How to make the world work | Simon Anholt | TEDxHamburg

Simon Anholt has advised the presidents, prime ministers and governments of 55 countries during the last twenty years, helping them to engage more imaginatively and effectively with the international community and to ‘make the world work better’.

He also publishes the Good Country Index, a survey that ranks countries on their contribution to humanity and the planet, and in 2016 launched the Global Vote, which enables anybody in the world to vote in the elections of other countries. Simon’s TED Talk launching the Good Country Index has received 5.6 million views, and his more recent one launching the Global Vote, over a million.

Professor Anholt is the author of five books about countries, cultures and globalisation. He is the founder and Editor Emeritus of a leading academic journal focused on public diplomacy and perceptions of places, and publishes a major global study measuring the international standing of fifty countries and fifty cities, the Anholt-IPSOS Nation Brands Index and City Brands Index.

Website: www.goodcountry.org

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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 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 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 try 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
four 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.
There're 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 the water,

that's our air and our water.

If they go to war,

it drags other countries in
and the refugees pour out.

There's really nothing you can do anymore

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 measure

the positive and negative effects
that 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
and 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)

So we have conversations about
these things and we'd argue about it,

and at the end I'd always say
the same thing, "Look, it's working."

I don't know if I'm right
or if you're right,

but in the end, we are
discussing the right thing:

we are talking about
not how well is your country doing,

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.

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 slightly lower in the Index,

that the United States of America

has for 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 interests 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.

A nice thing about the job I've 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'd 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. Ten 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
that 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,
and 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 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 the people like me
who care more about global things

should be enemies.

Who thought of this idea?

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.

Well 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.

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 you could take
something huge like climate change,

a huge systemic problem
or conflict or migration

that's taken billions of people
centuries to perpetrate,

and you are going to 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 will, a test tube rack

of the sort 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,
pandemics 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 six -

it's a wonderful subject
for six-year-olds -

they'd 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 it
on my 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'll switch off the damn light
when they leave 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 understanding and 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 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're 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 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 our cultural differences,

well, just have a think
about the United Nations' 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

it's more about joining up the dots
than starting from scratch.

Because there're 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're mostly
single topics and in single countries.

There's no time for doing it 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 of 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)