I'm really delighted that you could join us today for our book talk with Stephen Ratelette. I would like to acknowledge that today's event is co-sponsored by the African Studies Program and I know that Callie Askew will be joining us and so we are very appreciative for that co-sponsorship. Today's event will be a little bit less formal than our more traditional policy talks and I know a number of you have joined us for those and we hope to continue to see you again. The book talks at the Ford School series allow us to introduce new policy research from experts who are in the field and while it's always exciting for me to be able to introduce a book in my field, International Economics, I have to say it's a special pleasure when the author is a good friend and someone who I'm very pleased to have the chance to catch up with and so I'm really pleased to be able to celebrate the new book by Stephen Ratelette. So he has just published The Great Surge, The Ascent of the Developing World. Well, Steve has spent much of his professional life working on global development issues. After graduating from University here in Michigan, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa. In fact, he served with his wife, who is the current Peace Corps director, Carrie Hessler Ratelette and some of you may remember her. She came to the Ford School and delivered a policy talks here just last year. Others in particular, some of our students might remember Jimmy Schneiderwind, who is a Ford School alum who also happens to be Steve's nephew. And so in keeping with family tradition, Jimmy is now working in a development organization in Tanzania and he may actually be listening to us because of course we're live streaming the event. Well, Stephen also went on to receive first a master's in that PhD degree in public policy and one of the things I'm always intrigued and interested in is the many ways that people use degrees in public policy in their careers. Throughout his career, his work has focused on economic growth, foreign aid, debt, financial crises, primarily in Africa and Asia, but with expertise in countries throughout the world. He's testified before Congress on U.S. foreign assistance efforts. He's advised USAID, the State Department, Department of Treasury on U.S. Global Development Agenda. And since 2005, he has also served as an economic advisor to the President of Liberia, Alan Johnson Sirleaf. He's currently a professor of practice at Georgetown University and has recently written several articles documenting success stories in global development. And I have to say, as someone who often sees all of the concerns, the success stories are really important and not nearly as well known as they should be. The great surge explores these findings in depth, challenging the common assumption that most people who live in developing countries do so in poverty or in extreme poverty. Instead, Steve's book explains how unprecedented economic, social, and political transformation is in fact taking hold in developing countries around the world. I look forward to hearing more about these developments. I look forward very much to reading the book. And just want to say a quick note about our format before we begin. Steve will first provide an overview of his book and some of its major points, and then he'll take questions directly from the audience. And so we won't do the more formal card question and answer that we do for our policy talks. If you are watching online, please tweet your questions to us using the hashtag policy talks and a member of our staff will read them to Steve during the question and answer period. So thank you again for joining us here today. And it is a great pleasure to introduce our speaker. Welcome, Steve. Good afternoon. Thanks everybody for coming out. Free cookies will always get a good turnout. It's a good idea. And thanks. Thanks, Susan, for the for the kind introduction. Thanks to Cliff for all of his work putting this together. It's nice to see some old friends. Nice to see Dean who we first worked together a while ago. We won't say how long ago. But it's nice to be back here. I doubt that my nephew Jimmy is watching because he lives out in the middle of nowhere and he says he only gets about two hours of internet a month or so. And so I doubt he's live. But if you are, hey, Jimmy. So thanks for having me here. I'm going to give a brief overview here, just 20 minutes, kind of flying at 60,000 feet, if you will, on the main topic. So I'm not going to be able to get into everything in detail. But I want to give you a flavor for for what I for what I try to do in the book here. This book is really a reaction to to what I see is is way too much pessimism about what's happening in most of the world. There might be reasons to be pessimistic about the United States. We won't go into that. But but we do have a tendency actually to believe that because we have difficulties here in income inequality and stagnating economic situation that therefore that must be the case in the rest of the world. And what we hear about in the press about developing countries is war, it's corruption, it's failed elections, it's stagnation, it's famine. We that's what we hear about what we don't hear about is the actually overwhelming opposite story that has been going on for the last 25 years, slowly but surely and under the radar that has been affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world. The fact is that we now live in the period of the greatest progress amongst the global poor in human history. Period. There's no other time that's even close to the amount of progress that has been occurring around the world in the last 25 years. And by progress, I mean almost any dimension of progress that you care to look at reductions in extreme poverty increases in income, improvements in health, improvements in education, the spread of democracy, and improvements in basic rights, the reduction in conflict. So that we now live actually, despite the newspapers in one of the most peaceful times in world history. And so this has been happening in developing countries for more than two decades. A lot of the story is China and India. That won't surprise you. But people who do know some of the outlines of this story often assume that it is only China and India or maybe the bricks four, five, six countries. This is actually happening in 60 to 70 countries around the world in most dimensions of development progress. And some of them like health is happening everywhere, as we're about about to see. So the purpose of this book is to put pull together the data to show that this is the case to make the important point that while there has been tremendous progress, it is not everywhere. And there are still huge obstacles and hundreds of millions of people that are not making great progress. So it is not I am not declaring that everywhere is great. And then in the book to describe why I think they began to change in the in the mid 90s. And then the last part of the book looking forward to think about whether or not this great progress can be extended. So I'm not sure I'm going to be able to cover all of that in 20 minutes, but I'll give you a taste of it. And then depending on your questions, we can explore all of this in more detail. So what I want to do with a few slides is just show the data in a very simple form and some graphs on several dimensions of development. We're going to look at poverty. We're going to look at income numbers, look at health, education, democracy, conflict, just a couple slides on each of those to paint the broad pictures of what's going on. So let's start with poverty. This graph shows the number of people in the world living under $1 a day, going back to 1820. The best estimates that we have going back to 1820. The blue line comes from a study done by Francois Bourguignon and Christian Morrison, which was in the American Economic Review about 10 years ago, where they took on the heroic task and I'm glad they did it. And then I didn't have to have estimating the number of people living in poverty back to 1820. And we can quibble with their numbers. But the bottom line on the number is that back in 1820, about 900 million people out of a billion people in the world lived under $1 a day in today's dollars. It was actually $1985 that they did this. 90% of people in the world 200 years ago lived in what we now consider extreme poverty. And the basic point is that was the norm for most people, for most of human history. Lived in situations with poor housing, not enough food. They never went to school. They died young. Many of their children died in the first few days, if not the first year of life. And for most people, by today's standards, they lived in deep poverty. And the number of people, if you once you see that, then you realize that from the beginning of human history, whenever you believe that is, the number of people living in extreme poverty rose alongside with global population. So if we could extend this back, it was certainly going up and up and up from the beginning of time with perhaps some variations. That was the pattern throughout human history until after World War II, where the number for the first time began to level off. The percentage, which I don't show here, was beginning to decline, of course, but the number was leveling off. It's a classic case of where no change was actually a big change for about 30 or 40 years. And then that database ends, and we have a second database from Martin Reveille in Sashu Chen at the World Bank. This is the World Bank's database, also at a dollar a day, although slightly different price, different price levels. But for the first time in history, this number began to fall. And what's remarkable is that this number grew from the beginning of time. And then in the last 20 years, it fell by half in 20 years, which is nothing in terms of human history, and fell by over a billion people. So that's the broad outlines of what has been going on. Let's look at the last 30 years with more up-to-date numbers. These are the most recent numbers from the World Bank, their new poverty line, $1.90 a day. They're so new, in fact, that they came out two weeks after my book was published. It was very kind of the World Bank to wait until the book was published. So the book still has $1.25 a day poverty. Now it's $1.90 a day poverty in 2011 prices, constant prices. But the broad outlines of the story haven't changed much. The red line uses the left axis as the number of people living under $1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parity prices. The blue line is the percentage on the right axis. And what you can see with the red line is that up until about 1993, there were two billion people in the world living under $1.90 a day. That's the end of that leveling off period that started after World War II. Between 1993 and 2012, that number fell by over a billion. One billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty in two decades, a billion. Nothing remotely like this has ever happened in human history. Yes, China is a big part of it. Of course, it's a big part of it. It's a big country. There's been enormous progress. And India is a big part of it. Together, they make up for about 60, 600 million, 60% of this drop. And it would be surprising if they didn't. But it is not just China in India. There are more than 60 developing countries in the world that have reached this historical turning point. And the rise in the number of poor have stopped, the number has stopped rising at its level off and has actually declined. More than 60 countries, Mozambique, Namibia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, yes, India, yes, Indonesia, South Korea started earlier. Countries around the world big and small. This is beginning to happen. Not everywhere. It's not happening in Congo. It's not happening in Somalia. It's not happening in Yemen. It's not happening yet in Myanmar. It's not happening in North Korea. But 60 countries, more than 60 countries, this change has happened and more than a billion people have been lifted out. This is one of the biggest changes in human history. Almost nobody is aware of this. It's a survey asking Americans, conducted about four years ago, asking Americans what had happened to the share, the blue line, the percentage. What had happened to the percentage of people living in extreme poverty around the world in the last 20 years? And it defined extreme poverty of $1.25, according to the World Bank's numbers. It defined it. Answer A, the share had doubled in the last 20 years. 66% of Americans said A, the share had doubled, which means they'd never heard of China. And it's actually almost mathematically impossible for the share have doubled. But anyway, 66% of Americans thought that share had doubled. Answer B, the share had remained the same. 29% of Americans said that was the answer. We're at 95% of Americans. 5% guessed or knew maybe. Answer C, which is the share had fallen in half. So this is one of the great transformations in history and people are unaware that it is happening. Those are the poverty. Now people wonder, all right, incomes have now gone over $1.90 a day. Fine, that's not very high. Are they $1.91, $1.95, you know, $2.00? If that's the case, then maybe it isn't such a big deal. So I looked at this. And this is the number of people with incomes, with consumption, between different brackets. So if you'll allow me to walk away from here for a moment. This is the number between $1.90 day, below $1.90 a day. This is the numbers we just looked at. So there's the drop of a billion. This is the number of people with incomes between $1.90 and $3 a day. Three to five and more than $5 a day. And the blue is in 1993, the red is in 2012. What I thought when I did these numbers, I hadn't seen anybody else do them. I thought I knew there would be the big drop here. I thought there'd be a big rise here. In this bracket, most people were going to move to $2 a day or $2.50 a day. Well, there was a little increase here from a billion to $1.1 billion, but a much bigger rise of the number of people between $3 and $5 a day, which went from $750 million to $1.3 billion. The biggest rise is here, with people with incomes more than $5 a day, where the number has almost tripled from $970 million to $2.7 billion. That's where the rise is. And that tells you, we can't obviously identify particular individuals, but it is clear that people's incomes are moving not just a little, but actually quite a lot along basically the entire spectrum. And throughout human history, this number of people with incomes below $1.90 a day has always been greater than this number around the world with incomes greater than $5 a day. About 10 years ago it flipped and for the first time in human history, there are now far more people. There are more people with incomes greater than $5 a day than there are less than $1.90 a day. It's never been the case before in human history that that is the situation. But it is now. $5 a day may not sound like much, but the difference between $5 a day and $1.90 a day is huge. It means you get at least two meals a day. It means you have a tin roof on your head and probably cement block walls that keep the rats out and keep the rain out.  It means when you're sick, you actually can go see the doctor and get medicine and buy medicine for yourself. It's a huge difference. It means that you are not at risk in the next hungry season of someone in your family dying. You have a little bit of assurance that you're going to make it.  Those are the poverty numbers. Now, switching to income. So forget about poverty for a moment. This is average income. This is an index of GDP per capita income per person in all developing countries in the world since 1960. And I've indexed everybody's each country's income to be 100 in 1960 so we can see the increase in average income. There are three phases here that jump out immediately that tell us a lot about the history of development actually over the last 50 years. Between 1960 and the mid-70s incomes rose at a decent pace. But there is definitely economic growth happening in most developing countries. This is the period, post-colonial period, newly independent countries. The world economy was doing pretty well and growth was happening in many developing countries. But from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, it stopped. Of course, starting with the oil price crisis in the mid-70s when the whole world economy went down and every country in the world had major recession and that ushered in the period of debt crisis, macro economic imbalances and no growth. For 20 years, there was zero growth in average incomes in developing countries, zip on average. Many countries weren't getting progress, especially in East Asia, which means there are a lot of countries that were actually going the wrong way. Zero growth means that half developing countries actually had negative growth is what that really means and that's what was happening. This was a bad period. A lot of conflict, a lot of war, a lot of dictators, the height of the Cold War, which we're going to talk about a little bit more, no economic progress. This is the period why most people think that development progress isn't happening because it wasn't for 20 years, but most people are still stuck in that paradigm that there's no growth and very little progress in developing countries, but it ended 20 years ago. And starting in the mid-90s, we have much more rapid economic growth around developing countries, so incomes have increased pretty significantly over the last two decades. Excluding China, the average income in developing countries in real terms has doubled in the last two decades. Excluding China, the average income in developing countries has doubled in the last two decades in real terms. Again, we've never seen that kind of broad-based progress. Again, is it just a few countries? No, it's not. So now I'm counting countries. How many developing countries had growth exceeding 2% per capital in the earlier period, 1970s to 1990s? 21 out of where I have a group of 109 countries where I have decent data. Only 21 exceeded that modest standard of 2% per capital. Some of you will know 2% per capital is the long-term historical growth rate of the United States. It's the world average since 1960. This is the number of countries that are doing better than the global average. And it was only 21 out of 109. More recently it's 71. Lots of countries have made the shift to at least modest economic growth. This is the number for growth is now exceeding 4% per capital. It was 10. Now it's 30. 30 out of 109 have exceeded 4% per capital. 4% per capital is fast economic growth. It's not China, but it's fast economic growth, especially if you can do it for 20 years. That's fast. How many have had negative growth? It was 51. It was half of developing countries. Now it's down to 10. So there are still some countries that are going the wrong way. This is Somalia. This is North Korea. This is Haiti. Unfortunately, Jamaica is in this group. The Central African Republic. We still have some pretty bad situations out there, but they are now the exception. They used to be the rule. So that's what's going on in economic growth. People now ask about, okay, what about income inequality? We all know income inequality in the United States is getting worse. And we all know therefore that global inequality is getting worse, right? Not clear at all. As a matter of fact, most of the evidence leans the other way that global income inequality has actually gotten better in the last 20 years. Inequality is a tough thing to discuss because there are lots of different ways to think about inequality. It's actually much more complicated than poverty. Poverty we draw a line, dollar a day, $2 a day, we can argue about the income line, and we count. Are you above or below this absolute line? Income inequality, one of the reasons that discussions and debates on this are so complicated is that it's comparing the incomes of two different groups of people. But which two groups? Richest versus poorest people? The really richest versus the really poorest? Porest countries versus richest countries? Porest 20% to the top 20%? Lots of different measures and they're all valid. They all tell you something different. So I'm just going to look at a couple briefly. This is the Gini coefficient, which is the standard measure of income inequality, measuring income inequality across countries. So we have 190 countries in the world. We have 190 observations, the average income in all countries in the world. So it's not all people, it's the average income in all countries. And we look at that two ways. One is unweighted. Every country counts the same. Burundi counts the same as China. The other is population weighted. China counts a lot. Burundi doesn't count for a whole lot. And we look at what happened. The Gini coefficient, when it goes up, inequality is getting worse. When it goes down, inequality is getting better. If you just count countries, inequality was getting worse, which it had been doing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. One of the rich countries got rich and the poor countries stayed behind. Up until around 2000, and then, inequality has been getting better by this measure. If you count all countries the same. But it's actually, I don't think the best way to do it. If you weight it by population, which gets you closer to counting people, global income inequality has been improving since 1981, which is exactly when Deng Chaoping began to open up China. So that actually should not surprise you, that that's exactly what's been happening. But if you think about it for a minute, we have 2.5 billion people living in Indian China where incomes have been rising quite rapidly. So actually the global distribution of income, which had been widening for 200 years, actually has been shrinking a bit, because largely the rise of big countries like India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, and others that are growing faster than we are, and therefore closing the gap. If you count within country income distribution, within developing countries, I'll use a slightly different measure here, which is the income share of the poorest 40% of the population. What's the share of the poorest 40%, it's usually around 18% or 19% of GDP. Is that share going up or down? And I have data for 80 developing countries for at least 10 years, and I look at the first observation and the last observation. In 37 of those 80 developing countries, the share of income going to the poorest 40% has gone up in the last decade. In 22, it didn't change much. Plus or minus 1 percentage point of the income share that they control. And in 21, it got worse. So I don't want to make a strong case here that global income distribution is getting better and we should all be happy, but I do want to push back against the widespread assumption that global income inequality is getting worse. It's really hard to actually back that up. It's true in some countries. It's getting worse in China, because the coastal areas are growing faster than the rural areas. In Brazil, it's getting better. So it depends on the country, and when you count the countries, this is the pattern. I think the right way to characterize this is that the overall pattern is that there's not a clear pattern. But it is certainly not the case that you can argue that global income inequality is actually getting worse. So that's inequality. Now let me switch to health. This is a measure of the share of children that die before their fifth birthday. In 1960, in developing countries, 22% of children didn't make it to their fifth birthday. 22%, if you can imagine, more than one out of five children dying before the age of five. It's really hard to comprehend. It's totally unacceptable, but that's the way the world was. And actually, if you go back further in history, that number would have been higher, and frankly, it would have been higher in Europe and in many other places if you go back again before the industrial revolution. That number has been falling much earlier, starting right after World War II, and it's now down to 5%. So now we're down to one out of 20 children that die before their fifth birthday, which is still frankly unacceptable. But it's a whole lot better than 22%. And that drop from 22 to 5 means that 17 out of every 100 kids that are born today live that would have died just two generations ago, 17 out of every 100. And they're living longer. They're living healthier, as we're going to see. They're getting into school, and poverty rates are falling. This again, I think, I think actually this is one of the greatest achievements in human history right here. Nobody knows about it, but it's happening everywhere. I mentioned on the poverty numbers and on the income numbers, it's happened those improvements are happening in most countries, but not all. This is quite different for two reasons. First of all, the change started earlier, and second, it is universal. Not almost universal. It is universal. The share of children that die before their fifth birthday has fallen in every single country in the world since 1980. Period. Every single country in the world, in the United States, in North Korea, in the Central African Republic, in Haiti, every country in the world, in Afghanistan, every country in the world, this has fallen. I don't know of any socioeconomic indicator that has moved in the right direction for every country in the world ever. I don't know, but this has. So it's a big deal. It has a lot to do with child immunizations. It has a lot to do with antidiarrheal treatment. It has a lot to do with the spread of knowledge around germs. It has a lot to do with educating girls, as we're going to see in a few minutes. But this is a huge achievement that we see all over the place. A lot of people look at this and say, well, and they whisper, this is fine. It's really nice, these kids live, but doesn't this just mean we're going to have more people in the world? And they're all going to be stuck in poverty. I don't want to say that, but maybe this isn't such a good thing. Wrong. This is a really good thing. Why? Because actually, this is one of the most powerful drivers for reducing population growth. What happens when fewer children die? Yes, at first, population rises because more kids are living. Within a generation, parents are smart. They figure this out, and they start having fewer kids, a lot fewer kids. This is one of the biggest drivers for reducing fertility rates, and we see in country after country after country, within a generation, fertility rates drop and population growth rates drop. That's why in the late 1960s, global fertility rates started to drop, and why global population growth has been slowing since the late 60s. And so this is one of the most important forces behind slowing population growth that we hope, if it continues, will eventually lead to global population growth finally stopping within the next century, we hope. But that's a different story. But this is a powerful thing to reduce population pressures. Life expectancy, another measure of health. It's gone up from 50 years to 65 years. People are living much longer. This is life expectancy, contingency on making it to age five. These improvements in health are not just kids. Malaria deaths have fallen by half in the last 15 years. Malaria is the biggest killer in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria deaths have fallen by half in the last 15 years. Tuberculosis infections are down by a third. We've wiped out smallpox. We've almost wiped out polio. HIV-AIDS deaths are down by a third since 2005. HIV-AIDS deaths, globally, are down by a third since 2005. How many people knew that? How do we not know this? And nothing about you. We've been fighting HIV-AIDS. We hear all the bad stories, and a couple of people maybe have sort of heard about this. We don't get these stories out there where HIV-AIDS deaths are actually down by a third in just 10 years. So health is much better. Switching to education. This is the average number of years of schooling amongst adults. So put aside kids. Ask adults, how many years of schooling did you have? And this data comes from Bob Barrow at Harvard and Jung Wali, who's a Korean university. In the 1970s, the average adult had three-and-a-half years of schooling. Now they're up to seven, which is still not enough, but it's twice as much schooling for hundreds of millions of people around the world. The blue bars are for men, the red are for women. And you can see the gap between men and women, but you can also see that that gap is closing, and there's still a gap, but the gap is much smaller. So this is not enough. There are big questions about the quality of education, but far more people have at least a basic education. This is 1970, three-and-a-half years. If we went back earlier in time into the colonial period, of course it would have been much, much less. So a generation later, people are at least getting a primary school education, and more and more it's girls. So looking at girls, this is the girls are completing primary school. It was 60% back in the 70s, it's now 90%. 90% of girls are now getting through primary school. That is a huge, huge change, and it is absolutely transformative. Because what this means, when we educate a girl, we know first of all those girls, when they become women, have more income economic opportunities themselves. We know that they get married later. They have fewer children. Their children go to school and have more education. Their children are healthier, and their children have higher income opportunities. This is an intergenerational transformation process, and it is one of the most important dynamics underway in developing countries. It's not everywhere. There are still many countries that do not give girls the opportunities, but many of them do. And when people ask me whether or not this has impacts across generations. So that's what's going on in education. Here's democracy. Democracy is spreading like never before, or at least it was, up until a few years ago. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Lots of controversy about how to measure democracy, and I can talk more about that. If you'd like me to, I use two different measures. One is a freedom house based, rights based measure, and four index, which looks at electoral quality, and other institutional aspects of democracy. And by my book, you have to meet both standards for me to count them as a democracy. And my numbers mirror lots of other measures out there in terms of numbers of democracy. In the mid-70s, only 12 developing countries out of the 109 that I'm tracking were democracies. Democracy was very rare. India, Costa Rica, Botswana, a couple of other countries, but it was very, very rare. And dictatorship was the norm. Today there are almost 60. More than half of developing countries are now democracies. And again, I don't mean they just held an election. I actually mean they meet basic standards of freedom of rights, of political liberties, of electoral quality, of constraints on executive power, of rule of law. They're not perfect, but something big has changed, not just in India, which has been a democracy for a long time, but again, in South Africa after apartheid, in Mongolia, next to China, in Indonesia, in Brazil. Think of Latin America 20 years ago.  Now think of where they are now. They're all democracies except Venezuela. Haiti is still a bit of a mess. Venezuela, who knows what's going to happen? But the generals are gone. The generals from Argentina that invaded the Falklands are gone. And all the conflict that went with it. And this has been happening in developing countries around the world. And again, this is a reason why I think a lot of this progress can be sustained. So we can talk more about democracy. Hand in hand with democracies, there's much less progress in developing countries. In the 1980s, at any given time, there were a dozen civil wars going on in developing countries. Now it's about six. It's gone up a little bit. This is Syria and the Central African Republic. And I don't want to minimize those wars for a minute. They're terrible tragedies. But the amount of conflict today is far less than it's ever been in human history. Steven Pinker at Harvard has the better angels of our nature. It's a great book on the history of violence and conflict around the world. But think back again to the 1980s. Every country in Central America was at war. Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, all of southern Africa was at war around the end of apartheid from what is now Zimbabwe to obviously South Africa to Mozambique to what is now Namibia. We had Cuban troops in Namibia financed by us in what is now almost comical, but that was common. Southeast Asia, the aftermath of Vietnam, the aftermath of the killing fields in Cambodia, Indonesia had invaded East Timor. It's over. It's over. In Asia today we have conflict in Afghanistan and the conflict in Ukraine, but otherwise there is no war going on in Asia, which is actually remarkable. There is no war that is remarkable. There is a lot of violence, a lot of crime. It's not all over, but there is far less war. This counts the number of battled deaths, which is down even more. 75% fewer people are dying in war. It was over 200,000 people were dying a year in war and now we're down to below 50,000. And again, I want to minimize that for a minute, but there is far less war than there ever has been. Last slide. And I want to go back to income and make the point, again, that this is not everywhere. The middle line here is the line we showed before of average income leveling off and then doubling in the last 20 years. I took those 109 countries and I took the 25 with the fastest growth rates since 1960 and the 25 developing countries with the slowest growth rates to show one measure of the variation of growth rates around this line. This has increased by almost a factor of six since 1960. In those countries, in Korea and in Taiwan and in Indonesia and in China, today's adults have incomes more than five times higher than their grandparents. Five times higher than their grandparents in real terms for hundreds of millions of people. But at the same time, there are 25 developing countries in which incomes today are the same as they were in 1960. And one of the great puzzles of development is that we live in a world where we see the greatest progress ever juxtaposed against a couple of dozen countries where there's still basically no progress at all. And why is that and what can we learn from the rapid growing countries that could help the slow growing countries? It's one of the great puzzles of development. But the good news is that this number of countries that have been growing from success, but we've come a long way. Let me just take a minute to talk about why I think this happened and then I want to stop. We can talk about the future in your questions. Most of this changed in the early 1990s. Not all of it, the health stuff started earlier. But it's striking that the poverty numbers fell, the income numbers grew, the education numbers took off, the democracy numbers took off all of that. And I think that's the biggest clue as to what happened to bring about the great surgeon. I think there are several factors at play. One was the end of the Cold War. There's no question in my mind. And with that, the emergence of China, which was actually part of the end of communism, the beginning of the end of communism, really, and the end of the Cold War. And with the end of the Cold War, we stopped supporting a lot of people who fell. Sometimes they were replaced by new dictators, but more often than not, they were replaced by new leaders that were actually interested in democracy and basic rights and holding the executive accountable and having some modicum of development progress. So there was a big change in political systems at that time. It also reduced war. All of those wars I mentioned were proxy wars for the Cold War in Central America, in Southeast Asia. That was all the Cold War, with us going to war with the Soviet Union through some puppets. When the Cold War ended, conflict fell dramatically. And that opened the opportunities for much more development progress. So a big part of this story is the end of the Cold War and with it a move towards market capitalism, not free markets, but much more towards market capitalism and democracy. And then the other big force was globalization, that was all about opportunities, financial flows, the exchange of ideas, and other forms of global integration, which were highly disruptive. Some people lost, there's no question about that, but hundreds of millions of people gained new job opportunities, new financial opportunities, new ideas, and new knowledge. And perhaps the most important part of that global integration was technology. From cell phones to the internet to better seed vaccines. I actually think the best example of globalization working really well is vaccines for children. You cannot get a vaccine to a kid from a plant in Indiana to somebody, to a kid in Northern Mozambique without global integration, without private companies working with the United Nations, working with aid agencies, working with local governments, working with the community health worker who actually, and the mother who actually brings their kid. And you need all those pieces together to work. So some parts of global integration have worked quite well. And a big part of that has been the transfer of technology from rich countries to poor. So those are some of the forces behind what's going on. I'd be happy to talk about whether or not I think this will continue. I think it's an open question. It might, and it might not. I think it's a matter of choice that we make, not a matter of fate, but I'm happy to talk about that as we go along. But I've talked enough, so let me stop there and open it up for any questions that you might have. Dean, jump right in. Thank you. You're probably a very good person to address this. What role do you think poor aid, aid agencies, most bilateral aid agencies played in this story? I think, you know, my gut feeling is that you're right that it's about institutions, it's about democracy, reductions in civil conflict. But what about the aid industry? Good. So you notice that I didn't mention aid. And this is not a book about aid. And partly I got sick and tired of everybody who talks about development equating it with aid. And Dean did not do that. He actually made that separation. But too much of the debate about aid from my very good friends, Jeffrey Saxon, Billy Sterling, and others, end up equating development with aid. And that's a big mistake. I do have a full chapter on aid. It's chapter 9 on purpose to put it later in the book. Here's the bottom line of what I believe from my own experience and what I believe that the research evidence points to is that foreign aid has been a secondary, has had a secondary impact and a modest positive impact on this development progress. So it is nowhere near the major driver for growth. Institutions are choices around democracy, choices around economic policy and the world economic system are much more powerful. The transfer of technology is much more powerful. But aid can help that. I talked about vaccines. That doesn't happen without aid agencies. So aid is not the most powerful force. But it is also not the disaster that many writers like to paint it out to be. Yes, there's lots of failed aid programs. Yes, the money is not used particularly effectively. But here's where the research basically comes out. There's not much question that this huge improvement in health that I showed happened in large part because of foreign aid programs. And that's why it happened so much earlier. We do not eradicate smallpox without foreign aid programs and without UN agencies at the fore. We've almost eradicated polio and it's aid agencies that are doing it. Those immunizations that I talked about, aid is not the only thing happening there but it's a big part of it. Those reductions in death from malaria and tuberculosis and HIV are happening in large part because of aid funds. So there's not much doubt actually on the health side. There's more to the health story but that's where aid has had the biggest impact. It's also had a pretty big impact on agriculture, the green revolution of course, new seed varieties and other forms of agriculture. On economic growth the evidence particularly in the last five years there's a lot of variation in the research. I've read maybe all of it or more than anyone should read in their lifetime on this. But most of the research in the last five years is finding a modest positive relationship between aid and growth. Around one percentage point of adding one percentage point to growth rates from aid flows with a lot of variation but that's the statistically significant result and it seems to be a stronger relationship post 1995. There's five or six very recent studies that show that. So that's basically where I come out. It's not the biggest driver but it does help in some circumstances. Yes. So you've painted a very vivid picture of improvements in the developing world. Every day you can help care education income, the development well. So it's fair to say the developing world is catching up in the developed world but within the developed world also in the developing world there's increasing inequality within society. So yes, overall there's greater equality on the planet but within given societies certainly the U.S. but in hard places like India also is increasing internal inequality. So that's what this slide is about distribution within countries. And it is absolutely true in some developing countries that's what's going on but actually somewhat surprising in the majority of developing countries within country and country distribution has actually gotten better. And many of these are countries in Latin America. Brazil is the largest country where this has been the case El Salvador, this has been the case in the last few years and many other countries where this measure is the share of income earned by the poorest 40% but if I did the share of income of the poorest 20% or if I looked at a genie coefficient it would be basically the same picture that again either that distribution has actually improved or it hasn't changed much. In some countries it has gotten worse and again I don't want to I'm not going to make the strong claim that systematically income distribution is getting better that you can't make the argument that systematically income distribution is getting worse in some countries yes in some big ones China yes but others Indonesia it actually hasn't changed very much in South Korea it hasn't changed very much going back over decades and in Brazil and Latin America it's getting better. So that's the data that we have on developing countries. Just curious what is the nature and the extent of any international cooperation and the allocation and conservation of water and the obviously impact that that will have on growth? Good So to get to that the last third of this book is about the future and the question I ask is can this progress be sustained and I decided not to predict the future because whatever I said would be wrong that's for sure. So I actually lay out three scenarios that I think are all possible actually one is that this progress continues unevenly two steps forward one step backward some countries go backwards more countries go forward but over 20 or 30 years we actually see continued progress along these lines and I think that is entirely possible I think because of the institutional changes and the educational changes that could happen. Commodity prices at the moment are pushing against that but that's not a 30 year phenomenon I don't think it's a shorter term. Second scenario is that things don't change very much we've had this progress that basically stagnates and a third scenario is that it actually goes backwards and poverty numbers actually start to go up and I think this is entirely possible because of pressures on the planet either because of conflict we go back to war and we can all imagine scenarios where that might happen or because of various pressures on the planet increasing population increasing resource demand obviously climate change and with that now I finally get to water. If we don't address that issue all of those issues then we got a big problem and this kind of progress cannot be sustained and so I think to get there we need to continue among many other things and this will be a very short answer to a complicated question. Among many other things we're going to have to invest in new technologies and resources and R&D along with building the international institutions for cooperation around climate change obviously both to stop it but also to help countries mitigate it into clean energy and into water and one of the key things on water is both the management of the water we have but also things like desalination and if we can get the cost curves down on desalination which is happening so Singapore is doing some of this Jordan is doing some of this if we can get those cost curves down that becomes a game changer in many ways at least for coastal communities but you still need the management so how this is going to go I don't know a big test a base and treaty between Pakistan and India which has been in force for 40 years actually ends in 2019 so Pakistan and India are going to have to negotiate and that's just one example of many that we're going to have to get those negotiations are going to have to be right to manage the inland waters along with some technology on the coastal waters if we don't do that this is going to go backwards if we do progress that's the short answer to a very complicated and good question you mentioned the impact of globalization trade agreements is there an inverse relation in terms of what's been going on here versus the development I think I know what you mean but it has to be more explicit the income gaps that have developed here and part perhaps attributed to the outflow good question and I'm glad that I have one of the world's great trade economists here to help me answer this question Susan that would be you so the answer is to some extent yes however as soon as you go down that route you have to recognize that what that also means is that perhaps one of the reasons that our prosperity has grown so quickly over the last 200 years is perhaps we weren't creating opportunities but we were suppressing opportunities for the rest of the world if it is true that they now have opportunities and somehow that's making life more difficult for us there's an uncomfortable implication about the last 200 years of history that doesn't make it wrong but we have to recognize both sides of this coin first of all second of all I do think it is probably the case there's a lot of debate in the trade literature which Susan would know better than I about the extent to which the fact that we've got stagnating wages here for middle income earners has been stagnating how much of that is trade how much of that is technology and other forces that work my sense is that yes competition from India and China has been part of that story but my own personal belief is that if that is true the real problem is our poor response to that it's not so much that we're getting more competition from China and India it is that we are not responding with better education programs with better training programs for people who lose their jobs we're not investing in our infrastructure instead of blaming rising competition we ought to be making the investment so that we can compete in a global economy and the reason, one of the reasons I believe that is because when we have done that historically it actually ends up being good for all of us we had similar questions with Japan and Germany in the long run it has been very good for us that Germany and Japan have become more prosperous stable democracies not just because of the trade patterns but because they are now our allies in so many ways and so one of the reasons why I think this is ultimately good for us even though it puts some pressure on wages is because if this continues and we have more and more countries that are successful in some type of democracy some type of building effective government institutions some economic opportunities for their next generation these are allies that we can work with to solve our own problems of fighting terrorism of fighting conflict, of fighting drugs of fighting the international issues that we care deeply about one of the best ways to at least reduce terrorism we are never going to eliminate it it has been around forever is to help create more effective states that can counter that and building those effective states is part and parcel of development which is in our long term selfish interest for us even though it does create this pressure on wages but I think the right way to think about the competition from other countries and what that has done to our wages I think that highlights our own failure to respond in an effective way but I don't know if I'm summarizing the literature I don't know whether I want to put you on the spot for what the evidence says about the impact of competition from developing countries on our own wages I would just say two things I'm familiar with some of the literature this has really ballooned and is quite huge and there certainly are a range of that's why I passed the buck to you the pieces that I would add are first that it really depends on who is us when you think about where the benefits are and that's I think following up on a point that you are making there certainly among us and within the richer industrialized countries are many groups that have benefited substantially and so how our institutions and how engagements within the US in particular mean that those gains get distributed as part of the other point that I would make is that we often are not very clear about what our counterfactual is so what are we comparing the outcomes that we see and often we if you actually unpack that tend to be comparing them to alternatives which actually weren't very realistic and so depending on what you're comparing these outcomes to your view of what the alternatives might have looked like and what sets them look very very different there certainly are some quite realistic alternatives in which various kinds of technological and other changes occurred without expansions in trade and the implications in terms of work in the US would actually have been more concerning in some and so that's kind of a second lens on again a very important complicated question that doesn't have a very significant concern Yes So you cited a rise in democracies as an indicator for growth in the developing world so my question is in your opinion what is the biggest factor of being a democracy that contributes to growth? So I didn't So I cited democracy as an indicator of development broadly not necessarily of growth but I do believe that the two are related it's a little hard to look at these pictures and not see the obvious correlation and so it begs the question what is the relationship lots of literature and debate on this and here's where I come out on it it is absolutely true that many authoritarian governments have been quite successful in achieving decades of growth obviously China and Vietnam and Rwanda and Ethiopia and Indonesia when I lived there I lived in Indonesia for four years and worked in the Ministry of Finance for the Soharto government South Korea under the general so we have lots of examples so you cannot say that democracy is necessary for growth however in these last two decades the majority of countries that have had sustained growth the majority are democracies they're not getting the 10% growth of China but many of them are doing quite well and it's the majority it is South Africa and it is India Indonesia and it is Tanzania and it is Brazil and it is Chile and it is the Philippines and it is the majority of countries that have moved and the thing about authoritarian governments is that some of them do quite well if you happen to have Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore you know, Good Anya but once you go down that path you're more likely to get Robert Mugabe who started out supposedly as a democrat and that's the more common pattern so at least it's a risky business to go down the authoritarian regime and China's authoritarian regime now looks pretty good the last one didn't look so good under Mao so it's a risky business and what the evidence is is that under authoritarian governments there's much more variance in terms of growth performance under democracies there's much less variance which is essentially what Amartya Sen was pointing out in his classical work that there aren't any famines in democracies some people contest that with a few cases depending on how you define a famine but his point holds so the overall pattern has been growth on average of at least as good amongst the democracies with less variance but then the other point which I think is really the clincher for all of those countries that have had growth under authoritarian regimes historically they all end at some point we'll see what happens to China in the late 1950s everybody was saying the Soviet growth model was the one they were outperforming us but it fell apart it could not be sustained the same thing happened under Bismarck in Germany after the major restoration in China and many other places we don't have any rich authoritarian countries we have a few small oil rich countries that maybe you could define that way but the authoritarian governments don't consider switch to democracy as citizens demand more accountability or there's so much pressure as what happened in the Soviet Union that the system ultimately breaks down they can't sustain growth and they might try to maintain authoritarian control but growth is going to slow down there's a huge debate that's what happened in Indonesia they threw so hard to out I was told when I lived there that Indonesians only cared about economic progress that's what the elites wanted when the Asian financial crisis happened and Suharto had a heart attack and the opportunity arose it turned out that Indonesians wanted both the world's largest Muslim country wanted to be a democracy and last year well now 2014 a furniture maker beat Suharto's son-in-law Major General Prabowo if you can picture in your mind what Major General Prabowo looks like that's what he looks like this is the guy who invaded East Timor he lost in an election to a furniture maker, small businessman who had become the mayor of Jakarta and then a provincial governor and ran for president and if someone would have told me 20 years ago when I lived in Jakarta and worked in the Ministry of Finance that a furniture maker was going to beat Prabowo in an election, I would have told them they were crazy but that is exactly what has happened and so my belief and most of history shows that it is the democracies even though they may not grow faster in the growth spurts that are much more able to sustain it over time so that's the question this is probably the last question last one so kind of related to the democracy discussion many western development Asian seizure actors have democracy requirements on their aid or in their development goals and so I'm wondering with countries like China and many more actors non-western countries being involved in development how do you see that changing especially it's a good question, so China and other countries are out being donors and they obviously have quite different conditions if any on governance so a couple things on that one, that's the way we were many years ago when we supported Marcos and Mobutu and lots of other people so we have to be a little careful when we're critical of China having no governance conditions on their aid because we've been there so that's just one point second point is that China's aid like lots of other aid is quite mixed in its record and I actually think this question ultimately depends on the receiving government and this is a little bit simplistic but to the extent that they are a democracy themselves and where China's aid has been coming into countries where the governments are reasonably accountable and democratic, the aid is actually helping I mean it's a lot of money and it's building roads and it's building ports and it's building power supplies and I've seen this in Liberia where Chinese aid has without any question been quite helpful in Liberia's post-war recovery and Ebola and China was one of the first ones that came in and built any Ebola treatment union for example you know and they didn't have any conditions on governance but it didn't matter because you know it's a democracy but in other countries especially the non-democracies where aid flows are getting smaller and they can't get private capital again my friend Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe as a good example can't get money anywhere else it is possible that the Chinese aid flows are actually helping to support a dictator stay in power just as our money did 30 years ago and sometimes probably still does so there are I think situations where Chinese aid can actually undermine good governance and sustain a government that is hurting development but I think it's very hard to make an overall characterization on the whole given the shortage of capital and the need for investment in infrastructure in Africa and the fact that China is investing in a lot of that infrastructure overall it's been helpful but it again depends a lot on the country it's a good question so alright thank you very much I appreciate it so Steve congratulations on your new book and thank you very much for sharing some of the findings with us thank you all for coming we would like to continue the conversation out in the great hall there are some additional refreshments and courtesy of Nicola Books you have an opportunity to purchase the book and to have it personally signed so I hope that you will stay and join us to continue that conversation thanks again for being here


and easier in some ways to gain access to it. It's an extraordinary complex system. I don't understand how it doesn't fall down entirely one day. So many things going on at once. Can you imagine taking a cab and paying $35 to arrive at your destination? It used to cost $0.35. In every way, the city is different, largely because you yourself are different. And your expectations are different. It's always been both a pleasure to be here and an environment that could be extremely threatening and negative. But what it does have that no other place on earth is a population of the most extraordinary people you'll find anywhere. And that, of course, is one of the great rewards of being here. There's always a sense that when I talk to people, they're like, I always feel like I missed out on the New York that they had. They're always like, oh, 10 years ago. Do you feel like that's always been the case? Or do you feel like there was a time where you really felt the best here? Or has it kind of morphed over time? Well, I can't speak for everybody because everybody has a different experience. I know that you can't anticipate what's going to happen in this city. I mean, there are broad movements and events and cycles. But the truth of the matter is that opportunity for anything arises constantly. It's one of these places that are extremely difficult to objectify or quantify or analyze with any singular point of view. It's just too complicated. We're here tonight to celebrate the book that's just being released. How did that come about? The book? Yeah. Well, I had all these posters I've been doing. They're filling up all the space in my basement. I have 300,000 sheets of paper in the basement. I realized I had to do something with them. Actually, I had a friend, Steve Heller, who's a writer on the subject. And I said, Steve, help me get rid of this stuff. He said, well, you should have a catalog. I said, well, that's what I'll do. I'll make a catalog. You know anybody who'll publish it? And he recommended Abrams and my publisher. It was the easiest book I've ever done.  They asked to see the book. I said, dummy over electronically. They looked at it. They said, we'll do it. They did it. And I met my publisher for the first time tonight. Could you stand up, please? The ideal publisher. He made no trouble. At any rate, they said they would and they did. And all of you who are involved in publishing know there's nothing more difficult about trying to publish a book, because the first thing a publisher does is ask you to pay for it. This didn't happen that way. That's how it came about. When we were there in the studio, you had a dummy and you were telling us a little bit about the book. What struck me is you said there's a few in here that aren't good. And you were very straightforward. And you were like, yeah, sometimes I meant, which to me was shocking because such a legend, the idea that one in there would be that you didn't like. Can you, is that putting those out there and showing work that maybe isn't, is that kind of part of the process? Well, I think there was a choice in doing a book, which is, A, to do a select version of the book. So out of 500 posters, you pick the 30 that are really good. Or else you show what you've done. And I sort of avoided the issue by taking about 10% of the posters that are really lousy and putting them in the back under a heading saying that these are not so good. It seemed like a cheap way to achieve a reputation for being honest. So that's what I did. I mean, the book is obviously not a celebration of everything I've done, but an attempt to objectify and analyze why you do something to solve a specific problem. It's more of a kind of a book where you, for people who are not terribly visual, where you understand how you arrive at conclusions about going from where you are to where you want to be. So it really has a kind of different purpose than a display of virtuosity and genius. It really intends to show what you do when you make those things. When you graduated from Cooper Union, did you have any idea, or could you have ever foreseen this career that you've had? Or were you just kind of like, I just need to make a living? No, I could not have preconceptualized my life. It would have been very easy not to have this life. But I've been very lucky, and I've had great opportunities. And I have an accumulation of a lot of work. I'm worrying now what I'm going to do with it. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do after school? Like, did you, obviously Pushpin came about pretty quickly after school. Was that a plan, or did that happen? I don't know. My mother made me believe that I could do anything I wanted, and that's the way it worked out. I was so certain that everything was attainable. But that, of course, was a moment in the history of the city and the country. I don't think the city feels that way anymore, because there are too many frustrating, complicated issues involved. And I certainly don't think the country feels that way anymore, because we have Trump in the presidency. But I felt that anything I could conceptualize, I could arrive at. And also, I enjoyed my work so much, there was nothing that I preferred more than drawing. And I would, I still do it, in fact. And if there's anything to do as an alternative, I'll consider it very carefully before I give up drawing or making things. I think making things, the ability to create something that only exists in reality after you actually conceptualize it in your mind, there is no more glorious purpose. And I just followed, in this case, my passion and my enthusiasm. And that's how it turned out. And also, I was very lucky. We spoke earlier about, obviously, the posters. How have you seen in your lifetime the poster and its cultural relevance in society kind of change? I don't know. That's too objective a problem for me. Doing posters are acts of persuasion. I mean, what you hope to do when you do a poster is change somebody's perception about an event or a subject. I don't like advertising. I don't like the idea of persuading people to do things that are not necessarily good for them. And so for me, if I can get closer to the idea of the lighting people or changing their perception, that's where the deepest satisfaction is. But to persuade somebody to do something that is, as I say, not necessarily good for them is something I'm always jumpy about. I'm sure you've been approached by huge advertising agencies to do stuff. Have you just avoided it or just done it begrudgingly? Yeah, I avoid most advertising. I could say the first 20 years of my experience, I did a lot of advertising. Didn't know any better. But now I really avoid it because either I don't know the consequences of what I do or I fear that by some mechanism, what I'm advocating at a time will turn negative in terms of the life of the people who are receiving those messages. So I'm very nervous about doing advertising. So you guys did do some at Pushpin? Or yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about that experience? In design history, we learn about Pushpin. We learn about your luxurious career. What was the environment like at Pushpin? Can you describe it to us? At Pushpin? Yeah.  The environment was that we felt we were working towards a common goal. And that was the achievement of beauty. We never in the 20 years that I was at Pushpin, we never once talked about money. Never once did we talk about how we would share the proceeds or pay the rent. It was because the sense of being together to accomplish a common goal was so fabulous. And that's a long time to sustain an effort of that kind. But if you are involved in making things of beauty, there's almost nothing that can replace it. When we talked, this is something that stuck out to me. The idea when you started Pushpin, design was one way. And you guys basically kind of changed and introduced this other way that design could be seen and experienced. Is that true? Well, define that a little more. I mean, you guys basically introduced the idea of really illustrative. It was kind of like pushing back against things where Helvetica and kind of Swiss. It was much more expressive. It was much more drawn. Well, what we were doing was a little different. One of the ideas that we held in common was that there was no correct way of doing anything graphically. That modernism was just a style. It was just like everything else. It was a choice you could make. It was no different than Art Nouveau or the Arts and Crafts movement. It was just a choice you had from infinite number of choices in human history about old. And I still feel that way. There's nothing visual in human history that I don't adore. So the idea of sticking to modernism, to sticking to one typeface, to sticking to geometry is the basis for a come on, grow up. And we also were interested in narration and storytelling. But storytelling was supposed to be a low level. That was illustration. It's a low level of activity. Abstraction, on the other hand, is up close to the gods.  You're dealing with abstractions, sublime truth, universal truth. Well, none of us believe that. I don't know why anybody else did. But the power of abstraction was still with us today. I mean, a good part of the field is working out of the same assumptions as people were working under the 30s and the 40s. But we were interested in something else. We were interested in telling stories and showing pictures. I mean, rob yourself of the ability to show people in a book. What are you talking about? Anyhow, we had contempt for that, if not contempt, at least little patients. And so we started in a different way. And people were so refreshed by the idea that you didn't have to be so highfalutin that you could take funny things and show them and decorative objects and Persian rugs and the richness of the visual world. And our work caught on. People got to like it. So I've had my company for 10-ish years with my business partner who directed the film. I can't imagine doing 10 more years, so 20 years total, and then just switching gears and going out on my own. Like, were you worried and nervous? Like, why did you want to just switch gears like that? I don't know why. I just get bored so easily. 20 years is a long time. I was also always very interested in storytelling. And I had been illustrating for so many years. Then I used to work a lot for Clay Felker, who was the editor of Esquire. And then the Sunday supplement for the Herald Tribune. I started working for it. We got to be good friends. Our wives got to be good friends. And we said, hey, why don't we do a magazine, like in the movies? And the Sunday supplement went out of business. And we were able to buy the name New York. And once that happened, we were in the magazine business. And it's a great business. It was a great business then. It's not such a good business now. But you're dealing with stories and telling things to people and changing perceptions. Wonderful. What did you know about the magazine? How did you get in the fight? I didn't know anything about the magazine business, except how to make a picture. But I have a literary sense. And I know how to tell stories. And also, I was sort of the opposite of Clay. I was a Jewish boy from the Bronx. He was from the Midwest, coming here as an outsider, pressing his nose against the glass panes of people, eating fancy dinners. And I just thought it was my town. And the two of us made a kind of composite of what the town was interested in. It was a great ride. What did you just, it was too much of a, I'm sure it was kind of a burnout schedule, right? The idea of the pace of a magazine was probably too much to handle at a certain point, right? Just keeping up with that schedule? I don't know. If you don't know that it's impossible, you can do it. Of course, I was still running the studio at the time. So I only used half my time for the magazine. And then we were in the same building. It's amazing how much you could do. If somebody doesn't tell you, you can't do it.   Is that, how does that make you feel? Just one of the things that happens in your life. You know what I mean? What was surprising was that it became successful because we really didn't know how to do it. And we were really learning on the job. The first year, if you ever go back and look at New York Magazine, the first year of our publication, it's horrible. It's full of terrible misunderstandings. But we finally got to understand who we were talking to and what we wanted to say and it straightened up and it became what it is. Incidentally, it has restored its sort of former place in the city. For a while it went inert after Murdoch bought it and it was a product that nobody really wanted here. And then after three or four years, it regained its footing and now I think it's a good magazine. Were you involved with editorial at the time of the magazine or were you primarily doing it? Oh yeah, there was no separation and everybody did everything. And then in that same building, then you pushed and did your career as Milton Glacier and kind of, how was your own design from different than Pushman? Then? Yeah. Then what? Then Pushman. Like how was the work that you were doing on your own as Milton Glacier and different than the work you were doing at Pushman?  And did, who did covers and layouts and heavy lifting. And I was actually of all things, I was designing supermarkets for a guy named Sir James Goldsmith who I met in England who wanted to buy a New York magazine but Murdoch beat him to it and he asked if I could design supermarkets so I started designing supermarkets. And I did that for eight, nine years. How do you design a super? Like what do you mean design a super? You figure out what the signs say, you figure out where people walk, you figure out what the stands look like. I mean, it's a great job designing a supermarket. But that took a lot of time. And you've done like playgrounds and wine bottles and like is it all the same thing to you? Or are you just kind of? All the same thing. To find out, is it a process? Is it just, it's just an idea, it's just figuring out how to communicate these things or? I don't know, ideas are cheap.  I think most of the time the problem is not, is how to begin. And once you begin, the path takes you to the destination. And if you believe that, everything's easy. Making something like New York Magazine or like, I love New York, these ideas are these transcendental ideas. You talk about that a little bit in the film.  I don't think so. Whose line was the fish in water, doesn't know what's in water? You're just working. And you don't, I mean if you really think things are hard to do, they are hard to do. And if you think they're not hard to do, they're not hard to do. And I have, everything, my life has been exceedingly easy. I made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of stupid things, but so what? I went on and found another way to do it. And I think so much of this is, this preconception of everything. The idea that you know the answers before you actually experience the event is a killer. I mean this sense of having no doubt. The great thing about being alive is to have doubt and to transcend them. But people without doubt who are certain of everything are really in terrible shape. You talk about mistakes and obviously those can be huge and can kind of push one way or the other.  Or is it involve client work or this? Everything, everything. I mean you just stumble, stumble along, you make mistakes. Mostly you make mistakes by working with the wrong people. Do you have a sense, which I've kind of developed over time when someone walks in the room and you can just, you get the vibe like, oh this is not gonna go up? Immediately. Yeah. I mean I think that's one of the great attributes of humankind, you go into a room and there were 10 people and you go, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes. Before you say a word, we know it. I mean we all understand everything about everybody. But sometimes you don't want to pay attention. Was there a point where you got to pick and choose more so like, okay, I have this reputation, the work is out there, people know the work, I can be a little more selective or has that always kind of been a battle? Well what you want is to find people who trust you and who feel that you basically will find an answer for them and not that they have to direct you into what they want. One of the great difficulties for everybody who's in the design business is the fact that there are agendas where you don't feel you're doing anything except following the client's orders. And it does not yield, in most cases, a very happy result. Either in the work itself or in your relationship to the work. Have you had relationships with clients that have lasted 10, 20, 30, that have come? Yeah, I have a lot of relationship clients that last over the years, I do. And the best work I've done are for people I really like. I find, unfortunately, this is very unprofessional but I really find that I don't enjoy working for people and as a consequence, I don't do good work for them. So you think in that scenario it's just impossible to even, it's just they're not that great of a person, the work is just ultimately gonna not turn out the way. I don't want to be absolute about it. I'm sorry. You've done so much in your career and this is, again, a very tried question. I apologize. Is there anything left for you like I still want to do this one thing or I've never done this other thing or do you feel like you've done more than you'd ever want? I don't care what I do, in the sense of subject matter. People came to the office, they asked me to design eyeglasses. I thought it was a great problem. I never designed eyeglasses before. I did it. Didn't come out too well. No, there's no category that I would say is not interesting. Because your mom in the beginning said you could do anything or because you feel like design is so pervasive that that thinking process can be put on anything or it's just like you're willing to try it and who gives? I don't know. Not everyone has that. Sometimes people just do one thing and then they do it their whole career. It's certain. And some people like doing one thing and some people feel that they wanna do more than one thing. I mean, it's such an individual choice. I mean, some people really like the comfort of doing something and refining it every time and keep raising the level and they find they can do it within a category, you know, like shoes or watches or something like that and it satisfies them. But I've always been interested in novelty and seeing how far I could go. So with that line of thinking, the idea of freshness of novelty of new, you look at the I Heart New York logo, obviously it's extremely well rendered, all the details are there. Like when you lock in, can you really get in, dive in and kind of do those details or when you're drawing something, can you spend hours and hours and hours on it or do you kind of lose attention fast? Well, I didn't design the New York logo at the beginning. That was by Peter Palazzo who did a very good job and I just thinned it out. Probably wasn't the right thing to do with it. And I don't, you know, in an area of extreme skill, like rendering letter forms, I don't have the arrogance to say, I can do that, it's just a matter of paying attention. But there are too many complexities, too many details and too much preliminary work you have to do before you reach a point of mastery. But that isn't true about most things. You still have the drafting table in your studio. There were still 4,000 sharply sharpened pencils that were very, very beautiful. Is that when you're at your happiest when you're at the table? Well, now I work a lot with curiosity, something I never thought I'd do with a computer but I never touch a computer. These hands have never touched a computer. I work with somebody at my side and I tell them, move this, put someone else there. It's a very crude way of working but the results, you can't tell that somebody's skill didn't do it. Do you drive them crazy or are they? No, he's okay. You mentioned in Pushpin, the idea that no one ever cared about money, it wasn't like over the course of your career, have you developed more of a business sense or is that not something? No, I'm a terrible businessman. No, if I'm interested in something, I'll do it for nothing any time. And if I'm not interested in something, I can't do it. I mean, even if it's a big paying job, I mean, I realize at one point that if I were gonna be in business and treat what I do as a business, I would have to pay attention to money but that depressed me. Although I'm exceedingly rich through inadvertence but I could never figure out how to meet a payroll. Your brain just doesn't care about that, it's just not. I just can't seem to get to it. When you got out of Cooper versus now, has your drawing ability exponentially increased or was it always kind of the same level? I don't know. Also, I don't know what drawing ability is. I don't know what talent is. No, no, no, is it replicating what you see in front of you? I mean, there are certain kinds of skills, representational skills, but that's not what I think of.   Every drawing is an abstraction. So if you're in that business, the word ability means something else. When we were in your studio, you had work that you were preparing to do prints of and kind of in the more fine art category, but it seemed like there were more images you'd done in a design context that were being sold in the... Have you consciously stayed away from the art world and tried to be more in design or do you not care about that stuff? I have to go through this. That's what every class I've ever taught. There's no such thing as fine art, right? There's no such thing as commercial art. What there is are two ideas. One is moving towards an objective that produces an effect. And once you have the objective, you go into the process of trying to arrive at that objective. Art has nothing to do with that. Art is about transforming the mind of the viewer so that they perceive reality differently. Those two things have nothing to do with each other, although every once in a while, they sort of coexist. So I don't know how to tell someone that their drawing is inadequate. Outside of the fact that that space between seeing and representing has to have something that changes the people that witness it. If you see something that looks great like a piece of furniture, and it's terrific to sit in, it's not art even when it's very comfortable and it looks great because it hasn't done this other thing, which is to change your mind about the subject. You mentioned teaching earlier, and the idea of students. You've had a long relationship with SVA. What does teaching bring to you? Why have you maintained that throughout the course of your career? It makes you question what you believe. I mean, I hear myself saying something. I realize you've said that so many times, and yet you still don't know what it means. It is a way of discovering your own belief system, and then to be able to give it up. What satisfaction do you get from seeing students start to develop on their own and kind of see some of the things you're telling them and kind of start to flourish and you see that seedling in them that they might not even see? Is that part of it too, the idea of giving back? Well, you know, finally, at the end, you say, what did I do? What was my purpose? And if it's only making money or becoming famous, you have missed the point. Unless you share what you know with others, unless you develop a way of benefiting everyone, there's no point. So, teaching is one of the great experiences that you can have when you feel that you've shared your life.  You have any one instance in teaching where you kind of had this moment of whether it was like a very curious moment or a very inspired moment or a memorable moment you have with a student? Well, I've been teaching for 60 years, so it's a little hard to isolate. 700,000 hours of teaching. No, I don't, except for the fact. You know when you've done something and people respond. I mean, I'm still getting letters from people who studied with me 50 years ago and I have to say it's enormously satisfying. Do you think or care about legacy at all? Or is that not concerning you? Whatever it is, I mean, I don't know how to objectify that legacy. I mean, I've done some things that have had an effect on people. And by and large, I don't think it's been a negative effect. If 100 years down the road somebody looked back and they were talking about your contribution to design, what would you want that contribution to be? I would have no idea, except to keep an open mind. Do you feel like that's been a constant throughout your careers keeping an open mind? Not throughout, but in the later years. Did it switch at a certain point where you just realized it was... I wouldn't know that. There's too much analysis going on here. That's my job, Milne. Does anybody in the audience have a question that they'd like to ask, Milton? I was just curious if you had another design person that you loved. I don't know what you think about Steve Jobs. I'm sorry. She's asking about what you think of Steve Jobs. Or someone else in the design world that you find iconic or that is inspiring to you? Steve Jobs? A remarkable accomplishment. I'm not particularly interested in him. Who are you interested in? I know this is, again, this idea of influence is tricky, but was there one person that was like, either when you were coming up at Cooper or throughout your career or a friend or a peer? I had really good mentorship. I had a Fulbright to Bologna early in my career. I studied with Giorgio Morandi, who's a great, great man, basically not for what he taught, but for what he was. He was a perfectly decent, committed guy who only cared about painting and teaching once a week. He just was a man of such profound integrity. I thought that mattered to him with teaching and painting. I thought that was a great model. So there's a great model for me. Thank you. You've lived in the city your entire life. What is the neighborhood or the building that for you encapsulates New York City? Like when you think of home in the city, is there a particular location? Yeah. Or at any point, I guess. I don't have that sort of geographic idea of, since I've been married, we've lived on the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side, and Chelsea. I don't think of any of them as being my home. They're just spaces in the city. I guess I have a kind of broad sense of what New York is, and it's not a singular place. It's really all over the block. If somebody took you and said, I wanted you to take me on your favorite parts of New York City a tour, are there like little things off the beaten path that are just... Yeah, well, there's a thousand of them, but I would say that the only generality I make is it tends to be downtown rather than uptown.  Any clients that you've been approached by to pitch or they approached you and then the project fell through for whatever reason that you wished that the project had gone through? No. No, no, no, because something else turned up the next day. There's no... The velocity of events in your life can't be controlled. I suppose if I thought back, I could have done a great magazine for this person, but I don't think that way. Whatever... I just feel so lucky in my daily life that it doesn't occur to me that an alternative would be better. I've known you in my life. I'm glad to have known you in my life. You're a wonderful person, a great designer. I wanted to know were there any designers in your career that you liked, like their work, any influential designers besides that you looked up to or liked their work? Influential designers in your career. I always liked Paul Rand before I got to know him. No, no, I didn't mean that there were any. But when I was a kid, I liked Paul Rand. When I got to know him, I got to like him more and also admire his sensibility and his talent. That was true of Leo Leone who I got to know and a bunch of Italian designers, Italo Lupe and like that. It wasn't individuals so much as whole generation. In Italy, when I was there, it was a generation of Italian industrial designers and graphic designers who were superb. They still are. Pardon me for not knowing this, but did you spend a portion of your career in Italy working?  It was a wonderful period. Was there a difference? You saw working in the States versus working in Italy? Very different. And sensibility in everything is sort of collective. They don't have the sort of separation, but class separation between the rulers and the servants.  And with my experience, it may not be universal, but that's what I got out of it. After spending time in Italy, why'd you want to come back to New York? Maybe, I don't know. Was your talent earned or were you gifted with it, Milton? Was my talent earned? Your talent. Was it gifted or earned? Well, I'm not quite sure what it meant, but earned, I know I work like hell. I mean, I spent every minute of my young life before I was in junior high school drawing and learning and reading, but there was nothing more important to me than the world of art. Now, I don't know what that means you earned anything.  But do you feel like you had a natural talent more than most? I don't know what natural means. Everybody has latency, talent of some kind, but unless it comes into reality, it's irrelevant, right? I probably had a talent for tap dancing, but I never explored that. Like, when you were a young boy, when you were a young boy, what were your favorite things to do? Like, Leonardo da Vinci would walk around with paper in nature and he would just draw what he saw, but when you were young, what did you like? When you were a young boy, what did you like to do? What I like to do, outside of art? Or even in relation to art. I love to copy comics. I love to read about art. I always had a great literary interest in the history of art. There was nothing in terms of subjects, right? There was nothing more interesting to me, not even sex, when I was growing up. I mean, if I could be left alone with a sheet of paper and a piece of charcoal, I was happy as a clam. Did your parents have that creativity in them or was it a little different? I wouldn't call it creativity. I mean, they didn't have that interest or the opportunity. Did they encourage it, obviously, when they saw that you did? Well, as I told you, my mother said I could do anything, so when I started drawing, she would be enormously pleased and congratulate me. The world of design and illustration and art was very different back then. Did it seem like you were embarking on this path that wasn't fully laid out? I mean, the discipline of design... No, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what the world was doing. I just knew that I had great pleasure in doing it, but I had no idea what was going on in the world or who was doing what or what skills you needed. I learned on the job. Not even at Cooper? You didn't have a sense of what was happening beyond? By the time I was in Cooper, I was already professionally bound and I knew something about what designers did. But that was a long time. I went to life class to learn to draw when I was 12 years old, and that was with Moses Sawyer, who was part of a circle of sort of left-wing artists. But that's when I began officially my entry into the world of art. Thank you so much, Bill, and this has been fantastic. You're very welcome.