< Return to Video

How to make the world work | Simon Anholt | TEDxHamburg

  • Not Synced
    Give me 30 seconds,
  • Not Synced
    And I can give you a list of
    30 terrifying challenges
  • Not Synced
    facing humanity and the planet
    at this point in history.
  • Not Synced
    And we wouldn't sleep tonight.
  • Not Synced
    There are so many of them,
    and they seem to be so frightening
  • Not Synced
    It's not really surprising
  • Not Synced
    that many of us are feeling
    a little bit disheartened,
  • Not Synced
    and a little bit anxious at the moment.
  • Not Synced
    But the way I see it -
  • Not Synced
    There are really only two things
  • Not Synced
    stopping the world working at the moment
  • Not Synced
    The first one is the fact that
    the countries don't collaborate enough.
  • Not Synced
    We know the solutions
    to most of those challenges.
  • Not Synced
    But we don't implement them
    because we don't work together.
  • Not Synced
    And the second thing
    that stopping the world working properly
  • Not Synced
    is the fact that every single
    one of those challenges
  • Not Synced
    has been caused by the behaviour
    of human beings.
  • Not Synced
    And if we can change that
    we can change everything.
  • Not Synced
    Now those sound like
    big tasks and they are.
  • Not Synced
    But I'm optimistic.
  • Not Synced
    For the last 10 years, I've been working
    on projects and plans and policies.
  • Not Synced
    to try and attack those two barriers
    to making the world work better.
  • Not Synced
    Some of them I tried to encourage
    countries to implement.
  • Not Synced
    But the coolest ones, I keep
    and I try to do them myself.
  • Not Synced
    So I'd like to tell you two of those
    in the few minutes that I've got today.
  • Not Synced
    The first one is more of an update.
  • Not Synced
    It's a project called the Good Country Index,
    which I launched back in 2014.
  • Not Synced
    I haven't spoken about it for a while,
    but it has been through 4 different editions.
  • Not Synced
    And I thought it would be good
    to give an update.
  • Not Synced
    So the Good Country Index is an attempt
    to measure what every country on earth
  • Not Synced
    gives to the rest of the world
  • Not Synced
    outside of its own borders,
  • Not Synced
    a kind of balance sheet
    for the world if you like.
  • Not Synced
    A lot of people, when I
    originally launched it said
  • Not Synced
    not another country index, surely
    there are enough of those around already.
  • Not Synced
    But the interesting thing is that
    almost all of the others look inwards.
  • Not Synced
    They treat countries as if they were little islands
  • Not Synced
    inhabiting their own private oceans.
  • Not Synced
    But surely that doesn't really make sense.
  • Not Synced
    Because everything everybody does
    has an impact on all of us, always.
  • Not Synced
    If one country pollutes the air or water,
    that's our air and our water.
  • Not Synced
    If they go to war,
    drags other countries in
  • Not Synced
    and the refugees pour out.
  • Not Synced
    There is really nothing you can do any more
  • Not Synced
    So what the good country
    index attempts to do
  • Not Synced
    is to make a start towards
    helping people to understand
  • Not Synced
    that this is an interconnected system
  • Not Synced
    by measuring what each country
    contributes to the rest of the world.
  • Not Synced
    Now, it's not my opinion which countries
    rank higher and which ones rank lower.
  • Not Synced
    It's formed from a set of 35
    large databases,
  • Not Synced
    which mostly come from the UN system.
  • Not Synced
    And what they do is they simply measure
    the positive and negative effects
  • Not Synced
    that the countries have.
  • Not Synced
    It's always been a tiny bit controversial.
  • Not Synced
    But that's kind of good,
  • Not Synced
    because it helps to start
    a new kind of argument.
  • Not Synced
    In fact, it works really well
  • Not Synced
    within hours of me releasing the first
    edition of the Good Country Index
  • Not Synced
    I started receiving thousands of
    beautiful hate mails from trolls
  • Not Synced
    all over the world, demanding to know
    why the country they hate ranks so high.
  • Not Synced
    and the country they love ranks so low,
    and how I cooked up the entire thing
  • Not Synced
    just to produce that specific result
    and annoy them personally.
  • Not Synced
    And we have conversations about
    these things and we argue about it,
  • Not Synced
    and at the end I always say the same thing
    "Look, it's working."
  • Not Synced
    I don't know if I am right.
    I don't know if you are right.
  • Not Synced
    But in the end, we are discussing
    the right thing.
  • Not Synced
    We are talking about
    not how well is your country,
  • Not Synced
    but how much is your country doing.
  • Not Synced
    And that's what it was supposed to achieve.
  • Not Synced
    So by pushing the direction of
    the argument, the conversation,
  • Not Synced
    towards a new way of looking at countries,
  • Not Synced
    then I think that
    it's pushing the agenda forward
  • Not Synced
    So, my colleague Robert Govers and I
  • Not Synced
    just released the latest edition
    of the Good Country Index.
  • Not Synced
    And I'll just give you a very quick glimpse
    of what's going on there.
  • Not Synced
    Finland came first.
  • Not Synced
    One of these days, somebody is going to
    invent a country ranking
  • Not Synced
    that does not have
    a nordic country in the top ten.
  • Not Synced
    (Laughter)
  • Not Synced
    An index of modesty perhaps.
  • Not Synced
    Anyway well done Finland, seriously!
    It's absolutely great.
  • Not Synced
    And another rather interesting thing
    happened in this latest edition
  • Not Synced
    of the Good Country Index,
    and that was
  • Not Synced
    what you can see if you go to the
    slightly lower in the Index,
  • Not Synced
    the USA has various reasons sunk
    quite a long way since the last edition,
  • Not Synced
    and Russia for various reasons has risen.
  • Not Synced
    And we now have this peculiar situation
    where the USA and Russia
  • Not Synced
    relative to the size of their economies,
  • Not Synced
    are neck and neck,
    quite a long way down the Index.
  • Not Synced
    It's like two mean kids holding hands
    at the edge of the playground
  • Not Synced
    and refusing to join the others.
  • Not Synced
    (Laughter) (Cheering)( Applause)
  • Not Synced
    But hey, it's an interesting result,
  • Not Synced
    but in the end, I'm afraid to say that
    the world hasn't changed very much
  • Not Synced
    since the first one came out in 2014.
  • Not Synced
    It's still America first, Britain first,
    Russia first, Germany first.
  • Not Synced
    And in a way I understand that.
    I don't have a problem with it.
  • Not Synced
    I mean after all, if you are elected
    to run a country, it's pretty obvious
  • Not Synced
    you put that country's interest first.
  • Not Synced
    But what I find rather demoralising
    about those kinds of sentiments
  • Not Synced
    is the implication that
    everybody else has to come last.
  • Not Synced
    And this is what I dispute.
  • Not Synced
    I think we can all come first.
  • Not Synced
    And one of the nice things about
    the job I have been doing
  • Not Synced
    for the last 20 years or so
    advising governments around the world
  • Not Synced
    and trying out real policies
    in the real world,
  • Not Synced
    is that it's perfectly
    possible to harmonise
  • Not Synced
    your domestic and your
    international responsibilities.
  • Not Synced
    You can do the right thing
    for your own people,
  • Not Synced
    and you can do the right thing
    for humanity at the same time
  • Not Synced
    without sacrificing yourself.
  • Not Synced
    And the funny thing is,
    it makes better policies.
  • Not Synced
    This is something that most
    governments have simply never tried.
  • Not Synced
    So on to the second thing
    that's stopping the world working
  • Not Synced
    the slightly more complicated issue
    of the behaviour of us humans.
  • Not Synced
    Well, to get started on this.
  • Not Synced
    I thought it would be interesting
    to find out how many people in the world
  • Not Synced
    already agree with
    some of these basic principles,
  • Not Synced
    the ones outlined behind
    The Good Country Index.
  • Not Synced
    So Robert and I did some research
  • Not Synced
    and we discovered that no less than
    10% of the world population
  • Not Synced
    appears to fully share
    the principles of The Good Country.
  • Not Synced
    The idea that countries should collaborate
    and cooperate a great deal more,
  • Not Synced
    and compete a tiny bit less.
  • Not Synced
    This is great news. 10 percent,
    that's 760 million people.
  • Not Synced
    If that were a nation, that would be
    the third largest nation on the planet
  • Not Synced
    after China and India.
  • Not Synced
    And I have to admit when
    those numbers came out,
  • Not Synced
    I got very excited.
  • Not Synced
    But then on mature reflection,
    I realised that actually
  • Not Synced
    the counterpart of that is that
    90% of the people in the world
  • Not Synced
    don't agree with that proposition.
  • Not Synced
    And I think if one was going to
    take this challenge seriously,
  • Not Synced
    one has to focus on the 90%.
  • Not Synced
    It's not enough just to sell messages
    to the people who already agree with you,
  • Not Synced
    and try to make them make tiny tweaks
    in their behaviour because
  • Not Synced
    frankly, it's too late for that.
  • Not Synced
    We are in too much of a hurry.
  • Not Synced
    We need big change,
    we need it very soon.
  • Not Synced
    In fact, we need it right now.
  • Not Synced
    So how can we deeply educate
    the majority of the world's population
  • Not Synced
    to behave in a way which is more
    friendly to the world that we live in
  • Not Synced
    and more friendly to each other?
  • Not Synced
    Because by the way, when I was speaking
    of trolls, of course it reminded me
  • Not Synced
    of this strange idea that emerged recently
    and I don't know where it came from
  • Not Synced
    that the people who
    care more about local things
  • Not Synced
    and people like me who
    care more about global things
  • Not Synced
    should be enemies.
  • Not Synced
    Who thought of this idea?
  • Not Synced
    I think this is the most dangerous idea
    in the world at the moment,
  • Not Synced
    and I think we should all look out for it
    and challenge it whenever we hear it.
  • Not Synced
    The people who care more
    about local things
  • Not Synced
    and the people who care more
    about global things shouldn't be enemies.
  • Not Synced
    They should be working together.
  • Not Synced
    We should be glad that each other exist.
  • Not Synced
    There isn't time for this kind of
    childish tribalism.
  • Not Synced
    We need to get on and fix things.
  • Not Synced
    While anyway as I was saying
  • Not Synced
    the 90% need to be fundamentally
    educated in a different way.
  • Not Synced
    And I started looking at some
    of the websites of the NGOs,
  • Not Synced
    the campaigning organisations
    and charities,
  • Not Synced
    and I began to notice there was
    a common theme emerging.
  • Not Synced
    There was a sentence, which in
    one form or another
  • Not Synced
    kept on cropping up.
  • Not Synced
    And the sentence was something like this,
  • Not Synced
    "And we should leave the world
    in a better state for our children."
  • Not Synced
    And I've tried to read this sentence
    about 93 times in different places.
  • Not Synced
    I began thinking to myself,
  • Not Synced
    "you know that's pretty arrogant really."
  • Not Synced
    The idea you can take something huge
  • Not Synced
    like climate change, huge systemic problem
    or conflict or migration
  • Not Synced
    that's taken billions of people
    centuries to perpetrate,
  • Not Synced
    and you are gonna fix it
    before you check out?
  • Not Synced
    (Laughter)
  • Not Synced
    It's this kind of arrogance and impatience
    that causes more problems than it solves.
  • Not Synced
    If we only have the nerve,
    if we only have the courage
  • Not Synced
    to give it one generation,
  • Not Synced
    we can fix everything and
    we can fix it for good.
  • Not Synced
    Because every single day that passes
    humanity has an opportunity to start again.
  • Not Synced
    Because every single day that passes
    new children are born,
  • Not Synced
    and they can learn in new ways.
  • Not Synced
    So there is a solution to every
    single challenge facing humanity.
  • Not Synced
    It's called education.
  • Not Synced
    But we need to do it in a new way
    and a different way
  • Not Synced
    and a much more ambitious way
    than we've done it before.
  • Not Synced
Title:
How to make the world work | Simon Anholt | TEDxHamburg
Description:

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
14:55

English subtitles

Revisions Compare revisions