Nyerere, (Jomo) Kenyatta, somebody mentioned Idi Amin. (laughter) I let that pass. (more laughter). The point is, they couldn’t go beyond 15. Even if they had been able to name me 20, what does that tell you? 20 out of 204 means that the majority, the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people. And if you look at them, the slate of the post-colonial leaders, an assortment of military fu fu heads, Swiss bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elite, quack revolutionaries. (applause) Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that Africans have known for centuries. The second false premise that we make when we’re trying to help Africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in Africa that cares about its people, serves the interests of the people and represents the people.

There is one particular quote a Lesotho chief once says, that “here in Lesotho we’ve got two problems: Rats and the government.” (laughter) What you and I understand as a government, doesn’t exist in many African countries. In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states. “Vampires” is because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is a problem in Africa. A vampire state is a government which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks, who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies and tribesmen, and exclude everybody else. The richest people in Africa are heads of state. They’re menaces and quite often the chief bandit is the head of state himself. Where do they get their money? By creating wealth? No! By raking it off the backs of their sovereign people. That’s not wealth creation. It’s wealth redistribution.

The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people, we must know where the African people are. Take any African economy. An African economy can be broken up into three sectors: there is the modern sector; there is the informal sector; and the traditional sector. The modern sector is the abode of the elites; it’s the seat of government. Many African countries, the modern sector is lost. It’s dysfunctional. It is a meretricious fandango of imported systems, which the elites themselves don’t understand. That is the source of many of Africa’s problems. Where the struggles for political power emanate and, then, spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector, claiming innocent lives.

Now, the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into. More than 80 % of Ivory Coast development went into the modern sector. The other sectors, the informal and the traditional sector, are where you find the majority of the African people, the real people in Africa. That’s where you find them. And obviously that’s common sense. That if you want to help the people, you go where the people are.
But that’s not what we did. As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and the traditional sectors. The traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture. Which is one of the reasons why Africa can’t feed itself. And that’s why it must import food. You cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors. And you can’t develop the informal and the traditional sectors without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work.

These two sectors, let me describe to you, have their own indigenous institutions. First one is the political system. Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny. If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types. The first one belong to those ethnic societies who believe that the state was necessarily tyrannic, so they didn’t want to have anything to do with any centralized authority. These societies are the Igbo, the Somali, the Kikuyus, for example. They have no chiefs. The other ethnic groups, which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power. In Ashanti, for example, a chief cannot make any decision without a concurrence of the council of elders. Without the council, the chief cannot pass any law. And if the chief doesn’t govern according to the will of the people, he will be removed. If not, the people will abandon the chief, go somewhere else and set up a new settlement. And even if you look in ancient African empires, they were all organized around one particular principle, the confederacy principal, which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority, decentralization of power.

Now, this is what I’ve described to you, this is part of Africa’s indigenous political heritage. Now, compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established on Africa. It’s a total far cry. In the economic system in traditional Africa, the means of production is privately owned. It’s owned by extended families. See, in the west, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. The Americans who say, “I am because I am and I can damn well do anything I want, anytime.” The accent is on the ‘I’. In Africa, the Africans say, “I am because we are.” The ‘we’ connotes community, the extended family system. The extended family system pools its resources together. They own farms. They decide what to do, what to produce. They’re not taking the orders from their chiefs. They decide what to do and when they produce their crops. They sell the surplus on marketplaces. When they make a profit, it is theirs to keep, not for the chief to sequester it from them.

In a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free market system. There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu was one great big market town. Kano, Salaga, they were all there. Even if you go to West Africa, you notice that market activity in West Africa, has always been dominated by women. So, it’s quite appropriate that this section is called a market place. The market is not alien to Africa. What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism. But then, after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a western institution. And the leaders say Africans were ready for socialism. Nonsense! And even then, what kind of socialism did they practice? The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of Swiss bank socialism which allowed a head of states and the ministers to rip and plunder Africa’s treasuries for deposit in Switzerland. That is not a kind of system Africans had known for centuries.

What do we do now? Go back to Africa’s indigenous institutions. And this is where we try to get, to go into the informal sectors, the traditional sectors. That’s where you find the African people. And I’d like to show you a quick little video, about a informal sector about the boat builder that I myself tried to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora to invest in.

Could you please show that? (Video starts- 15:41- crowded harbor, boat builders) (talking over video, starts at 16:04- narration at beginning is very low in volume and obscured by video sound). Traditionally, boat building, small boats, there’s an enterprise. This is by a local Ghanaian entrepreneur using his own capital. He’s getting no assistance from the government and he’s building such a boat. A bigger boat will mean that more fish will be, will be caught, and landed, means that he will be able to employ more Ghanaians. It also means that he will be able to generate wealth and then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy. All that you need to do, all that the elites need to do is to move this operation into something, which is enclosed so that the operation can be made more efficient.

Now, it is not just this informal sector. There is also traditional medicine. 80% of Africans still rely on traditional medicine. The modern health sector has totally collapsed. Now, this is an area, I mean, there is a treasure trove of wealth in the traditional medicine area. This is where we need to mobilize Africans, in the Diaspora especially, to invest in this. We also need to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors, also, but to go into agriculture and, also, to instigate change from within. We were able to mobilize Ghanaians in the Diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana. And I know that with the cheetahs, we can take Africa back, one village at a time. Thank you very much. [Transcription by Robert Thomas Carter]

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