Vital Interests: Phil, thanks very much for joining us today on the Vital Interests Forum. During the past year and a half the Vital Interests forum has offered conversations on the societal and security challenges presented by political polarization, global unrest, and the disruption caused by the COVID pandemic. I thought it would be a good time to rise above the weeds of these immediate issues and try to imagine what are the overarching trends that define this point in human history. Your writing examines long-term social evolution and fundamental trends with a focus on how innovation and entrepreneurship are the most effective catalysts for transformative change. I thought that you would be the ideal person to answer the question: “Just where do we stand today?”

Phil Auerswald: Thank you for having invited me to be on as a guest in the Vital Interests Forum. I have known you for as long as I have known anybody professionally, I believe, and I've always appreciated the complementarity between our respective areas of work---with mine more focused on economics and  yours more focused on law, but with a shared interest in the human condition and in the way society develops and evolves.

I spend my time the way that I do and explore the themes that I explore because I believe that understanding long term trends interacting with one another is actually the most direct way to make sense of the human condition whenever it might be, including our present human condition.

I have long been of the view that the more you follow the news, the dumber you are. You can think about it from an investing standpoint. Yes ,there are certainly people who have made a fortune on high-frequency trading. But if you're not in that game of the nanoseconds, then following the stock market minute by minute provides you with essentially no useful information. Pursue that approach from an investment standpoint and you will drive yourself crazy. 

We know actually that stock prices are what's called fractal. They have self-similarity, which means the patterns over 100 years look like patterns over 10 years, which look like patterns over 10 months, 10 weeks, 10 minutes, 10 seconds and so forth. There's a self-similarity in the data. Now, this is where I'm going with my analogy. When we focus on the minute to minute of any phenomenon then we disinform ourselves. What we actually need to do is look at the structure of the information, look at the structure of the phenomenon at a higher level of abstraction as has been done, for example, with stock data, and you can at that point begin to have some kind of an insight into what matters and what doesn't.

VI: Is this what your most recent book The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand Year History focuses on? The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History – Philip Auerswald The message of the book is that underneath the development of human civilization are transmittable codes that are the source of both productive continuity and innovation in society.

Phil Auerswald: The Code Economy was essentially conceived as one of a trilogy of books that I probably will never complete.That trilogy was going to focus on the three dominant trends that are driving change in our historical moment. One is the advance of what generally is called the digital economy. I would call it the algorithmic economy or more broadly, the code economy, which is the title of my recent book.

The second trend is urbanization. I know you had a discussion recently here on the Vital Interests Forum on the inevitable growth of megacities. I will just say to your readers that the discussion we’re having today is a perfect follow-on to Ran Hirschl. You can take them as a pair because that episode constitutes the second volume of the trilogy that I won't write. 

The third volume, which is actually a book I have started to write and I also may complete at some point, relates to the truly historic--on a millennial time scale--shift from population growth to population decline that we are currently experiencing.This is the most significant social discontinuity of our era.

The topics of the first two of these volumes get a lot of attention. The advance of the algorithmic economy--which is to say,exponential technologies, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, digital disruption--is a topic from which one can almost not escape. The emergence of megacities is also widely understood to be one of the key trends defining the twenty-first century. Ran Hirschl did a great job of highlighting and updating our understanding of megacities, but urbanization has been an intensifying phenomenon for about 10,000 years. The acceleration that we've seen in the last century is part of an exponential, and the fundamentals that have driven this exponential have built over that time period of 10,000 years. So--in spite of Covid--urbanization is not going away any time soon.

The third irrefutable trend, the shift from population growth to population decline, is the only one of the three in which there is a discontinuity. There's a huge difference between growing and shrinking. Even as we get into exactly what the data are, many of your readers will be immediately thinking, "Well, global population is still growing." (I will elaborate on that in just a moment), but it's when the rate of change of population growth grows negative that one begins to see the fundamental disruptions that we have already been experiencing for the last 20 years. It is not when the population itself declines, and that's why I emphasize the transition from population growth to population decline.

It is the case now, and it has been for a decade, that all of East Asia, all of North America, all of Europe are experiencing below replacement rate fertility. South Asia is well on its way. Populous developing countries like Brazil and Iran, are also well below replacement rate fertility. So we are already well on the way to the transition from population growth to population decline. The only exception to that trend in the next fifty years--and it's an extremely important exception--is the African continent. The African continent is where essentially, in terms of net gain, the entirety of global population growth will occur in the next half century.

VI: Phil, just to put this in perspective, so this shift from population growth to population decline is not because of any cataclysmic event. This is not because of a pandemic. This is not because of food shortages.  This is a biological, sociological trend?

Phil Auerswald:  Yes, and I will just elaborate on that. What is fascinating to me, is that as far as I can make things out, almost everything bad happening in the world is a consequence of some very good things that have happened in the past.

Pandemics do essentially nothing to shift the trajectory of population growth. This Malthusian view--the notion of resource scarcity and disasters inevitably lead to population decline--became obsolete 200 years ago.That has not been the case since the 19th century. We've had steady population growth since the 18th century. You only have to look up the data on the 1919 pandemic, which killed 30-50 million people worldwide (the data gathering then was not good, but massive numbers of people). If you look at the trend of global population growth through the entire twentieth century, you can barely see it.

What has caused this shift from fertility rates of six and seven in a place like India, to where today they're approaching 2.1, which of course, is replacement rate, quite rapidly? What has done that is a host of things - increased economic prosperity, empowerment of women, and urbanization. Those have been the primary three causes of population decline. As people get wealthier and move to cities, and as women have more choices because of  more political, economic, social freedoms, then couples have fewer children. That has been the case. That's called the demographic transition that first occurred in France nearly two centuries ago.

VI: When you see these declines in fertility rates - as was seen in Japan and before in France - even when recognized, this population trend is difficult to reverse. Is that the case? 

Phil Auerswald: There is no reversal. For example, take the change from large family sizes to small family sizes in a society where there isn't a social security system and your family is your social security system. In such a place you might likely need a surviving male heir in order not to be living in the gutter in your old age.

A few years ago,there was an economist whose research found that the family size that you needed in rural India to ensure a surviving male heir with a statistician’s standard 95% confidence was more or less the number of children that people were having in India at the time. These explanatory mono-causal ways of looking at a complex phenomenon like fertility choice, obviously, can be overdone. But I think it illustrates what the phenomenon is about. 

The broader question is, "Give us an example of something that was good but has become bad." Here is one. Prior to the extraction of fossil fuels the way that we lit city streets was by killing large mammals - whales. We were basically slaughtering large sentient beings, and using their fat to light city streets. That was a very bad thing to do, morally, extremely bad. 

The idea that you could light city streets with the remnants of life that had been dead for 50-100 million years or however it takes to create petroleum - that is  a huge step forward. Not just in terms of from a moral standpoint, but also in terms of the resource availability to power economic development. And not just economic growth, but the true development of societies that has allowed us to achieve everything that we've accomplished, including urbanization, but also advances in health, advances in science, increased life expectancy, decreased mortality, increased education, and the increased empowerment of women. If you look at any sensible measure of human well-being over the past two centuries, it's almost impossible to argue that humans are worse off today than they were in say 1850 if we are talking about switching from whale oil to petroleum. This was a good thing.

It turns out that when you burn fossil fuels, those emissions end up in the atmosphere. Then they seriously impact the climate systems of our planet. But I think that it would have been very hard for John D. Rockefeller and other oil pioneers to know that. It would have been more than extremely hard--it would have been impossibly hard. So now we have to deal with the consequences of climate change. This is another example of something that was essentially very good, that has led to tremendous advances for the human species and for the human experience, and now it's turned into a global crisis--and, many believe, an existential one.

VI: If recent history of human activity is potentially causing a tipping point which will impact the future of human society on the planet, how do you envision this crisis being addressed?

Phil Auerswald: At the beginning of our conversation I didn't list climate change among the three long-term trends.. My interest is in the human economy. I understand that the human economy is embedded in our biosphere, and in fact my initial interest in economics was ecological economics. These are topics that I have been studying and have been interested in for a long time.

I honestly don't think we help ourselves too much by forgetting about the human economy. In fact what we've learnt in recent years in the United States is that when you neglect the human economy, then you do more damage to any prospect of improving the conditions in which we live on this planet than anything else you could do. Obsessing about climate change at the expense of attending to the human economy is actually the worst way to address climate change.

Let's just get very pragmatic and tactical about it. During the Obama Administration, due to no real presidential initiative or act of policy but more due to the inexorable movement of technology and innovation as well as the movement of oil prices, something called fracking became technologically and economically feasible at scale.

As the fracking boom unfolded during the Obama presidency, our famously “energy insecure” country became a net oil exporter. Oil and gas production under Barack Obama increased at a rate that I don't believe had been seen since the days of John D. Rockefeller or shortly thereafter.

Now what does this talk of oil extraction have to do with the human economy, or with the question you asked? Bear with me. 

What the fracking boom did, and the reason it was actually welcomed by the political leadership at the time, was that it made natural gas cheaper and more widely available in the United States than it had been previously. This had the effect of essentially destroying the economic viability of coal. Now, from the standpoint of individuals whose concern is addressing climate change, that was a great thing. There's nothing worse for the environment from a climate standpoint than burning coal.

People sometimes talk about adverse effects of methane but dirty coal is very bad. It's called dirty coal for a reason. I followed all this. I was fascinated because I expected that there would be some tacit embrace of the emergence of natural gas over coal as the preferred input into producing electricity. The principals involved at the White House can testify directly to what was happening there at the time--to how these changes were being considered. I have no direct information about any of that.

All that I have observed is that there appears to have been zero plan, and certainly zero effective execution of a plan, to address the economic devastation that occurred when the coal industry imploded. Of course, that set the pre-condition for the Opioid epidemic. It was among the things, in addition to the intensity of veterans who returned to rural areas suffering from chronic pain. Remember, these were the individuals who fought in the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East. They needed painkillers to cope with the injuries they sustained. There's a number of reasons the opioid epidemic occurred. But the economic implosion of coal country was one of them. These phenomena jointly led to what Angus Deaton has referred to as America’s epidemic of “diseases of despair,” and their intensity in exactly those places that suffered devastation due to the implosion of the coal industry.

Now the implosion of the manufacturing industry is a different story, involving a different set of actors. During the first part of the twentieth century, the vast majority of economists supported free trade and globalization. Let’s just say the Washington consensus was a consensus. We could talk about international  trade and its impact on the rust belt being a different story but in fact they demonstrate the same indifference to the human economy.

Then there is the rise of Donald Trump--because people were pissed off. Look, one thing you know about those who voted for Donald Trump is they were pissed off. You could say, "What do they have to be pissed off about?" You had another great conversation about White nationalists, about the history in the United States of racial prejudice. Are Trump supporters intrinsically racist, bad people? I don’t think the 72 million people who voted for Donald Trump can be so easily categorized or dismissed. One thing is for sure - the so-called populists who backed Trump do not feel they are fully participating in a human economy that gives their lives meaning and security.

We just have to get real. Who is responsible? How far back do the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump go? Well, It could go back 20 years. It could go back 30 years. Who is responsible? This is a serious question. Where is the accountability? Where is even the thinking about it? Where's the rigorous thinking to assign responsibility? 

VI: According to the populists the failure is from the East Coast intellectuals, the experts. Part of the populist anger is at leadership. It is directed at those who were telling them, "Everything is great - globalism is what we need to do to keep the United States competitive. Just wait.  You will get more trickle-down benefits like $5.00 t-shirts at Walmart"

Phil Auerswald:  I agree with that but let's take that a step further. I'm saying that there is one causal thread - in a complex, independent system, there's causality in multiple dimensions and it's difficult to disentangle, but we can identify one causal thread. From the fracking boom to the implosion of the coal industry, the change  was - again, we can question the principles, but I believe more or less - welcomed if not cheer-led by the White House and the political leadership at the time. Then we had the devastation of communities that resulted in the opioid epidemic and the rise of Trump that was at least correlated with those phenomena.

That's one causal thread. But then you could say more broadly, the East Coast intellectuals, the responsibility of the intellectuals that you've just outlined. It's not just the East Coast intellectuals, it's the West Coast intellectuals. It's the intellectuals in Austin, in Chicago, in Atlanta.

It doesn't matter. The point is, it's urban versus rural. I wrote about this in July of 2016, as the determining factor in the 2016 election. I was right. I also wrote at the same time about Russia and election interference, and the fact that the president of the United States was likely, witting or unwitting, an agent of a foreign power.The point is that those were the two phenomena that defined the 2016 election. It was both a genuine grassroots revolution, as well as an auto-immune disease deliberately inflicted upon American democracy.

The first of those phenomena, I want to say it was not only rural-urban, because, again, the phenomenon of election interference and all that surrounded that, and the exploitation of this discontent were also really important. But the fundamental divide that surfaced in the 2016 election is rural versus urban--which gets back to megacities and also gets back to the transition from population growth to population decline. This is what I mean by the interrelationship of phenomena. ( NYT op-ed with Joon Yun.)

VI: In the long historical study you did for The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand Year History, there have been other episodes in the course of human society that have caused significant disruptions - early industrialization in Europe was also a rural/urban cultural clash. Are we in that kind of inflection point where human society must fundamentally change?

Phil Auerswald: I absolutely think that it is. The question is, what does this one look like?

VI: In the past we labelled these significant changes as progress. Is there a positive spin can we put on this moment?

Phil Auerswald: Again, it's like I said before - bad things come from good things but good things come from bad things too. It's not just one way or the other. Urbanization, the shift from population growth to population decline, and the advance of code, the advance of the algorithmic economy. How do we put those together into a vision that allows us to inform a positive outlook about possibilities in the present world?

Now, first of all, let me just make a note about prior disruptions. You invited me to plug The Code Economy, which I'm now going to take the opportunity to do a little bit more enthusiastically. What interested me then was what I call the advance of code, and without getting into all the particulars, my analogy for code is recipes. Then you think about literally culinary recipes and the increase in diversity and complexity of culinary recipes since we first started pounding tubers with rocks and scraping at animal meat with sticks. That was something that made the food we ate more easily digestible. This, in turn, unlocked energy that allowed us to form our large and importantly more densely interconnected brain that created the human species.

The first recipes literally made us what we are.Then we improved upon that. That improvement has led to obvious enhancement of the human experience, when you think about what the world of food does for us. Culinary recipes, as an example of code and algorithm, because that's what a recipe is, it's an algorithm. We take lower value inputs and convert them into a higher value output. That's what links Tunisian couscous to the Mars rover. There are algorithms behind both of them.

The advance  of human society is, essentially, the advance of those capabilities that grow over time. It’s the advance of recipes, of code. That's what the Industrial Revolution was. That's what the scientific revolution was. Both were based on repeatable processes--algorithms, codes. The scientific method is an algorithm for discovering truth about the natural world or a better understanding, let's say, we see patterns and regularities in the natural world.

VI: One of the things that struck me as I was reading over The Code Economy was that most economists examine the what of production - the raw materials that are transformed by a manufacturing process. On the other hand, what you were emphasizing is the how.  Isn’t that the important code that is passed on throughout human society, one generation to another, one craftsman to another, one scientist to another?

Phil Auerswald: The how makes a huge difference. It turns out that again, positive trends leading to a possible negative, or at least disruptive, consequences, this advance of code that I've just described, when it accelerates, creates tremendous social disruption. We can just go through all the examples. The printing press is an example.You just march on forward in history and you find many more. 

Right now, where are we? Right now, it's interesting because machine learning and artificial intelligence are not code the way that a recipe is.There is an algorithm that governs how you essentially pattern match in the way that machine learning or artificial intelligence do. However, the executable program that governs the so-called artificial intelligence, is not a design program in the way that Fortran programs or C++ programs were years ago. It's a different type of program that creates a discontinuity of its own. The power of digital technologies presents this now unprecedented threat of robots taking our jobs and digital disruption, there's going to be nothing left for humans to do--Ray Kuzweil’s The Singularity is Near scenario.

Pick your version but very bad things can potentially happen, because now the advancement of code is accelerating to such an extent.  To quote Stalin, "Quantity has a quality all its own." We may be travelling into a completely different domain than has been experienced previously in human society. That's our moment. 

You talk about how we've had these discontinuities over time, and how do we turn the particularities of our moment into an opportunity? Here's my two-sentence answer: “In a world where robots are taking our jobs, what's left for humans to do? Be human.” Then the question becomes, “What does it mean to be human?” That's exactly the question that you need to ask. That's why my interest and my emphasis not just on this topic, but on other topics as well, is on the human economy. The human economy is about understanding what it means to be human in the context of our deeply interconnected, complex society. 

There's what it means to be human spiritually. There's what it means to be human in a whole bunch of different ways. The way that we interact in the material world, the way that we survive, how we find a place to sleep, how we eat, how we raise families, all these things. Let's just say that's called “the economy.” The “human economy” is the dimension of the economy that's almost the flip side of what I talked about in The Code Economy. To me, the point of writing The Code Economy was to highlight the importance of the human economy through a back door. (The third of three sections of the book is titled “The Human Advantage.”) It's a yin and it's a yang. I could have written about the yin, I wrote about the yang because it's two ways of getting at the same thing.

I was just on a McKinsey Global Institute call this morning. They were summarizing the report they just produced on The Future of Work After COVID-19. What were they talking about? They were talking about how every single person in the workforce has to focus on deepening their humanity. Humanity is about creativity, humanity is about curiosity, humanity is about compassion, humanity is about seeking understanding, humanity is adaptability. You can look at the Confucian word for humanity - it is a word that has a deep resonance that indicates a tradition toward humanism.

There is a very long and deep intellectual tradition that is organized around seeking answers to the question of what it means to be human. This McKinsey Global Institute report did not find the future of the world of work is for people to be more robotic. That is definitely not the future of the world to work. Then going back to population decline, what happens when we go from population growth to population decline? Look at Japan, in a world where the transition from population growth to population decline is well underway, Japan is where we see its impact more clearly.

What's different about Japan is they're not really an immigrant-friendly country. That's why there's so much talk about Japan. Otherwise Japan is not so exceptional. The underlying demographics there are very similar everywhere else (except the African continent). It's just that it's an Island, so they don't have a lot of internal migration, and it's also not really an immigrant-friendly country. Has Tokyo suddenly become a ghost town? I don't think so.There are  a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that people like to be around other people.

A pandemic does impact this attitude but let's just say, generally speaking, people like to be around other people. When there are fewer people, the value of other people actually increases. It's one of the things that increases the value of city center urban real estate, because people like being able to wake up in a place where there's a lot of other people.

It's good for people to be valued. We just have to change the nature of the economy, change the nature, certainly, of the way we educate people in the economy -so-called educate -basically the way we provide people with the opportunities to learn and educate themselves. All that has to change completely.

VI: In the course of human society didn’t people learn humanity from their family, from their community, from whatever religious group they are associated with, through education and cultural integration?

Phil Auerswald: Maybe. But we're a long way from the days of Socrates--from learning humanity from street philosophers. 

A lot of people have talked about how we have the educational infrastructure of a machine or agrarian economy--Sir Ken Robinson being one of them. That's just basically true. You look at how we structure the school year so that children can be available for the harvest - it's still organized around the economic realities of the past.

It's out of touch with the times. I also think that the mid 20th century was the epitome of educational failure.You talked about the organization man and you think about some of the atrocities of the 20th century, why did that occur? It's because we were at an interval where economies of scale were at their maximum. We talk today about the top-down or hierarchical structures for organizing society which were really at their peak sometime between the 1930s and the 1970s. In the United States, you can mark it very clearly where we basically started to have something called the conglomerate discount and you had the breakup of the large diversified multinationals.

Then we started to shift away from an economy based on scale to one based on innovation and adaptability. You can really actually mark it almost from the standpoint of stock market valuation by that trend, and then you had the era of corporate raiders and so forth and so on. There was a specific period in history where this robotization, dehumanization was at its peak. A lot of the structures that we have in society today, certainly so-called educational structures, are legacies of that not particularly good point in educational history. The real problem is that this is basically the cavalry that we are counting on to rescue humanity at this moment. But it's not the right cavalry.

VI: Isn’t the right cavalry that is potentially going to rescue our future, today’s youth? Let’s move on to your association with the Hult Prize Foundation and promotion of global youth empowerment.

Phil Auerswald: You've mapped this out pretty well, because that was exactly what's on my mind. We at the Hult Prize Foundation are now launching with our affiliate organization, the International Business School, something we call the Hult Institute for the Human Economy. It will be dedicated to all the things that I have just been discussing, basically the things that are inadequately focused upon.

What does that have to do with the youth? To quote Max Planck, “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents essentially die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

The problem is that people are living longer. Therefore It's just more difficult to have these generational transitions. There's a reason that that has always been true. Youth are always at the forefront of change. Fashion trends start with teenagers. It's partly about the physiology of teenagers, their brain, just the brain plasticity. They just can see new things in a way that people our age just don't see anymore.

Obviously youth are the future, everybody knows that. But youth are also the present. Youth are the way to make the changes that we need today. Youth actually need to be in the lead. Youth have to be heard and empowered so that they can direct change.

The problem is that youth don't know enough and they don't have the resources to direct change. That's what the Hult Prize Foundation is about. The Hult Prize Foundation is supported entirely by Bertil Hult, who's the founder of Education First. I think it's a great way to close by telling Bertil Hult's story and then basically why he has supported Ahmad Ashkar to create the Hult Prize, and why I now dedicate much of my time to working with the Hult Prize.

Bertil Hult was a young Swede who struggled in school in the mid-1960s. He had particular difficulty learning languages. Later he determined he had dyslexia. But when he traveled to England as an 18-year-old he found that he learned English very easily. So he had the idea of a company where he would offer travel experiences with the objective of teaching people English. That became Education First. Today, learning English is the most direct path for the average person anywhere in the world to double their income and become empowered.

Education First is a vocational-technical company. Is it teaching coding, machine learning? What is meant bytechnical skills? It's teaching communication. English is the common language of global communication. If you speak English, you can interact with more people. It’s that simple. Speaking English extends your cognitive reach, your relational reach. It's hugely empowering. It is in the domain of extending your capabilities as a human. That's the goal--and the legacy--of Education First: giving more people in the world that opportunity than any other single organization, by far. 

A dozen years ago Bertil Hult  was looking to the next generation and he met a young Palestinian-American named Ahmad Ashkar who had an idea of empowering youth to come up with business concepts, impact enterprises, that would, with every dollar sold, with every sale made, improve the planet, improve society, and improve the lives of other people--for profit, for good businesses you could say. The idea was to challenge youth to create businesses that were integrally positive for the world--the human and the natural world together.

That was the idea behind the Hult Prize. Bertil Hult--whose entire experience and legacy has been about learning by doing, about practice-based, project-based embedded learning--saw immediately the educational value of such an activity. It wasn't so much about the companies which this prize would regenerate, although the Hult Prize, which is a $1 million startup prize, is the world largest social innovation startup program in the world. The $1 million is awarded at the United Nations every year at the start of United Nations General Assembly week.

The teams that come out of that process actually have gone on to be extremely successful companies, and one of them is Aspire Food Group, which is on its way to being a billion-dollar company. It was featured in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, has had very substantial equity investment growth.

So the companies themselves do create significant value. But the real purpose of the Hult Prize is impact education. It supports integrally human attributes that we learn from the McKinsey Global Institute are the core human attributes required for the post-COVID economy. I'm glad we've been working on this for the last decade.

VI: You're right on time.

Phil Auerswald: We're well-positioned. It may be that Bertil Hult was a little bit ahead since he basically saw some version of this in 1965 experience. Having said that, we all at the Hult Prize appreciate the reinforcement of the underlying vision and model on which all our activities are based.

VI: In other words, the Hult Prize Foundation is creating a methodology of how you can incubate progress in a new direction to face the challenges that we have today.

Phil Auerswald: Yes, exactly. What we're working on now is this - we've launched something called the Human Accelerator. It gets us outside of colleges and universities, and gets us into the general youth population. The Hult Prize is a program that's also now in 3,000 colleges and universities worldwide, which is wonderful. But we want to do more than that. That's what the Human Accelerator is about.

The point is this: Are we--as groups of connected societies globally--doing everything that we possibly can to make sure that every young person on the planet has all the support, all the encouragement, all of the opportunity to do everything they possibly can in their life to contribute as much as they can? That they have every invitation to fully realize themselves in the world? Are we doing that?

The answer is, absolutely not. How many activities like the Hult Prize Foundation are needed? A lot. It's an example, yes. Then you think, with all the issues we've just discussed, complex issues, like climate change. Let's be real: are international accords really solving that problem?

I don't think so. This was obvious in 2009. We published an issue with my journal Innovations and John Holden was the co-editor of it, and it was called Energy For Change. It was all about how, ultimately, solutions to climate change need to come from human initiative and imagination. They're not going to come from top-down government panels and programs.

Arguably--when you think about addressing climate change--one of the most fundamentally transformative companies is Tesla. They made electric cars cool. That could make a big difference. I would put them on the list. That's what this journal issue was about. 

Also transformative was what Art Rosenfeld did in California around energy efficiency standards which was a policy thing. But it was at the right scale. It was at the state scale. State scale is already pretty big particularly in the State of California, but when you get localized solutions, they energize the participants. Then you have some chance at success. That's the theory we operate on at the Hult Prize. It's a theory of calculus. If you keep adding infinitesimals, it can lead to something big. Youth are not infinitesimal. They may not be huge but they're not infinitesimal. So if we add up the impact they can create in the world, we can create something massive. That's what we're really interested in doing.

VI: We are getting to the end of our time. Thanks for this engaging conversation. It is instructive to learn about trends that shape our reality and to look for initiatives and new visions so that the human economy can be recognized, supported and counted on to be a hope for the future.

Phil Auerswald:  I agree with you. I would just say in closing, although we've emphasized youth, the human economy is everybody. One can make a similar case for the value of people who in the previous generation might have been called old people or elderly people--who, in our world, are just called people.

The human economy is about all of those dimensions. Again, are we doing everything that we possibly can so that every person is valued and that every person is given the resources they need to reach their full productive potential and their full potential as human beings? So that they feel from their own terms of reference that they are as fulfilled and gratified as they can be given their reality? Do we all feel that? Do we all have that opportunity? Until we've done that, we haven't done the work that I think we can do as a society.

Philip Auerswald is a professor of public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government; a co-founder of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Zilla Global LLC, and Innovations journal. He is the author of numerous books, papers, and articles including The Code Economy: A Forty Thousand Year History. The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History – Philip Auerswald Since 2018 he has served as the chief academic officer for the Hult Prize Foundation that challenges 300,000 students around the world to come up with practical ideas that will positively impact global realities. www.hultprize.org