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.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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?
