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Thank you, very much.
It's the Oxford Martin School, which is a group of about 350
people working on the biggest challenges of the future.
And what I'd like to share with you is some of the
thinking coming out of that and why it matters for the
management of the planet.
We live in the most magnificent of times, what I
think of as the New Renaissance.
A period of extraordinary creativity, a period where
lives are better, where our prospects are greater than
anything our parents or
grandparents could have imagined.
Our average life expectancy is better.
There are more people escaping poverty now
than ever in history.
And all the prospects are really wonderful.
And yet.
And yet there's this real danger that this precious
moment in history is not going to be part of a trend but
rather the end.
The end of this creativity, this end of this extraordinary
burst of progress which is much greater
than ever in history.
And that's what happened in the Renaissance.
And that's why I think of this period as the New Renaissance.
The Renaissance, of course, we still
worship the iconic artists.
We benefit from the wisdom of the Galileos and others, a
group that revolutionised thinking.
But it doesn't show up in economic history at all as a
time of progress.
Indeed, it was a time that set us back immeasurably.
We still feel the damage of the religious
wars that began then.
We still feel the damage inflicted by slavery and the
industrialisation of human subjugation that was created
out of those technologies.
And so the Gutenberg press, which was a revolutionary
technology which allowed ideas to travel from just a few
people passing ideas around by word of mouth to enabling
millions of people in the first years of the press to
share ideas, leading to these leapfrogs in creativity that
we saw in the Renaissance that became the symbol of
oppression.
It became the symbol of conflict in the bonfire of the
vanities, the burning of books,
destruction of the presses.
And we have, in our time, the Internet.
We have connectivity at a level that could not have been
imagined there and we couldn't have even
imagined 30 years ago.
The walls have literally come down.
The Berlin Wall fell about 24 years ago.
And with that ripples around the world, 84 countries
becoming democratic, and changes that I saw in my
country, South Africa, which I ascribed to the struggle of
the South African people and was certainly that.
But that wouldn't have happened unless the wall came
down in Berlin, the systemic change that led to our blinds
being lifted.
And, of course, we see that continuing in the Arab Spring.
We see it in China, we see it around the world today and in
the tensions that remain not least in the setbacks in
places like Egypt.
So we know this is a struggle.
We know that it's not a one way street.
But we think it's broadly irreversible.
And yet we see in the politics of today this rejection.
UKIP getting 24% of the UK vote in
the most recent election.
People turning their back on migration.
Protectionism and nationalism rising not only the UK but in
many, many societies.
And the tension between growing integration a
hyper-connectivity, which is the source of our progress,
it's the reason for our leapfrogging and the rejection
of it, I believe, is a very great one.
I believe it's the most critical tension of our time.
And it's far from resolved that we are going to remain a
hyper-connected, integrated, global society.
The fabric that binds us is under stress.
And the tension is rising not because we don't want to
continue, we do.
We love integration.
We benefit from it.
But because the institutional system which is managing it is
unfit for 21st century purpose.
The institutions we have are the legacy of the
Second World War.
They are over 60 years out of date, the United Nations
system, the Bretton Woods system, and other parts of it
which arose in the Cold War.
And so the new challenges are not being met by an
institutional response.
At the national level, the response is to use our old
sovereign state to try and manage an economy, a society,
technologies which are global.
And at the global level, we try and use these unwieldy
fossilised institutions to try and manage global affairs with
old civil servants created with job descriptions for
different periods of time.
And the irony is that our successes, not only in the
economic terrain but in the political terrain, are making
this much more difficult.
It's because we are climbing this
economic curve so rapidly.
It's because five billion people around the world are
escaping poverty and climbing the energy ladder incredibly
rapidly, the food ladder, the land and water ladder so
rapidly that we have this very rapidly rising perfect storm.
And we saw this reinforced in the IPCC,
materials coming out yesterday.
It's because of our success, our success in
inter-connectivity, our success in growth, our
collective genius being unlocked to create development
that we have this rising tension.
But it's also because of our political success because
we've won our freedoms.
Because we have more individual rights.
We have the ability to choose in ways that were unimaginable
for most of the world only 30 years ago.
There's only really one society now, North Korea,
which is disconnected where people are not part of this
global community compared to well over 80% of the world's
population only 30 years ago.
But because we have more choice, we also make more
crazy decisions.
Decisions which are rational for us as individuals but not
rational for the collective, not rational for the planet or
for the future of the world.
And this tension between individual rationality and
collective rationality, I believe, is
absolutely at the centre.
Now this is not a new idea either.
The idea of global commons and global commons management and
the tension around it is an old one.
Economist have written about the tragedy of the commons
when villagers had a few goats and cattle and put them on the
common fields, that was fine.
The field sustained them.
But as they got wealthier and got more and more goats or
cattle, the past just collapsed.
And so it was when a small number of people fished in the
rivers or lakes and then the lakes and
rivers became depleted.
And so rules were put in place.
Elders were created that managed
these common resources.
There were regulations.
There were times, there were numbers of cattle
you could put on.
Now we've seen in many signals like in the ocean fisheries
the collapse of these global commons.
But they are becoming increasingly stark.
A tuna was sold for $1.8 million in Tokyo in
January this year.
And there is a great YouTube video of this auction.
That's about $10,000 for a plate of sushi.
And we see similarly absurd prices for rhinoceros' horn
and for many, many other scarce natural resources.
Of course, the tuna or rhinoceros don't know how much
they are worth.
They don't make more when they become
million dollar creatures.
Their supply is determined by their old habits.
And so we see extinction looming in these areas because
people are exercising their rational choices.
But when you sum this up in other areas, it becomes even
more dramatic.
It's not just the tunas or the rhinos that are going, it's
our atmosphere.
It's, of course, rational for everyone to progress from not
having energy up the energy ladder, to get air
conditioning, heating, cooking, computing, TVs,
transport, and all of that.
I'm amazed by the number of attendees have come here from
Sydney or speakers.
That's rational.
We all want to hear them.
They want to come.
That's our individual choice.
We will do it all the time.
I travel more than the average.
And yet we know that when these rational individual
actions sum up, we will get disastrous global
consequences.
So what is to be done?
I believe it's absolutely crucial that we accept a loss
of individual and national sovereignty.
Whatever can be decided at lower level as possible by
individuals, by communities, by countries should be.
But where the spillover effects of our decisions
impact on others, it's very important that we collectively
understand that.
And that, of course, not only requires an understanding but
an action around it.
This is different to choices around
something like religion.
If you're religious, you believe that non believers
might go to hell.
That's fine but actually it's only you in the end that is
living through the consequences of your beliefs.
The choices we exercise around us in our consumption of goods
and services, in our lifestyles, impact everywhere.
Now as [? Malac ?]
said in the previous presentation, the UK, in many
ways, might be better off, Northern Europe might be
better off, Northern Canada might be better off as a
result of climate change.
And so maybe selfishly we'd think, well, it be great to be
able to predict a barbecue.
Let's not worry too much about climate change.
But, of course, as a global community we know that
billions of people will be made much
worse off as a result.
And we know that the planet will become less sustainable.
And it's not just climate change, we need to think about
this writ large.
Antibiotic resistance is another very good example of
the tension between individual and collective rationality.
It's rational for all of us to take antibiotics, to give them
to our loved ones.
We'd be silly not to in many ways.
And yet we know that in all of us doing that, they're
becoming less and less effective.
And this is compounded by the problem that actually most
antibiotics are no longer given to humans, they are
given to animals to increase the profitability of food
processing.
They are even painted on ships' hulls to speed up the
movement of ships so that the barnacles don't grow on them.
So our goods and services have fractions of logistics costs
shaved off them, and the companies can do even better.
This is insane because we also know that one of the
consequences of being joined up and being more people, and
there are 2 billion more people in the world since
1990, since these walls have come down, an extraordinary
success story because they are escaping poverty, and that's
never happened before with more people and
far fewer poor people.
But we also know that as we are more densely packed in
urban areas and more connected that pandemics will be a much
greater threat to humanity.
Our future of emerging infections in the Oxford Marin
School has demonstrated how pandemics will exactly mirror
airline traffic.
And how places like Heathrow, JFK, and others will be the
super spreaders of new pandemics.
We know this.
This is not complicated.
But our actions are making it much more
difficult for us to resist.
In the financial crisis, we saw the first of the 21st
century systemic crises.
A cascading failure that came out of a complete conceptual
failure of economists to understand
what they were doing.
The prising of individual rationality, the putting it in
such a place that it was regarded as the logical
expression of a collective rationality.
If people pumped it up, it must be happening because it's
logically so.
What economists call rational expectations theory.
And what we saw was as this market pumped up, the politics
behind it drove it even further.
No one wanted to prick the balloon.
Taking away the punch bowl while the party is going is
not a nice thing for a politician to do.
And so what we saw was this facade of wealth creation
being sustained in a totally unsustainable base.
And, it did not only impact on those that were immediately
effected, the homeowners who had their homes repossessed,
but shocked around the world.
So all of us and our friends and our labour markets are
much worse off.
And up to 100 million people have been laid off around the
world as a result of this misguided belief in individual
rationality in economic markets.
But it wasn't only and intellectual failure around
the markets, it was a technological blind spot.
Hank Paulson, who was the Treasury Secretary of the US
at the time, had been the chief
executive of Goldman Sachs.
And in his testimony to the Congress, in explaining why
they let Lehman Brothers go, and Lehman became the centre
of the spider web of financial transactions that led to this
cascading failure, he and others say, we simply did not
know what was happening.
Now cynics may say, he was bluffing.
Of course he knew.
I actually believe that he and the whole supervision system,
which is the most sophisticated global system in
the world with the best data, the best people, and the most
joined up, actually didn't know what was going on.
They were blind.
They were blind to the structural changes, to the
technological changes with how these derivatives where
evolving and to the complexity of the system and it's super
spreading around the world.
They did not understand complexity.
They did not understand hyper-connectivity.
And they did not understand technological change.
They were misguided in believing it was rational.
They were misguided in believing that it would look
after itself.
And, of course, in the UK, our leadership similarly brought
down regulation when they should have been lifting it,
became less connected when they should have
becoming more connected.
But under it was a deep intellectual failure and a
deep failure to understand the way the world is evolving.
And so I see in the financial crisis, the first of the
systemic crises, but certainly not the last, and I think many
others, in cyberspace, in pandemics, in climate will
follow these simple patterns.
With this complete failure to recognise the spillover or
unintended consequences of what might seem politically
expedient national decisions.
Politically expedient decisions for individuals
after all because we're more democratic, we vote for the
people that make these decisions.
We put in place this governance system which is
leading to an unbundling of governance.
And so this paradox.
We live in a world where hyper-connectivity and
integration defines our time.
In many aspects of our lives, we feel it all the time.
Not least in walking around [? shortage ?]
and feeling the vibrancy of this multicultural
environment.
In all technologies that we use, in
everything we think about.
And this is leading to a release of genius, individual
genius because there's just so much more creativity.
There's so many more educated people out there.
So much more talent being connected.
And collective genius.
Because not only about the individuals at the top end of
the spectrum, it's about our ability to come together and
through our coming together to have ideas we could never have
had on our own.
And we know this from all the psychological management in
other work that's done on creativity.
We know that when we come together, we can do things we
can't do on our own.
And yet the perverse outcome of this is that we're coming
together to create bigger and bigger problems for ourselves.
This is the best time to be alive.
So it's not based on a pessimism
about where we're at.
It's based on extraordinary optimism.
Just while you're listening to me for 20 minutes, your
average life expectancy will increase
by about five minutes.
This is the most amazing time.
But we need to recognise that it's fragile.
That this time cannot be sustained unless we think
differently about the implications of why we are
here and where we go if we carry on like this.
And it's not just about us.
Because we with our incomes can turn up the air
conditioning or turn up the heating
and insulate ourselves.
Maybe we can even stockpile pandemic drugs or
anti-pandemic drugs that might protect us, although their
efficacy will be coming down.
It's about what we think about of ourselves as human beings.
Do we care what the spillover impacts of our actions are and
what do we do about it?
This group here at Futurefest, I believe, is an extraordinary
opportunity.
All of us will be living all of the rest of our lives in
the future.
But it's remarkable how little time people spend consciously
thinking about what does the future hold?
And what can we do about it?
This is a fantastic opportunity to do so.
And I hope in the 19 minutes that I've had with you that
this has been helpful in the way you think about it.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]