ISQOLS 2025 Annual Conference Keynote — Professor Jeffrey Sachs

[00:00:00] Music [00:00:08] Music [00:00:10] Music [00:00:12] Music [00:00:16] Music [00:00:20] Music [00:00:22] Music [00:00:28] Good afternoon, welcome [00:00:32] to today's keynote. [00:00:34] It's my great pleasure [00:00:36] and great honor [00:00:38] to introduce Professor Jeffrey Sachs [00:00:40] world-renowned economist [00:00:42] and the global leader in sustainable [00:00:44] development who is joining us [00:00:46] online today. [00:00:48] Professor Sachs is university professor [00:00:50] and director of the [00:00:52] Center for Sustainable Development [00:00:54] at Columbia University, where he [00:00:56] directed the Arts Institute [00:00:58] from 2002 until [00:01:00] 2016. He is president [00:01:02] of the United Nations Sustainable [00:01:04] Development Solutions Network, [00:01:06] which he established in [00:01:08] 2012 under the [00:01:10] auspices of the UN Secretary [00:01:12] General to promote [00:01:14] multidisciplinary, [00:01:16] a multidisciplinary integrated approach [00:01:18] to overcome the global [00:01:20] interconnected challenges that our world [00:01:22] is facing nowadays. He is [00:01:24] co-chair of the Council of Engineers [00:01:26] for the Energy Transition, [00:01:26] commissioner of the [00:01:28] UN Broadband Commission for Development, [00:01:30] academician of the [00:01:32] Pontifical Academy of Social Science [00:01:34] at the Vatican, and [00:01:36] Tan Sri Jeffrey, [00:01:38] CEA Honorary Distinguished Professor [00:01:40] at Sunway University. [00:01:42] He has been special advisor to [00:01:44] three United Nations Secretary-General [00:01:46] and currently served as an SDG [00:01:48] advocate under Secretary-General [00:01:50] Antonio Guterres. [00:01:52] Professor Sachs has pioneered [00:01:54] the new economic metrics to [00:01:56] measure sustainability and well-being, [00:01:58] two topics that are at the core of our [00:02:00] conference and of our community [00:02:02] at Eastcourse. He has co-founded [00:02:04] with Professor Layard, who was [00:02:06] with us yesterday, and Professor [00:02:08] Halliwell, the annual World [00:02:10] Happiness Report, and the annual [00:02:12] Sustainable Development Report [00:02:14] and SDG Index, which measure [00:02:16] national progress towards the SDG [00:02:18] in more than 150 countries. [00:02:20] The report was just released [00:02:22] a few weeks ago. He was a [00:02:24] recipient of the 2022 [00:02:26] Tang Prize in Sustainable [00:02:28] Development, and the co-recipient [00:02:30] of the 2015 Blue [00:02:32] Planet Prize, the leading global [00:02:34] prize for environmental leadership. [00:02:36] Professor Sachs has an incredibly vast [00:02:40] experience in advising policymakers [00:02:42] and world leaders in transition [00:02:44] and developing economies all over the [00:02:46] world. He is the recipient of the [00:02:48] Legion of Honor by Decree of the [00:02:50] President of the Republic of France, [00:02:52] and the Order of the Cross from the [00:02:54] President of Estonia. Prior to his [00:02:56] arrival in Columbia in '22, [00:02:58] he spent over 20 years as a professor [00:03:00] at Harvard University, where [00:03:02] he obtained his PhD degree, [00:03:04] and since then [00:03:06] he has been awarded 42 honorary [00:03:08] doctorates. [00:03:10] He is the author and editor [00:03:12] of numerous books. [00:03:14] His most recent books are the [00:03:16] Ages of Globalization: Geography, [00:03:18] Technology, and Destitution, [00:03:20] released in 2020, and Ethics in [00:03:22] Action for Sustainable Development, [00:03:24] released in 2022. [00:03:26] So we have, I understand, [00:03:28] 35, 40-minute talk, [00:03:30] followed by Q&A. [00:03:32] So, Professor Sachs, [00:03:34] many thanks for being [00:03:36] with us today, and the [00:03:38] floor is yours. [00:03:40] Thank you so much. [00:03:42] Thank you to the International [00:03:44] Society for Quality of Life Studies [00:03:46] for all that you do, [00:03:48] and for this conference, [00:03:50] and for inviting me. [00:03:52] And greetings to everybody [00:03:54] from Hong Kong, [00:03:56] where I have been on a travel [00:03:58] through Asia for the last month, [00:04:00] and just culminating [00:04:02] in Hong Kong. [00:04:04] And I think that that trip [00:04:06] is also relevant for our discussion, [00:04:08] as I'll try to explain. [00:04:12] I'm really grateful for [00:04:14] the theme of this conference: [00:04:18] Redefining Progress, [00:04:20] which we urgently need to do, [00:04:22] and Achieving Sustainable Development [00:04:25] for All, as the subtitle [00:04:28] of How to Redefine Progress. [00:04:31] You can imagine I'm very fond [00:04:34] of that framing of the idea of progress. [00:04:38] I do believe that sustainable development [00:04:41] is the framework that is most helpful [00:04:46] for the world's governments, [00:04:48] and indeed for society more generally, [00:04:51] in addressing our challenges today. [00:04:55] And just to say that the way [00:04:57] that I interpret sustainable development [00:05:00] is as a holistic approach [00:05:03] to human well-being [00:05:06] that aims to address economic, [00:05:10] social, environmental, [00:05:13] and geopolitical challenges. [00:05:16] Specifically, it aims to ensure [00:05:18] material well-being for all. [00:05:21] It aims to ensure a just society [00:05:26] with social inclusion, [00:05:28] and as the UN says, [00:05:30] to leave no one behind, [00:05:32] or no group behind, [00:05:34] or no region behind, [00:05:35] or no nation behind. [00:05:37] It aims to address the very severe [00:05:41] and intensifying ecological crises [00:05:45] of climate, biodiversity, and pollution, [00:05:49] and it aims to promote a world of peace. [00:05:54] So this, I believe, is the right framing [00:05:59] for human well-being and quality of life. [00:06:03] And to get us started, I want to indicate [00:06:07] what's wrong with our world right now. [00:06:11] And a vivid way to explain what is drastically wrong [00:06:18] is the announcement a couple of days ago [00:06:22] by the U.S. government [00:06:24] of its withdrawal from UNESCO. [00:06:28] UNESCO has to be one of the most wholesome [00:06:33] and useful of our global institutions. [00:06:37] It, after all, is the institution [00:06:40] of the UN family that focuses on education, [00:06:44] science, and culture. [00:06:47] And so, hard to believe that it is [00:06:50] the enemy of anybody. [00:06:53] But let me read to you the statement [00:06:55] by the United States government [00:06:58] as it is true from UNESCO. [00:07:01] Now, put on your seatbelts [00:07:04] if you really want to see the world [00:07:07] as it is right now. [00:07:09] Quote, this is by a State Department spokesperson. [00:07:14] UNESCO works to advance divisive social [00:07:18] and cultural causes [00:07:20] and maintains an outsized focus [00:07:23] on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, [00:07:27] a globalist ideological agenda [00:07:30] for international development at odds [00:07:33] with our America First foreign policy. [00:07:37] the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. [00:07:40] The United States is at war [00:07:43] with sustainable development. [00:07:46] It is in open opposition [00:07:48] to the Sustainable Development Goals. [00:07:51] It has pulled out of UNESCO [00:07:54] because UNESCO focuses on this, quote, [00:07:58] globalist agenda that is at odds [00:08:04] with our America First foreign policy. [00:08:09] If this were some two-bit dictatorship [00:08:17] someplace in the world, you might say, [00:08:21] "Well, that's the huffing and puffing [00:08:23] of some local tyrant." [00:08:25] This is the statement [00:08:26] by the United States of America, [00:08:29] without question, [00:08:30] the militarily most powerful country in the world, [00:08:36] arguably the richest economy in the world, [00:08:40] and no doubt in countless ways [00:08:46] the most powerful country in the world [00:08:49] outside of the military sphere, [00:08:51] for instance, in the financial sphere, [00:08:53] in the use of the dollar, [00:08:55] in the ability to control governments, [00:08:58] individual governments, [00:08:59] in the fact that it has [00:09:01] 750 overseas military bases [00:09:05] in 80 countries around the world, [00:09:08] in the fact that it overthrows governments [00:09:10] right and left when it wants to. [00:09:13] So this is a government [00:09:14] that is in open opposition [00:09:17] to the Sustainable Development Goals [00:09:19] and to the concept [00:09:21] of sustainable development itself. [00:09:25] And it's pursuing a policy, [00:09:29] the America First policy, [00:09:32] that is, according to the State Department, [00:09:37] diametrically opposite [00:09:40] to the globalist agenda [00:09:43] of sustainable development. [00:09:46] So I'd like to unpack all of this, [00:09:49] because this is not a joke. [00:09:52] It's not a footnote. [00:09:54] It is the great drama, actually, [00:09:57] of our time. [00:09:59] Europe is not immune to the craziness [00:10:02] of the United States, [00:10:03] though it's nowhere near as crazy [00:10:05] as the United States. [00:10:07] But Europe is also in a fit of militarism [00:10:10] and almost a neglect of an agenda [00:10:16] that it did more than any other region [00:10:18] of the world to create, [00:10:20] the sustainable development goals [00:10:23] to an enormous extent, historically, [00:10:27] are Europe's goals. [00:10:30] The whole concept of sustainable development [00:10:32] was championed by Dr. Gru Brundtland [00:10:35] in the Brundtland Commission. [00:10:37] Europe was, I think, the lead promoter [00:10:41] of the concepts of sustainable development. [00:10:43] And today, while Europe is not in open war [00:10:50] against the sustainable development goals, [00:10:52] it hardly is an active promoter [00:10:56] of the sustainable development goals. [00:10:58] So, to my mind, this is a puzzle. [00:11:04] It's a drama. [00:11:05] It's a crisis. [00:11:07] Not only do we have a climate crisis, [00:11:09] we have a crisis of lack [00:11:11] of effective governance response to climate. [00:11:15] Not only do we have a biodiversity crisis, [00:11:18] we have a crisis of governance, [00:11:20] of the lack of response to biodiversity. [00:11:23] And we certainly have a peace crisis [00:11:26] because we are in active war [00:11:29] in many parts of the world. [00:11:31] There is an open genocide [00:11:33] taking place in Gaza, committed by Israel. [00:11:37] And we're not allowed to say that [00:11:39] in many places in the world. [00:11:42] My own university is called anti-Semitic [00:11:46] because students rightly protest [00:11:49] Israel's genocide. [00:11:51] So, something is seriously wrong [00:11:54] with our values, our approaches, [00:11:58] our sense or definition of progress. [00:12:03] So, I'm going to try to help understand [00:12:06] what this is. [00:12:07] And these days, these years, [00:12:11] I personally like to start almost at the beginning [00:12:16] and that is with Aristotle. [00:12:18] And that's because I think Aristotle [00:12:21] got most right about quality of life studies. [00:12:26] He did it in the year 330 BC. [00:12:30] He did it in two volumes. [00:12:33] The first being the Nicomachean Ethics [00:12:37] and the second being the politics. [00:12:40] The first one was the invention of the modern field of ethics [00:12:46] or the field of ethics, the scientific field of ethics. [00:12:50] And to my mind, ethics is our field. [00:12:53] Ethics is the study of the good society [00:12:57] and of the good life and how to achieve it. [00:13:00] Aristotle wrote the first systematic text of ethics in the Western world. [00:13:09] And I personally regard it as still the best study ever written [00:13:13] of the good life for the individual and the society. [00:13:19] The politics is about the good life for the polis, for the political community. [00:13:26] And I'm fascinated by the fact that Aristotle ends the Nicomachean Ethics [00:13:33] literally with the lines that now we have to turn to politics, [00:13:40] because to achieve the good life requires the good life of the political community. [00:13:47] Because we are, after all, zoan politicon. [00:13:51] We are political animals. [00:13:53] We can only thrive in a communal context. [00:13:58] And therefore, we can only thrive in a political context. [00:14:02] And not only are politics and ethics therefore linked. [00:14:10] Politics is a field of ethics. [00:14:14] Hard to believe right now. [00:14:17] And certainly in the Western world, after Machiavelli, [00:14:22] the idea that politics is a field of ethics was basically discarded. [00:14:28] Politics became a study of power, not of ethics. [00:14:33] But for Aristotle, politics was actually the study of ethics. [00:14:39] But ethics in the community rather than at the individual level. [00:14:46] Now, to my mind, Aristotle was about the keenest, wisest observer of human life [00:14:55] that has walked the Western world. [00:15:00] He, of course, did not have the benefits of the science of psychology, [00:15:06] of neuroscience, of evolutionary biology, [00:15:12] and many other things that would have been helpful for him. [00:15:16] But he was a remarkable observer of human beings and their human nature, [00:15:23] as could be understood in 330 BC. [00:15:27] And he identified in the Nicomachean ethics the constituents of a good life. [00:15:35] Remember, ethics for Aristotle was how to achieve eudaimonia or ebdomonia. [00:15:41] That is a thriving or happy life, depending on one's translation of this Greek term, [00:15:53] which actually means a good demon sitting by you. [00:15:57] But it means, in essence, a good life or a thriving life. [00:16:04] And Aristotle was very practical. [00:16:07] So he said that there are several constituents of a good life in three broad categories, [00:16:13] I think it's right to say. [00:16:15] The first is material conditions. [00:16:18] Aristotle was no ascetic. [00:16:21] He was opposed to the greed or mass accumulation of wealth for its own sake. [00:16:32] But he knew that material conditions were necessary for a good life. [00:16:38] There should be enough wealth for leisure in order to be able to study ethics, for example, [00:16:46] in order to be able to have the time for philosophical reasoning, for education and so forth. [00:16:54] He also knew that good health was part of a good life. [00:17:00] And he was quite explicit that this is also partly good luck because one's health is also a matter of fortune. [00:17:11] And people can be unhappy because of bad luck. [00:17:15] So he was no ascetic and he was no stoic. [00:17:18] He believed that normal good life requires normal material conditions of income and of wealth and of health. [00:17:31] Second, he believed that a good life was relational, that inherently our happiness depends on our good relations with others. [00:17:43] And chapter eight of Nicomachean ethics is, of course, the chapter about friendship. [00:17:50] So he said that one cannot have a good life without having good friends. [00:17:56] And he differentiates several kinds of friendship, the very instrumental kind, the kind based on full reciprocity, [00:18:06] the kind based on short term cooperation and the kind based on true emotional depth, [00:18:14] where the well-being of the other is really taken as the well-being of oneself. [00:18:21] And that's what he called true friendship. [00:18:25] And he said that true friendship is absolutely essential for a good life. [00:18:30] He also said that anyone who would choose to live alone must either be a god or a beast, [00:18:38] because our happiness depends on our sociability and our living in a community. [00:18:44] And that led to the third pillar of well-being. [00:18:48] And that is the health of the political community, the polis. [00:18:53] And that is, of course, the whole purpose of the second book, the politics. [00:18:59] What leads to a good political life? [00:19:04] And from my point of view, Aristotle makes two very important observations about politics. [00:19:14] Maybe I could say three basic observations about politics. [00:19:19] First, he says that there are many forms of government and many forms of good government. [00:19:26] There can be good government by the one, by a wise monarch, by a Lee Kuan Yew. [00:19:34] There can be good government by the few, an aristocracy in which a small group rules on behalf of the common good. [00:19:45] There can be good rule by the many, a constitutional republic in which different citizens play different roles during their lifetime and participate in the political life. [00:20:03] But he also made the point that the form of government is not dispositive of the quality of government. [00:20:14] Because for every good form, there is a corresponding bad form. [00:20:20] So government of the one can be good if it's a monarch, but it's bad if it is a tyrant or a despot. [00:20:29] Government of the few can be good if it is an aristocracy, literally government of the best. [00:20:36] But it is very bad if it is an oligarchy, which is a government of a group of gangsters. [00:20:43] And government of the many can be very good if it is a republic, but it can be very bad if it is mob rule. [00:20:55] Which, as you know, the ancient Greeks called democracy in a pejorative sense. [00:21:02] So the first point for Aristotle was that the form of government is not dispositive of the quality of government needed for a good life. [00:21:17] This is very important because we're all about form in our political discourse. [00:21:24] Our government's good because we have elections. [00:21:26] Their government's bad because they don't and so forth. [00:21:29] And this is a very naive vision of politics in my view. [00:21:35] It also misses an essential point. [00:21:39] The U.S. government today is a disaster. [00:21:43] It's a political failure. [00:21:45] It's a political collapse of good government. [00:21:49] And yet it's the same form that we had 50 years ago when the quality of government was much better. [00:21:56] And the public confidence in government was much better. [00:22:00] But with the same form, our government today is corrupt. [00:22:05] It is vile. [00:22:07] It is nasty. [00:22:08] It is warmongering. [00:22:10] And it is nonstop telling lies. [00:22:14] But it's the same form we had 50 years ago. [00:22:17] So this is Aristotle's point. [00:22:22] The second point for Aristotle that is very important is that good government depends on truth. [00:22:33] It depends on the values of the citizenry and of the leaders. [00:22:42] And so governance as more generally quality of life for the individual is not dependent on form, but is dependent on the virtues. [00:22:57] And the politics is about how to create a virtuous government. [00:23:05] And this is almost missing from our discourse today. [00:23:12] Our president is convicted of many crimes, suspected of many more crimes. [00:23:22] It didn't matter. [00:23:23] It did not disqualify him from politics. [00:23:27] The idea of virtuous leadership, which was absolutely central for Plato and for Aristotle, is hardly a matter for many governments and many societies around the world, [00:23:46] people of which have convicted felons as their leaders, people under trial for multiple crimes and so on. [00:23:58] So this was Aristotle's second point. [00:24:02] Third point of the politics is really an unsolved, the deepest conundrum of politics, both for the Greeks and for us today. [00:24:12] So how do you make a virtuous society? [00:24:15] How do you get virtuous leaders? [00:24:17] Well, you need a population that is committed to the virtues. [00:24:22] But how do you get a population committed to the virtues through virtuous leadership? [00:24:28] There is a virtuous circle, literally, but there's also a vicious circle in which bad leadership leads to a degradation of values in the society. [00:24:41] The degradation of values in the society is much more likely to prompt degraded leadership as well. [00:24:50] So to come back to Aristotle's vision of the constituents of a good life, they are material, they are relational, and they are political. [00:25:01] Now, those books were written, as I said, 2,350 years ago. [00:25:08] They are thought to be students notes, actually, taken down Aristotle's lectures. [00:25:17] I would add three constituents of good life today that Aristotle did not cover, but are pertinent for our time. [00:25:27] The first is environmental sustainability. [00:25:30] This was not something that Aristotle had to worry about at a time when the world population was a few hundred million using basic agricultural technology. [00:25:45] That was not degrading the planet, although it was deforesting Athens, interestingly, but it was not degrading the planet. [00:25:54] Today, of course, we have profound environmental crises that are unmet and that have an extraordinarily direct and pertinent impact on our well-being. [00:26:11] Every place you go these days and weeks and months and years, there are profound environmental crises occurring. [00:26:22] This year, we'll set new records for temperature. [00:26:25] There are mega droughts. [00:26:27] Just before I arrived in Hong Kong, there was a very powerful typhoon, and these are coming with increasing frequency and increasing intensity and so on. [00:26:38] I don't need to belabor the point. [00:26:40] The second consideration that Aristotle did not have is the truly geopolitical dimension. [00:26:49] Aristotle and Plato focused on the polis. [00:26:53] They had a few words to say about inter-city-state relations, but they did not write about global politics. [00:27:02] They might have if they had considered the relations of the West and Persia, for example, as Herodotus did. [00:27:13] But neither Plato nor Aristotle really wrote very much about geopolitics, not even about the Peloponnesian Wars, something closer to home for both of them. [00:27:25] So I would add the geopolitical dimension. [00:27:26] So I would add the geopolitical dimension. [00:27:28] Politics is not enough. [00:27:29] Geopolitics now is the determinant of our survival and therefore is absolutely central to well-being. [00:27:40] And the third area that Aristotle did not consider in the quality of life is the nature of governance of technology, because as we all understand, we live at a time when the misuse of our technological capacities can end human survival itself. [00:28:05] The nuclear threat is absolutely the highest on the list. [00:28:15] We should recall that according to the doomsday clock, we're 89 seconds from midnight, the closest to nuclear Armageddon that humanity has been at since the start of the atomic age in 1945. [00:28:27] And I think without eliminating the death stick assessment, we are close to nuclear war in several parts of the world. [00:28:37] And we treat that blithely. [00:28:39] We treat that without seriousness. [00:28:41] We treat that without moral responsibility, I have to say. [00:28:45] But it's not only nuclear. [00:28:48] Our biotechnologies are extraordinarily powerful and dangerous. [00:28:53] I happen to believe, based on years of research, that COVID was a laboratory-made virus that was made in Carolina. [00:29:07] That's, again, another long story. [00:29:09] It's a very interesting one. [00:29:11] It is hidden from view. [00:29:13] And how the virus was made and tested and then sent to Wuhan for further studies is a fascinating story. [00:29:25] There are going to be lots of books about all of this in the future. [00:29:29] But it shows how extraordinarily dangerous our biotechnology is. [00:29:34] And AI, obviously. [00:29:36] We hear about every single day the risk of autonomous weapons and the risks of runaway systems. [00:29:45] In my recent visits in just the past few days to Chinese manufacturing sites, they are already profoundly AI driven. [00:29:59] Very impressive, by the way. [00:30:01] Automated factories with almost no workers in them producing very high quality, very low cost, renewable energy equipment, for example, in the solar plant that I went to. [00:30:13] But AI is becoming profoundly embedded in everything, as we all know, and it's also not in control. [00:30:21] OK, so the constituents of a good life. [00:30:25] Material well-being, relational well-being, political well-being, geopolitical well-being, environmental sustainability, and technological governance. [00:30:37] I'm going to stipulate that that is what would be conducive to the quality of life. [00:30:43] And I'm actually going to say broadly and quickly that that is what sustainable development is about. [00:30:50] It is about achieving those dimensions of life. [00:30:55] So to my mind, sustainable development, for example, the 17 sustainable development goals gives us a framework for a high quality of life. [00:31:05] And as the progenitors of the SDG said, it is the future we want. [00:31:12] Now, it's not the future we're getting. [00:31:15] We're getting the United States an open war against the SDGs. [00:31:20] We're not achieving the sustainable development goals. [00:31:23] So the question is, what's wrong? [00:31:25] And in my view, Aristotle, again, put his finger on the key point, which is that what is wrong is the lack of the virtues that we need for our societies to be healthy societies. [00:31:45] Now, the Greeks, of course, had many virtues that they championed. [00:31:49] But from my point of view, four are key virtues. [00:31:53] And remember that in Greek, virtue was the term for virtue is arithi. [00:32:04] And in ancient Greek, arithi means an excellence. [00:32:08] So a virtue is an excellence of human character. [00:32:13] And Aristotle's whole Nicomachean ethics is about what are the excellences of human character that lead to the good life. [00:32:22] And the politics is all about how to promote those excellences at the social level so that the political order works. [00:32:33] And the virtues that are most important in my mind, first is the virtue of temperance or moderation. [00:32:41] In the temple of Apollo in Delphi, the sign over the wall said moderation in all things. [00:32:49] And that was Aristotle's view that virtue is the balance, is the middle way between agency and access. [00:32:58] And so moderation is key. [00:33:00] Moderation of wants, moderation of tastes, moderation of pursuit of well-being materially and so forth. [00:33:08] Avoiding greed, avoiding asceticism. [00:33:11] Second is sociability, as I said. [00:33:14] The ability to be a good friend. [00:33:17] The ability to take someone else's well-being as your own. [00:33:22] The ability to be a good citizen. [00:33:25] That is to pursue the common good as a citizen. [00:33:30] Not your own good, not your corrupt good, but the common good. [00:33:35] And justice was the core virtue in Plato's Republic, because justice was defined as the proper order of things, a harmony of components. [00:33:50] And according to Aristotle, giving to each what is due to each. [00:33:57] Finally, the Greeks had a very powerful concept of practical wisdom. [00:34:03] The ancient Greek term is phronesis, but it means the ability to discern in any circumstance what is the right thing to do. [00:34:13] What is the ethical thing to do? [00:34:15] What is the ethical thing to do? [00:34:16] But by ethics, not the right and wrong, but the approach that is conducive to human well-being, to a quality of life. [00:34:26] And as I emphasized, the Aristotelian theme is not only that virtue is essential for well-being, that it's the key. [00:34:38] It's the excellence of character that leads to happiness and that leads to political order. [00:34:45] But it is also not a given. [00:34:49] Virtue needs to be cultivated. [00:34:52] It is a potentiality, not an actuality. [00:34:57] Virtue needs to be built. [00:34:59] And how do you build virtue? [00:35:01] As Aristotle said, you build it through good habits. [00:35:05] By being virtuous in your actions, you build it through good mentors that help to guide you. [00:35:11] You build it through education. [00:35:14] So education, mentorship, and practice are the keys to character building. [00:35:22] And the state, the political society, has a major role to play in promoting such virtues. [00:35:31] And that's the theme of the politics, that these virtues must be developed by leaders who are virtuous. [00:35:40] Another idea, by the way, shared with Confucius and Mencius, that good leaders lead to virtuous citizens. [00:35:47] And by the state providing public education, which was already a theme 2,300 years ago. [00:35:55] Public education that would teach the excellences for the population. [00:36:01] Okay, let me just turn to what went wrong. [00:36:06] And to my view, what went wrong was substituting the virtues of sociability by the claimed virtue of power. [00:36:20] And by that, I mean a deep political and even philosophical tradition of Europe, and especially of Britain. [00:36:34] And it became of the United States, that power was the end purpose of governance, not the common good. [00:36:44] And that it was through the exercise of power that one would achieve the well-being of the society. [00:36:53] And of course, there have been multiple theories of power and multiple justifications of power. [00:37:01] The earliest of the Western world was the power of the cross. [00:37:08] That winning wars was in the name of Christ. [00:37:13] It was in the name of Christianity. [00:37:16] The conquests all over the world in the 16th and 17th centuries were in the name of Christianity. [00:37:24] By the 18th and 19th centuries, it was in the name of the nation. [00:37:30] So patriotism became the virtue. [00:37:33] And nationalism became the guiding ideology more than religion. [00:37:39] By the 19th century, racism became the guiding principle, especially a kind of pseudo-scientific racism that developed in the Enlightenment in the 18th century. [00:37:55] It was maybe a good attempt to explain the multiple races. [00:38:00] But as everybody knows, the races were then ordered in a hierarchy with the European Caucasian race at the top and the savages of Africa at the bottom. [00:38:12] And it's interesting that even the wondrous humanist and most important and brilliant scientist Charles Darwin predicted that the savages would be driven to extinction by the superior races. [00:38:29] And of course, much lesser and much kinder thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries adopted the scientific racism or pseudo-scientific racism and social Darwinism. [00:38:42] And that eventually became in the hands of post-Darwinian thinkers, especially in Germany, a claim that life was a struggle for survival of nation against nation and race against race. [00:39:02] And this was also supposedly backed by a kind of Malthusian idea that we're fighting for our survival against others. [00:39:14] So it's kill or be killed, gain Lebensraum or starve. [00:39:23] And that ideology became extraordinarily powerful and still is a very powerful idea in the Western world. [00:39:33] And finally, the British variant of this is a kind of Hobbesian libertarianism, [00:39:41] which says that man is implacably greedy, selfish, out for glory, out for conquest. [00:39:51] You need either market competition or a Leviathan to hold things in check. [00:39:58] But at the world level, we have an anarchy, we have a Hobbesian global order. [00:40:04] And so conflict among nations is almost inevitable, according to this view. [00:40:10] This is American ideology. [00:40:11] At the domestic level, it is a libertarianism, which said you fight on your own. [00:40:20] There's nothing to do about virtue. [00:40:22] Virtue is a myth anyway. [00:40:25] Man is implacable in his insatiability. [00:40:30] And at the international level, where there is no Leviathan, the world is both anarchic and a struggle for national survival. [00:40:40] We call that the theory of realism in international relations or the theory of offensive realism in its most strong variant, which is very popular in the United States. [00:40:54] Okay, this is not leading us to well-being. [00:40:58] And I think that this is a very, very serious problem, which is that we do not have even a sense of the virtues that would be needed for our own well-being. [00:41:12] And I take it to be one of the great tragedies and one of the great paradoxes that at a time, quality of life, longevity, food security, income security, leisure time, a quality of life that was unimaginable. [00:41:36] Even a half century ago, the anxiety levels are profound. [00:41:43] The United States is at war with the rest of the world, deeply aggrieved. [00:41:50] Eliminating its aid programs, disdaining sustainable development, thinking that UNESCO is a globalist conspiracy that is against America first. [00:42:05] As being so essential. [00:42:09] And what we have, interestingly and ironically, is that though the Western world is richer, more safer, with more leisure time and well-being and on a life evaluation saying, yeah, life is good. [00:42:28] Our societies are better. [00:42:29] Our societies are pessimistic, filled with anxiety, and militarizing at the same time. [00:42:37] And I view this as a kind of status anxiety that what is happening in the world for the good is that poorer places are catching up with Europe and the United States, most notably China, but not only China. [00:42:55] And as the Asian world rises and as other countries rise and as the U.S. and Europe cannot dictate terms to Russia or to China, the anxiety levels are soaring. [00:43:13] Not because, not because our quality of life is diminished by the gains of others, but because our status and the idea of power as being the key to our well-being is threatened. [00:43:29] So to my mind, we are living in an age of rising anxiety that is a reflection of the wrong values, the wrong virtues, not a true measure of threat or insecurity, but rather a measure of insecurity of our own making. [00:43:53] We are making enemies of others, China being the most notable case. [00:44:00] I do not regard China in any way as a security threat to the United States or Europe or as an enemy. [00:44:09] And what I find remarkable. [00:44:13] And again, I've just spent a couple of weeks in China and I've been coming for more than 40 years. [00:44:18] We don't have one good word to say about a society that has raised 1.4 billion people out of poverty and that has come to be leader of the green technologies that we need for environmental sustainability. [00:44:37] We can't find a good word to say. [00:44:40] We can't find a good word to say. [00:44:42] It's all threats. [00:44:43] It's all claims of profidity. [00:44:45] It is all rising tensions, at least when it comes to the United States and China. [00:44:53] So just to conclude, I believe that our well-being, our redefining progress has to mean reestablishing the virtues that we need for our age. [00:45:11] And that means, first of all, that ideas like America first should be seen for what they are as truly disgusting. [00:45:23] America should be championing human well-being everywhere. [00:45:28] Of course, it should be championing America's well-being. [00:45:33] It should look at the well-being of others as a positive, not a negative, and actually instrumentally as a contribution to America's own security. [00:45:44] America, as the richest economy and society in the world, where about 15 people have maybe $2 trillion of net worth, should be asking, what can we do to help the rest of the world? [00:46:00] How can we be more effective in helping countries escape poverty? [00:46:05] How can we address the fact that the United States is the number one contributor in historical terms to the rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere? [00:46:17] All of this is thrown out the door currently. [00:46:22] There is no sense of the global common good. [00:46:25] There is no sense of an ethical approach. [00:46:28] There is no sense of a relational approach. [00:46:31] There is not even the sense of peace at this stage. [00:46:35] We can't even tell the difference of a genocide or not when it's staring us in the face right now. [00:46:42] So first, we need to rebuild the virtue of the common good, but at the global scale. [00:46:49] That, to my mind, is absolutely at the essence of human well-being and our survival. [00:46:55] And we have to understand that power hierarchies are not the point of our lives today. [00:47:03] Well-being, quality of life is the point, and especially survival. [00:47:10] So the final and most important virtue of all is peace itself. [00:47:17] And we really need to relearn the virtue of peacemaking. [00:47:23] Let me stop there and thank you again for the chance to share these thoughts with you. [00:47:28] Thank you, Professor Sachs. [00:47:29] Thank you, Professor Sachs. [00:47:30] It's now time for Q&A. [00:47:31] I would encourage you to be brief in your questions and answers. [00:47:37] So we have more time for more questions. [00:47:43] Yeah. [00:47:44] Thank you for a very interesting talk. [00:47:47] I'm intrigued by your comments about power. [00:47:50] I wonder if they don't amount to a bit of a difficult paradox. [00:47:54] If we, who care about well-being, don't engage with the idea of power in some way. [00:48:01] And by the way, I've checked the program. [00:48:03] There's not a single paper at this conference that has the word power in the title, in the sense that you mean. [00:48:09] If we don't engage with it, then do we perhaps not, do we do we perhaps cede the ground to people who have a more malicious engagement with the idea of power? [00:48:20] Can we really afford not to engage with that concept in a way that is then intended to further the values that we hold? [00:48:29] Yeah, I think so. [00:48:32] Actually, I have to say one of the things that puts me off to the list that I helped to make of the rankings of the Cantrell Ladder reported each year in the World Happiness Report is Israel's high ranking in the rankings. [00:48:55] The Israeli people profess a high level of well-being. [00:49:00] I believe what Israel is doing is profoundly criminal and immoral. [00:49:07] And I can't imagine at some level being a happy Israeli citizen in this context. [00:49:17] Our definition of well-being, which is how do you evaluate your life on 11 rungs from 0 to 10, doesn't capture that dimension. [00:49:32] And so at a policy level, just to say, aiming for a higher score subjective well-being can miss the point that there can be serious externalities involved in that rise of SWB. [00:49:53] And it's possible that your well-being is coming at the expense of others, even drastically at their expense. [00:50:02] So power is intrinsic to human relations. [00:50:07] It's a danger. [00:50:09] And it intersects with our thinking, I believe, about well-being in a couple of ways which are clear. [00:50:21] One is that it is a substitute system of values or an alternative system of values. [00:50:28] It happens to be quite prevalent. [00:50:30] There's a lot of human nature that can lead in that direction. [00:50:36] And second, it can give us a very wrong picture of which societies are doing well or not if we fail to take into account power relations and their impact on other societies. [00:50:53] So I would just include our own responsibility for well-being of others as intrinsic to quality of life. [00:51:03] Thank you very much for your talk. [00:51:06] You mentioned the recent deterioration and virtue among U.S. leaders. [00:51:12] And I was wondering what you think about the hypothesis that the support among the U.S. population for these leaders is also a result of increased economic insecurity due to neoliberal policies. [00:51:29] Thank you. [00:51:30] Yeah. [00:51:31] I think that there is a lot wrong in American society and in European society that brings this to bear. [00:51:44] But there is a lot of first objective inequality that has risen substantially for a lot of reasons. [00:51:56] And the American political system has been uninterested or incapable of addressing it, mainly because it is a corrupt system where politicians respond not to the median voter, [00:52:11] certainly not to the poor voters, but to the campaign contributors. [00:52:14] So the system itself is profoundly corrupt financially. [00:52:24] There are other things going on with Trump and with the similar political leaders. [00:52:30] There's a lot of status anxiety in the U.S., not only because of economics insecurity, but because of demographic change. [00:52:39] So the U.S. was throughout his racist society, it grew up with a white supremacist ideology. [00:52:51] Slavery was only ended in the U.S. by a war, which is very unusual. [00:52:58] By the way, most societies ended slavery by a decree, not by a civil war. [00:53:03] And the U.S. committed mass genocides of the Native American population. [00:53:09] So it's always been a very racist society. [00:53:16] What's happening now is a rather significant demographic change also occurring in Europe. [00:53:24] Not quite the same, but the white non-Hispanic population in the United States, which was the overwhelming population in the U.S. [00:53:36] other than African-Americans, which was always around 10 to 15 percent, is going to be a minority by around 2050 to 2060, according to the census. [00:53:48] And this is leading to a lot of white anxiety. [00:53:53] And that's a big part of Trump's base. [00:53:56] So that's a second dimension to this. [00:53:59] And we know similarly the immigrant populations in Europe, the rising foreign-born population, is a big part of the European politics. [00:54:11] And the language of what to do about this, how to handle it, what kind of immigration policy, is perhaps the most polarizing issue in the U.S. and Europe, [00:54:25] other than the global geopolitical issues, meaning the West versus Russia or versus China. [00:54:32] So I think there are a lot of reasons for the deterioration of American politics, the growing corruption, the growing inequality, the demographic changes that are underway. [00:54:46] But it means that American society is very high anxiety and Trump is a product of that. [00:55:02] I have to add, we haven't had good presidents in a very long time. [00:55:06] Trump is off the charts, but we have lacked excellence of political leadership for many, many decades. [00:55:16] Is it okay if I collect two or three questions? [00:55:19] Of course. [00:55:20] Yeah. [00:55:21] So there's one there. [00:55:23] Thank you very much. [00:55:24] Regarding the hope, there was this morning actually a session where we talked about the power. [00:55:33] Sorry, regarding power, you mentioned there's no abstracts and no lectures. [00:55:38] So there was a lecture about the power of hope. [00:55:42] So, and I would be happy to hear some view of you about hope. [00:55:46] And the other thing is all the virtues, behaviors that you discussed were, in other words, [00:55:56] but when you're going to your home, your institution, two days ago, your institution has pledged [00:56:07] to reverse racially discriminatory practices and behavior and resolve civil right violations against Jewish students. [00:56:17] So I would expect you also to admit that in your home, there is a big problem. [00:56:24] Yeah. [00:56:25] So let me say there is no institution less anti-Semitic than Columbia University. [00:56:34] I'm Jewish. [00:56:37] Most of my colleagues are, you know, an enormous proportion of my colleagues and students are Jewish. [00:56:44] It's a very Jewish environment because New York City, of course, is a very Jewish city. [00:56:52] This is not an anti-Semitic institution. [00:56:55] This is an institution in which students protested against the Israeli government actions in Gaza. [00:57:03] That, in American political context, is now called anti-Semitism. [00:57:09] I think it's a repression of speech. [00:57:13] So I don't agree with what the university did, and I don't agree with the characterization of Columbia University as being anti-Semitic. [00:57:22] I find the whole thing preposterous. [00:57:25] I, by the way, have lived as an American Jew for a very long time without ever experiencing a single moment of anti-Semitism in my lifetime. [00:57:40] That this is literally true, as weird as that sounds, and never in my 23 years at Columbia University. [00:57:49] The slightest example of that. [00:57:52] Everything about this characterization is that students protested Israel's war in Gaza. [00:57:59] And that is a political speech, not about anti-Semitism. [00:58:07] You talked about hope, and thank you for doing that. [00:58:12] Hope is actually one of the three Christian virtues, as you know. [00:58:17] The four cardinal virtues are practical wisdom, fortitude, moderation, and justice. [00:58:27] And the three Christian virtues are hope, faith, and charity. [00:58:37] And hope is a virtue. [00:58:38] And it is a virtue. [00:58:40] It is a kind of excellence of looking to build a better world. [00:58:47] And it's a value and a virtue and a character trait. [00:58:54] It's interesting that it's related to optimism, of course. [00:59:01] I looked at this paradox. [00:59:04] Ipsos does a survey each year of optimism and pessimism by country. [00:59:12] And the bottom countries in 2025, at least four of the five bottom countries are Germany, Belgium, France, and Japan. [00:59:21] And Japan as pessimistic countries. [00:59:24] The most optimistic countries are Indonesia, Colombia, China, and the Philippines. [00:59:29] Very interesting. [00:59:30] The countries that are at the highest quality of life by any objective measure, longest longevity and so forth, [00:59:42] are at the bottom of the pessimism chart among the 30 or so countries that are surveyed. [00:59:50] And again, to my mind, it's a kind of status anxiety. [00:59:55] It's not a measure of the actual state of well-being of the population. [01:00:01] It is a measure of the loss of sense of power in the world because of the rise of others, which should be championed rather than viewed as a threat. [01:00:15] Thank you so much, Geoffrey, for your interesting talk. [01:00:18] My name is Johnson Kansime and I'm a doctor researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Cultural Development in Transition Economies in Germany. [01:00:26] And I would like to, if I get you well, you actually seem to posit that we can use vacuos in order to decide whether a state of the world is better than another. [01:00:38] So in a nutshell, whether we are making progress. [01:00:41] But you might have read that quite a number of critics have really pointed out vacuos for a high burden of accessibility. [01:00:50] So we cannot exactly assess vacuos. [01:00:53] They also posit that so proponents of vacuos kind of push the responsibility of authorities or institutions that are supposed to make people to achieve well-being to the individual and they really get this responsibility to them. [01:01:09] So my simple question is how exactly can we use the vacuos that you so much well defined? [01:01:16] So I think there were four and then you added three. [01:01:19] How exactly can we use this to measure progress? [01:01:23] And where should we focus? [01:01:24] Should we focus on the individuals? [01:01:26] Because Aristotle proposes that individuals should have the vacuos. [01:01:31] Should we focus on the individuals or should we should focus on those that are supposed to provide the enabling environment for people to achieve those vacuos? [01:01:39] And how quantitatively or qualitatively? [01:01:42] I thank you. [01:01:44] I thank you. [01:01:45] There's nothing simple about your question. [01:01:47] That's your question. [01:01:48] It's a very, very excellent and very important question. [01:01:53] And for roughly maybe 1,800 years, it was a central question of Western thought and philosophy. [01:02:10] What are the virtues and how are they achieved and how are they to be cultivated? [01:02:17] And to say very briefly, the ancient Greeks got us on that path and they emphasized the virtues like moderation, as I said, and justice. [01:02:33] Christian theology added to that. [01:02:38] There was a great synthesis of Christian and pagan or Greek philosophy at the University of Paris at the end of the century, led by a professor, Thomas Aquinas, [01:03:00] who established a Christian virtue approach that I mentioned this because Christianity, of course, played such a predominant role in Western ethical thinking until the last century or so. [01:03:18] And the Aquinas or Thomistic answer to the question was those seven virtues that I mentioned. [01:03:30] And he explained them at great length in the Summa Theologica. [01:03:34] And what's interesting for me, I'm myself not Christian in birth or faith, but I spend a lot of time with the Vatican and the Catholic Church. [01:03:47] And the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Social Sciences. [01:03:52] And there, the Roman Catholic ethics are those seven ethics or those seven virtues at the center. [01:04:04] And the Christian social teachings are an ethical tradition of the Catholic Church that tries to answer your question at great length and with great sophistication. [01:04:20] So there are many, many papal encyclicals that address exactly the question you ask. [01:04:30] What are the virtues? [01:04:32] How can they be promoted at the individual level? [01:04:36] How can they be promoted at the institutional level? [01:04:39] So I don't want to oversimplify, but I would say the question you asked is the same question that's been asked for 2,300 years in a way. [01:04:51] But in the Western thought, what you expressed came to be a very predominant view, which is there aren't really objective virtues. [01:05:01] You can't get an ought from an ought from an is, said David Hume. [01:05:03] You can't get an ought from an is, said David Hume. [01:05:06] We don't really know, and for the Scottish Enlightenment figures like Hume, the virtues were just sentiments. [01:05:18] So moral sentiments became predominant. [01:05:23] They were just feelings. [01:05:24] Whereas for the Greeks and for the Thomists, these are things that can be analyzed. [01:05:33] They are related to human nature. [01:05:36] I believe that they actually are bolstered by modern psychology and neuroscience, which would take us a little bit far afield. [01:05:46] But ideas of sociability, reciprocity or conditional reciprocity, friendship, empathy, compassion. [01:06:00] Of course, cooperation as a virtue. [01:06:04] I think these are all analyzable at a rigorous level. [01:06:09] One can understand the social value of such virtues. [01:06:15] And I believe the more important point, but this is always subject to testing and debate. [01:06:25] I believe that these virtues can be cultivated, which is really the main theme. [01:06:31] You know, which are the virtues as part of the debate? [01:06:34] But then how would you get them? [01:06:36] And are they intrinsic? [01:06:39] Do they evolve? [01:06:41] Is there a difference of some societies or some political structures over time? [01:06:48] I think there is. [01:06:49] I believe it's measurable. [01:06:51] I think it's worth measuring. [01:06:52] I think we should spend more time on measuring the attitudes and the behaviors of that are related to these virtues as part of our understanding of quality of life. [01:07:07] Thank you very much, Professor Sachs. [01:07:12] I'm afraid I would stay here for another hour or so, but I'm afraid we have to finish now. [01:07:20] I would like to say again, thank you very much for being here with us today and for giving us a glimpse of hope. [01:07:28] Great. [01:07:28] Thank you to everybody. [01:07:29] I really appreciate it. [01:07:30] Bye-bye. [01:07:31] Bye-bye. [01:07:31] Bye-bye.