Christian Wolan

Christian Wolan, Forbes Staff

When the mood strikes, I write about tech

5/19/2011 @ 2:01PM |16,228 views

Bill Clinton's Commencement Speech: Our World Is Unequal, Unstable, And Unsustainable

Bill Clinton Image by Maria Rocha-Buschel

On a rainy day in New York City, the clouds over Yankee Stadium held back long enough for Bill Clinton to address NYU’s graduating class.

Clad in violet, the former president offered the usual advice given on such occasions—follow your dreams, don’t give up, change the world—but Clinton also shared some comments on the economic and environmental problems facing our little blue planet.

“The world we live in is too unequal.”

What they [poorer countries] need are systems, things you take for granted. We would be shocked if the microphone failed or the lights went out today, but I spend a lot of my life in places where people take none of that for granted. They need systems, and a lot of you have worked in places where you see young people just as intelligent as you are, just as hard working as you are, they simply don’t have like chances because they don’t have the systems to guarantee good consequences for hard work and good behavior.

The problem with all countries that have great systems is that they get long in the tooth. That they become so successful that those who run them are more interested in holding onto their positions than advancing the purposes for which they were established. More interested in maintaining the gains of the present than achieving even greater ones for our children in the future.

“The world we live in is unstable.”

Not just because violence can cross borders and non-state actors can cause trouble, but because disease can cross borders. Because the financial crisis, which sadly began here, spread almost instantaneously. First, to the United Kingdom, then to Ireland, then Iceland. Then to the exporting countries because people couldn’t afford to buy their products.

We have to find a way to reduce the negative instability of modern life without going to a totally static world where nothing would grow.

“The world we live in is unsustainable”

Some people look forward to the global warming because it will make it easier to explore for oil and gas, but what else does it mean that the plants bloomed 15 days early in the Arctic Circle this year? That soon you could take a boat across the North Pole in the summer time and visit Santa Clause?

It means that the ice pact on Greenland is melting; it’s 8 percent of the world’s fresh water. If it all melts and falls into the North Atlantic it could block the gulf stream, and perversely, as the planet warms it could make North Europe, Northern Canada, and the northern most portions of the United States as cold as they were 700 years ago in a mini ice age.

With that, Clinton then focused on “two bad ideas” that have taken hold in the United States over the past thirty years. Ideas, he said, “serve the interests of people serving atop the various totem poles in America today.”

Companies with obligations only to their shareholders


Ever since then we’ve been teaching our young people that your primarily obligation is only to the shareholder. The problem is that if you do that you ignore the other stakeholders.

That could be why wages have been virtually stagnant for the past 30 years, because the workers are stakeholders. It could be why communities have been unable to undertake economic transformations in many places, because communities are stakeholders. It could be why customers don’t care so much what the source of their purchases are, they’re stakeholders.

The government is inept

The second wrong idea is that the only problem America has is that the government, especially the national government, messes everything up that it touches. It would mess up a two car parade.

There is no such thing as a good tax, no such thing as a bad tax cut. No such thing as a good regulation, no such thing as a bad deregulation. That contradicts the evidence in the United States and every other country in the world that only truly successful countries have both strong economies and effective governments, and a public/private partnership to share the future.


The whole speech can be viewed here, skip to the 50th minute to get to the good stuff.

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  • Michael Tobias Michael Tobias, Contributor 2 years ago


    All former President Clinton and the students who were present for his speech need to do is to reverse the substance, grammar and time-horizon for this sentence.