President Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the US. He also runs the Clinton Global Initiative.
Short video on the Clinton Foundation
Microsoft has been a key partner to the Clinton Foundation. They have been a part of the Global Initiative for 8 years.
- Microsoft’s commitments to CGI is 36 pages long
When President Clinton started, the average cell phone weighed 5 pounds. There existed a total of 15 web sites then. At the end of his 8 years, IT jobs represented 20% of job growth and 1/3 of wage growth.
All the growth came due to the accelerated rate of technological change.
- Tsunami hit South Asia in 2004, they tried to get them back in their fishing boats. They gave them phones to be able to check fish market prices. Their average income increase 30%
- After Haiti earthquake, 80% of Haitians had cell phones and were able to get access to their banks quickly.
- Technology advances also helped decreased lab testing time, saving lives.
- President Bush made generic drugs available to Africa. They figure it saved 1.7 million lives
- Now treat 5.1 million people for slightly less money than they spent with the 1.7 million treated 5 years ago.
The world has grown more and more interdependent. This can pull us closer together but in ways that are both good and bad. For example, roadside bombs, centrifuges in Iran, etc.
There’s something else technology has done as we try to get all citizens to have a part. Everyone has a bigger voice because of the power of numbers.
- The 2004 tsunami was the first major event where news consumption was driven by the internet…… not network news.
- The median contribution in Internet giving was $56 for the tsunami
- 2010 – Haitian earthquake. The median contribution was $25 with a lot contributed via sms
- It revolutionized the world of disaster response
- In China alone, more
The major challenges of the modern world can be categorized thus:
- There is still an enormous amount of inequality that drives premature deaths, political instaibility, hunger, etc.
- 2.5 billion have no access to basic sanitation
- In the US, median family income is still lower than it was in 2001. We have suffered from an inability to create sufficient jobs at the right skill levels.
- This undermines the basic security needed to ensure safety of citizens.
- You cannot get rid of inequality simply by a taxation policy.
- Example of improvement is the Malawi small farmers who are steadily increasing their productivity. It’s a small farm approach rather than a “throw them out and mechanize it all”
- Most were farming one acre of land
- Many paid 15% of income just to transport the produce to the market place.
- Key iniative is access to a cell phone
- Caribbean islands have the highest electric rates in the world
- Import heavy diesel and fuel oil.
- Looking for ways to accelerate the Caribbean as the first “clean energy” location in the world
- Haiti has a solar system that produces a net surplus of power.
- China over-farmed the fields to the Northeast of Beijing. That led to dust bowls that directly added to Beijing’s air pollution problem
- The world is too unstable
- Some instability is good.
- Too much causes chaos which cannot be managed.
One last thought: President Clinton is optimistic about the future because on balance, the technical revolution has fostered more cooperation than conflict. The most important thing is that we keep innovating. Our identities have to be informed by what we share in common with other people rather than what sets us apart.
President Clinton then used the example of Ukraine which has significant inequality and which was the core reason for the uprising.
Quote: Most important political book in the last two years: The Great Conquest of Earth by Wilson. Factoid: the mass of all the ants on earth is greater than all the humans on earth. “The conquest of earth has come only through the cooperators….. ants, termites, and humans. “
