We have some treats for everyone and cake as well. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you very much. And now on booktv, Jeffrey Sachs director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University puts forward a Sustainable Development plan to address global poverty, political corruption and environmental decay. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon everybody. And to those of you who have struggled here on a freezing day, congratulations. To those smart ones who are watching on line well done. And Jeffrey Sachs is wellknown to us a very good friend of the multilateral system and of the goals that we all share for development. I want to read you what bill gates said about jeff. Sachs could have had a good life doing nothing more than teaching two classes a semester and pumping out armchair advice in academic journals great but that is not his style. He rolls up his sleeves. He puts his theories into action. He drives himself as hard as anyone i know. Just doesnt always make friends. His goal is clearly not to make friends. Some of you will know of the controversy around the free insecticide treated bed nets. Some of you will have followed the exciting exchanges on line about millennium villages. Jeff doesnt pull his punches and discussion and i hope that today we will continue that fine tradition. So today we are here to talk about his new book the age of Sustainable Development. Jared diamond said if you want to understand the modern world and if you have room on your shelf for only one book this is your book. So before handing it over let me single out two reasons why i think the arguments, the approach of the book matter to us at the world bank group. So first, i quote from chapter 4 which is headed by some countries developed while others stayed poor. There are three points here. First, Economic Growth was a diffusion process starting in one small part of the world, britain and gradually diffusing and evolving all over the planet. Second the patents of diffusion are discernible. They are not just a mystery. Third, many different kinds of factors have been at play during the past 250 years and the relative importance of these factors continues to change especially as technologies evolve. And the second reason i think this matters is because of jeffs insistence throughout the book on improved country specific diagnostic using diagnostic checklist. So for those of you here working on jobs diagnostics his arguments and approach i think are really helpful to us. So jeff is going to present for 30 or 40 minutes and if all goes according to plan we will have room for 30 minutes of questions and answers. Thank you very much. Well when this was scheduled who would have thought there was going to be a snow day but i am grateful for the chance to be with you today and thank you for indeed coming today with all of the difficulties of the last couple of days. I asked my climatologist expert whether this was Climate Change human induced Climate Change that we are seeing. As a good sign to see answered nobody knows. But let me come over here, there is at least a theory that is gaining a lot of debate that what we are observing is a weakening of the jet stream because of a shrinking gradients of temperature between the midlatitudes in the high latitudes and that is leading to more meandering of the polar front through the socalled rouse the ways by which the jet stream meanders from west to east around the planet. When the jet stream dips south of washington d. C. You have this remarkable occurrence as you had in the last two days. I think i will show you a map later on that will also be relevant for this. Whether it is human induced Climate Change are not as cold and rainy and icy and snowy outside and good to be inside together with you. What we do know, whatever is happening in our small part of the world at a global scale there is without doubt a massive human induced climate disruption and massive human induced environmental destruction more generally. Its making all of our work in all of our responsibilities much more complicated. I think it is right to say 30 or 40 years ago the goal was Economic Growth and then it was realized increasingly well thats not good enough because we have to make sure its growth that really makes a difference and clues of late. In a sense we are adding a third very complex additional feature to the challenge of development and that is that it has to be growth of course that is environmentally sustainable. And that is not simply a small matter that is one of the most consequential and complex challenges that the world has ever faced because never before has the world as a whole that means the 193 Member States of the United Nations and all of the International Institutions such as the world bank and the imf and other global institutions have to make a conscious decision to change course on how economies are managed. We are not good at that. This has been a very tumultuous difficult unfinished process but this year is one of the most important years in our generation for getting this right. And that really is the backdrop to the book and the backdrop to my talk. The starting point is our new age as the geologist would call it and the geologist have increasingly sat on a new name for this new ad hoc the enterprise and at andrew christine. This is a term that is them popularized by one of the three Nobel Laureates atmospheric chemists who lucky for humanity happen to discover the mechanisms by which chlorofluorocarbons were degrading and depleting the stratospheric ozone. Crewdson did a Great Service for humanity with his colleagues. He is doing another Great Service by making it more clear for us that not only was it ozone depletion that more generally we have entered a new period on the planet. The weight geologists count they went from the ice age period to anthropocene to say the earth transferred to the holocene which is the period roughly from 12,000 years ago until now that is the whole age of human civilization the retreat of the ice in the beginning of agriculture, the beginning of human settlements, the rise of human civilization to our now urban global scale society and economy. And what crewdson is saying is by all objective standards of the geophysical sciences, we have actually transferred to yet a new era where humanity the answer post is having such a strong impact on fundamental Earth Systems whether its the climate the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the water cycle that now basic Earth Systems are under human control or human driving. We are not really controlling things in a conscious way. We are determining outcomes so far without much thought designed Institutional Innovation and that is a huge danger. It is that realization that we need now to combine the economic objectives the social objectives especially in view of the widening inequalities in so many societies in the world with the environmental objectives that make this new anthropocene different and really compel us to a new concept, the concept of Sustainable Development as a developing system. Why this anthropocene . Why did we arrive here as i say on the slide, its all about scale. Its about the size of the human venture the population and resource use on average per person in the world. Both have increased to an extent that was simply unimaginable two centuries ago just at the ebook the industrial revolution. So i think that this iconic invention is probably the most consequential invention of modern history. It is of course the steam engine. It is the invention that unleashed the modern world more than any other single step because it made it possible for the first time in civilization to Harness Energy beyond what was captured by our food and our own muscles or our animal traction or wind in sails or wind and water to drive males. Other than that we couldnt move forward. Metallurgy, machinery, heavy motive Power Transport was all limited to what the animals essentially could do or what wind to wind power could do for a sale and then came watts in the 1770s and unleash the modern world. And that was an enormous way to the wonderful breakthrough. It was the breakthrough to longevity. It was the change from 35 years Life Expectancy to today 70 year Life Expectancy. It was the monumental improvements of Living Standards in almost all parts of the world. It is important to appreciate of course that before 1800 90 plus percent of humanity were peasant farmers living off subsistence. Simply by knowledge of population and evidence of yield of crops around the world one can make an estimate like this. There was little else and that modern world and modern economy grew up dramatically with the industrial revolution. The output per person has the same dynamic and the population also has the same dynamic. These are all knew for humanity. This is something new. The whole area is knew 200 years old. All of us who have studied economic models do not use the right titles because our models, whether it is the solar growth model or and Indigenous Growth or whatever model does not start in 1800 and explain what is different before and after and generally it does not include interesting things like energy which was the breakthrough or the technological changes that made this possible. It would be it would be good for us in the future to re base economics not in pure formalism but actually in the grounding of the physical world and the engineered world more specifically so that we can understand why the curve turns out so dramatically and is something that our growth theory does not really tell us much about. Well, all curves look like this now the reconstructed concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere measured as parts per million of co2 going back 2000 years. Of 2000 years. Of course, this has also been reconstructed back millions of years. Even if you even if you do it from 800,000 before the present up until now the curve is just about flat with little oscillations that are times times to oral cycles but suddenly in 1800 the arrow starts churning due do north because it was the unleashing of fossil fuels that made the modern world. When fossil fuels are combusted they produce Carbon Dioxide, and we dioxide, and we have known now for about 150 years that Carbon Dioxide warms the planet. The fact it has not reached the wall street editorial journal page yet, but for the rest of humanity it is no, either experientially or because people went to school again, something that seems to have eluded the wall street journal editorial board. This is an extraordinarily important basic. Which is we have reached a global scale of human business of human activity on the planet where we are consequential indeed the the drivers of fundamental environmental change able to raise the co2 concentrations in the atmosphere by 30 percent. And because of the co2 dissolving in the ocean water creating carbonic acid and acidifying the oceans having a drop of ph in the ocean is now also about 30 percent. So humanity is changing fundamentally. Air chemistry, ocean chemistry, terrestrial chemistry terrestrial vegetative cover species biogeography, you name it. We are driving these fundamental processes. Of course, technology did not stop. It is gone through ways that i think a fairly and rightly called dan drawdy waves after the great russian economic thinker of the early 20th century the noted that there are long technological waves, steam rail, chemistry, electrification, automotive chemistry, electrification automotive breakthrough, aviation, and now our age of information technology. Absolutely fundamental and revolutionary as any of those that came before with the exception, i would say of the steam engine, which was the most fundamental or maybe write to say steam, electrification, and digital revolution are on par in terms of the death of impact of their effects on global society. And in our time the curve also looks the same way, this dramatic digital revolution exemplified by moores law gives us the power and speed of transformation that is also astounding. It was in 1959 that jack helvey 1st put one transistor on a silicon crystal and started what became then called an integrated circuit. And in 1961 robert noyce but to transistors on the crystal. And by 1965 there were about 30 to transistors on the crystal, and gordon moore of intel a Young Company then look back and said we have a doubling rate of everyone year, and this could probably go forward perhaps 18 months or 24 months for the next ten years and there was born moores law of the increasing power of creating integrated circuitry and what became microprocessors soon thereafter. Last year and last year intel put 5 billion transistors on its microprocessor xeon five microprocessor, and so we have had roughly a billion fold rise of the ability to process, store, and transmit data. And that is since the early 1960s. That is our revolution. Of course, what it what it means is, the incredible unprecedented diffusion of technologies and this is one of those technologies that diffuses everywhere mobile phones. Who doesnt love the mobile phone . I certainly love mine because it is one of the most Versatile Technologies imaginable for the things that it can do and benefit us. Apparently 7 billion other people are pretty happy with theirs as well and for all of us working in extremely poor places, we have watched just in the last five years the mobile revolution sweeping to the most remote villages of the world, and we are now seeing broadband come into the most remote places in the world, and this is as transformative for our line of work which is development, as for any other sector of the economy or any other sphere of science for that matter as well leading to a rate of change that is absolutely unprecedented for those of us who have had the good fortune to work a bit in china we have seen something even in a generation that was unimaginable i did not believe it when i was 1st given the forecast of what could happen, but this is change in china which china, which many of you know as lying just north of hong kong in 1980 when theyre were 23000 People Living in this bucolic rural community, and this is shenzhen today. It exemplifies the pace of development. It is now 25 Million People dwarfing the new york metropolitan area. And that change occurred in one generation. It is why it really is true that poverty can be ended by 2030, a goal which i am thrilled the world bank has taken on formally. It is the right call. It is achievable, but it will not happen by itself. It has to be strategized and pursued vigorously but it is within reach, and that has been the dream of this institution rightly and should continue to be the dream, and the institution can help lead that by the year 2030 it is within reach and and we know that the poverty rates are coming down sharp. The world bank, the keeper of the numbers, in 1990 the developing countries is a parked car had a had a poverty rate of 23 percent. By 2010 2009 around 21 percent, already cutting my more than half the rate of extreme poverty the dollar 25 and a day standard of the world bank. In 2011 it went down to 17 percent. Now we are in 2015. I 2015. I wish that the bank could be uptodate with its data, so i we will make a plea. We wait much too long for these data because we should not be four years behind. Google knows the answer every day and we should try to find out faster, faster but my guess is that when we do get the official count it will be Something Like 14 for 2015 or 15 . Poverty is coming. Poverty is coming down dramatically, and that is because of the fundamental drive of technology. But that is the end of the good news for a moment because i want i want to talk about Sustainable Development, why this is not enough. It it is not enough for the reasons i already alluded to there are basically three major problems that remain, and they are core to the purposes of this institution and core to the work of development in the new era ahead. First, there is growing income inequality. In the in the United States it has reached unprecedented dimensions, probably an alltime high income and wealth command i would say power inequality as well. This country is in the hands of the rich. It is politically in the hands of the rich. Our policies our policies do not lean against inequality they amplify it. We have reached an unprecedented state of inequality, but we are not alone and that. Many other countries are facing similar phenomenon. Second, there are poverty traps that are not yet overcome and will require a concerted directed invested effort to overcome them. Do we have the will for that . Can we get organized to do that . Many of those places have very high fertility rates as well, especially in Subsaharan Africa where the fertility rates remain above five. On average atf are of 5. 2 command we cannot end extreme poverty with such high fertility rates and rapid population growths because population will run ahead and because those poor children and poor large families are not going to make it with the kind of health and education and nutrition that they need. 3rd is this massive and growing Environmental Crisis so exemplifying in the rising inequality of the dramatic scale social unrest around the world very real. My own city is in the middle row to the right, but all over the world that people are unemployed, inequalities arising. There is a considerable dissatisfaction with the distribution of income and wealth employment. Persistence of very high fertility rates which, by which, by the way save for the median f