(Applause)
Give me 30 seconds,
And I can give you a list of 30 terrifying challenges
facing humanity and the planet at this point in history.
And we wouldn't sleep tonight.
There are so many of them, and they seem to be so frightening
It's not really surprising
that many of us are feeling a little bit disheartened,
and a little bit anxious at the moment.
But the way I see it -
There are really only two things
stopping the world working at the moment
The first one is the fact that the countries don't collaborate enough.
We know the solutions to most of those challenges.
But we don't implement them because we don't work together.
And the second thing that's stopping the world working properly
is the fact that every single one of those challenges
has been caused by the behaviour of human beings.
And if we can change that we can change everything.
Now, those sound like very big tasks and they are.
But I'm optimistic.
For the last 10 years, I've been working on projects and plans and policies.
to try and attack those two barriers to making the world work better.
Some of them I tried to encourage countries to implement.
But the coolest ones, I keep and I try to do them myself.
So I'd like to tell you about two of those in the few minutes that I've got today.
The first one is more of an update.
It's a project called The Good Country Index which I launched back in 2014.
I haven't spoken about it for a while, but it's been through 4 different editions.
And I thought it would be good to give an update.
So The Good Country Index is an attempt to measure what every country on earth
gives to the rest of the world
outside of its own borders,
a kind of balance sheet for the world if you like.
A lot of people, when I originally launched it
said, "not another country index. Surely there are enough of those around already."
But the interesting thing is that almost all of the others look inwards.
They treat countries as if they were little islands
inhabiting their own private oceans.
But surely that doesn't really make sense.
Because everything everybody does has an impact on all of us, always.
If one country pollutes the air or water, that's our air and our water.
If they go to war, drags other countries in
and the refugees pour out.
There is really nothing you can do any more
that only impacts the domestic population.
So what The Good Country Index attempts to do
is to make a start towards helping people to understand
that this is an interconnected system,
by measuring what each country contributes to the rest of the world.
Now, it's not my opinion which countries rank higher and which ones rank lower.
It's formed from a set of 35 large databases,
which mostly come from the UN system.
And what they do is they simply measure the positive and negative effects
that the countries have.
It's always been a tiny bit controversial.
But that's kind of good,
because it helps to start a new kind of argument.
In fact, it works really well.
Within hours of me releasing the first edition of The Good Country Index
I started receiving thousands of beautiful hate mails from trolls
all over the world, demanding to know why the country they hate ranks so high.
and the country they love ranks so low, and how I cooked up the entire thing
just to produce that specific result and annoy them personally.
(Laughter)
And we have conversations about these things and we argue about it,
and at the end I'd always say the same thing, "Look, it's working."
I don't know if I am right. I don't know if you are right.
But in the end, we are discussing the right thing.
We are talking about not how well is your country,
but how much is your country doing.
And that's what it was supposed to achieve.
So by pushing the direction of the argument, the conversation,
towards a new way of looking at countries,
then I think that it's pushing the agenda forward
So, my colleague Robert Govers and I
just released the latest edition of The Good Country Index.
And I'll just give you a very quick glimpse of what's going on there.
Finland came first.
One of these days, somebody is going to invent a country ranking
that does not have a nordic country in the top ten.
(Laughter)
An index of modesty perhaps.
Anyway well done Finland, seriously! It's absolutely great.
And another rather interesting thing happened in this latest edition
of The Good Country Index, and that was
what you can see if you go to the slightly lower in the Index,
that the USA has various reasons sunk quite a long way since the last edition,
and Russia for various reasons has risen.
And we now have this peculiar situation where the USA and Russia
relative to the size of their economies,
are neck and neck, quite a long way down the Index.
It's like two mean kids holding hands at the edge of the playground
and refusing to join the others.
(Laughter) (Cheering) (Applause)
But hey, it's an interesting result,
but in the end, I'm afraid to say that the world hasn't changed very much
since the first one came out in 2014.
It's still America first, Britain first, Russia first, Germany first.
And in a way I understand that. I don't have a problem with it.
I mean after all, if you are elected to run a country, it's pretty obvious
that you put that country's interest first.
But what I find rather demoralising about those kinds of sentiments
is the implication that everybody else has to come last.
And this is what I dispute.
I think we can all come first.
And one of the nice things about the job I have been doing
for the last 20 years or so advising governments around the world
and trying out real policies in the real world,
is that it's perfectly possible to harmonise
your domestic and your international responsibilities.
You can do the right thing for your own people,
and you can do the right thing for humanity at the same time
without sacrificing yourself.
And the funny thing is, it makes better policies.
This is something that most governments have simply never tried.
So on to the second thing that's stopping the world working
the slightly more complicated issue of the behaviour of us humans.
Well, to get started on this.
I thought it would be interesting to try to find out how many people in the world
already agree with some of these basic principles,
the ones outlined behind The Good Country Index.
So Robert and I did some research
and we discovered that no less than 10% of the world's population
appears to fully share the principles of The Good Country,
the idea that countries should collaborate and cooperate a great deal more,
and compete a tiny bit less.
This is great news. 10 percent, that's 760 million people.
If that were a nation, that would be the third largest nation on the planet
after China and India.
And I have to admit when those numbers came out,
I got very excited.
But then on mature reflection, I realised that actually
the counterpart of that is that 90% of the people in the world
don't agree with that proposition.
And I think if one was going to take this challenge seriously,
one has to focus on the 90%.
It's not enough just to sell messages to the people who already agree with you,
and try to make them make tiny tweaks in their behaviour
because frankly, it's too late for that.
We are in too much of a hurry.
We need big change, we need it very soon.
In fact, we need it right now.
So how can we deeply educate the majority of the world's population
to behave in a way which is more friendly to the world that we live in
and more friendly to each other?
Because by the way, when I was speaking of trolls, of course it reminded me
of this strange idea that emerged recently and I don't know where it came from
that the people who care more about local things
and people like me who care more about global things
should be enemies.
Who thought of this idea?
I think this is the most dangerous idea in the world at the moment,
and I think we should all look out for it and challenge it whenever we hear it.
The people who care more about local things
and the people who care more about global things shouldn't be enemies.
They should be working together.
We should be glad that each other exists.
There isn't time for this kind of childish tribalism.
We need to get on and fix things.
While anyway as I was saying
the 90% need to be fundamentally educated in a different way.
And I started looking at some of the websites of the NGOs,
and the campaigning organisations and the charities,
and I began to notice there was a common theme emerging.
There was a sentence, which in one form or another
kept on cropping up.
And the sentence was something like this,
"And we should leave the world in a better state for our children."
And I've tried to read this sentence about 93 times in different places.
I began thinking to myself,
"you know that's pretty arrogant really."
The idea that you could take something huge
like climate change, huge systemic problem or conflict or migration
that's taken billions of people centuries to perpetrate,
and you are gonna fix it before you check out?
(Laughter)
It's this kind of arrogance and impatience that causes more problems than it solves.
If we only have the nerve, if we only have the courage
to give it one generation,
we can fix everything and we can fix it for good.
Because every single day that passes humanity has an opportunity to start again.
Because every single day that passes new children are born,
and they can learn in new ways.
So there is a solution to every single challenge facing humanity.
It's called education.
But we need to do it in a new way and a different way
and a much more ambitious way than we've done it before.
Imagine if you wield a test tube rack
of the sort that you probably had when you studied science at school.
And in this test tube rack made of wood there are 7, 8, 10 I don't know
little glass test tubes, and each one contains a different coloured liquid.
And each one of those liquids is a vaccine, an educational vaccine
against the behaviours that cause climate change, conflicts,
human right abuses, terrorism, migration pandemic and all the rest of it.
And if we administer these educational vaccines to all of our children,
in the next generation, they will be incapable of continuing the behaviours
that we have indulged in for so long.
If we teach our children cultural anthropology at the age of 6,
it's a wonderful subject for 6 year olds.
They grow up taking a scientific pride in understanding cultural differences.
They are immunised against the kind of ignorance
that leads to prejudice and intolerance.
I know that one works, because I experimented on my own children
and it works a charm.
(Laughter)
If we want to lessen the speed of climate change,
we need to teach our children oceanography and meteorology,
and then maybe one day they will switch off the damn light
when they leave the bedroom.
(Laugher)
We need to teach our children hygiene so that there is less disease.
We need to teach them to meditate so there is less mental illness,
and they learn to have more empathy and more understanding and more kindness
towards everybody else.
There are so many subjects.
I can't decide which ones they should be.
What I think we need to do is we need to have a big global discussion
on the internet
where everybody puts in their own idea
about what should be the next set of values
that we are going to teach the next generation of children
so they can run towards the global challenges
instead of running away from them as we've done.
And we can do this.
Next year, it will be my aim, my ambition to have one hundred ministers of education
signing up to this new global compact of educational values.
UNESCO has already signed a letter saying that they would like to support this
if we can get it going.
And if you have any doubts about whether it's possible
for humanity to engage in such a big common project
despite all of that cultural differences,
we'll just have a think about the United National's charter
or the human rights documentation.
Have a read if you haven't read it for a while.
These are the most beautiful documents ever produced by humanity,
and they really give you faith, because they remind you as you read them
that we are capable of behaving like a single species
inhabiting a single planet.
We can do it if we really want to and if we do it at scale.
The good news is that it's more about joining up the dots
than starting from scratch.
Because there are of course hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of projects
around the world at the moment, finding and experimenting different ways
of educating children so they behave better in the future.
The trouble is they are mostly single topics and in single countries.
There's no time for doing it that slowly now.
We need to do it big, and we need to do it in one go.
Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish climate activist
is beginning to discover and beginning to show us how very difficult it is
to persuade grown-ups to change their behaviour.
But the simple fact to the matter is
that we can see that a lot of children have got the right attitude,
but they don't have the solutions.
Some adults have the solutions but they definitely don't have the right attitude.
And so guess what, it's another necessity for collaboration,
the children and the grown-ups working together.
We all have to think very hard now about being better human beings.
And that's about being better citizens, both locally and globally.
But it's also perhaps mainly about being better ancestors.
If we can do that, we can make the world work.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering)