The global economy is a wash and abundant, inexpensive labor, and the solution for that labor to get higher wages is for the whole global economy to take advantage of that labor and to have more global labor demand for the world surplus of unskilled labor that we have now. The way out is not worrying about robots. The key is allowing more globalization, allowing more trade, allowing more migration. My name is Bill Easterly. I'm a professor of economics at New York University, and my interest is development economics. I think we can think of two dimensions, which is outside versus inside and big versus small. A big episode of my development was the realization that outside advice and aid was really not working very well. We had great ambitions for achieving development with the help of a big push of lots of money spent on foreign aid, a lot of advice by foreign experts, usually European and American experts. And that was sort of the mentality in the 70s and 80s when I sort of was starting to study economics and got my first job at the World Bank in 1985. That was the mentality. You know, we had this great optimism that we were kind of the saviors of the developing world that we as experts were armed with all our funds and all our knowledge were going to be able to go in and kind of bring rapid prosperity, especially in the regions that are most dependent on foreign aid, like Latin America and Africa and South Asia. And things did not work out. You know, the economic growth in Africa and Latin America and South Asia in that era of the 70s and 80s was very disappointing. And the initial growth after there was some attempted economic reforms in the 1990s, very disappointing. And then there was the whole episode of attempting to advise the former Soviet economies how to make the transition from communism to capitalism. We thought that also could be achieved very rapidly with our aid and our advice. And that also did not work out. There was kind of one of the greatest depressions in economic history happened in the former Soviet countries after the end of communism. And so, you know, that was the point at which I and I think many others felt a lot of disillusionment about what we were doing in development economics. It just seemed like we really did not know anything about how to achieve economic growth and development. We had really failed. And, you know, that was the point at which I started writing sort of critical books about the aid business and about the advice business and was almost ready to give up. And I think since then there have actually been some more hopeful trends in development economics over the past 30, 40 years or so, which is that, first, I think we really realize that most development successes are homegrown, like China was. So I think the pessimism about the value of outside expertise has basically turned out to be correct, that most success stories are really homegrown. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, more recent successes in Africa like Ghana. Those are really homegrown success stories and not parachuting in a foreign expert saying, here are all the answers, just follow our advice and take our money. And that was not the formula in China. That was not the formula in most of these homegrown success stories. So what was the formula in China? I think, you know, ironically, the homegrown China success story was actually adopting for themselves the advice that many Western economists would have given them, which is not Soviet central planning. That doesn't work. I think China is itself one of the greatest examples of just how big a failure the sort of Stalinist Soviet central economic planning was. And then China showed us the flip side of that. When you move away from central planning to a market economy, then suddenly you have a great formula for success. When you have a lot of hardworking, unskilled workers that are now available, that you can now use to export labor-intensive goods into the whole world economy, the simplest formula that sort of explains China's success and a lot of other successes around the world is just get away from extreme state control to using markets as your main guideline for how to develop and then take advantage of the globalized world economy.  That's one of the big reasons why they're poor. So you take all that unskilled labor and if it's confined to only the domestic market, the demand for it is going to be fairly low and wages are going to stay very low. If suddenly you can sort of dump the whole supply of your unskilled labor onto the world market, suddenly you've found a huge demand for your unskilled labor that drives the wages up of your unskilled labor. This is sort of like trade theory 101. If you export labor-intensive goods, that will increase the demand for your labor force, capital income will go up and you will have economic growth and development. And that's sort of the simplest story for how China succeeded. They moved away from closed to open. They moved from centrally planned to market. There are lots of more subtleties that we could talk about, but that is the big formula that China demonstrated. The happy news is that developing countries have done a great job figuring out their own challenges and solving them. I think one of the biggest ones, especially in Africa and Latin America, was finding a way out of this sort of extreme authoritarian, sort of extreme state interventionist control of the economy that was really destroying the economy. You take Ghana as an example. So Ghana, after independence in 1957, actually carried over some of the colonial controls over the export economy. They had a marketing board that bought up all of the cocoa at punitive rates that did not reward cocoa growers for growing cocoa at a time when Ghana had been the largest supplier of cocoa on the world market. And that was a formula that basically killed off the whole cocoa industry in Ghana over the 60s and 70s and early 80s. By 1983, the Ghanaian official policy which forced cocoa growers to sell their cocoa to the state marketing board at their controlled price was so punitive the cocoa growers were getting only 6% of the world price. Of course, nobody wanted to grow cocoa at that price. So Ghana had become a disaster. The economy had declined a lot since independence with that kind of formula. But the great news at that point was there are sort of homegrown reformers in Ghana, including some of them, like Yao and Yarko, whom I know is a colleague of mine at NYU. We're sort of transmitting the economics knowledge that this is a disaster for economic development and liberalizing giving incentives that would reward exporters for exporting would be a lot better formula for development. So Ghana decontrolled the cocoa export market and a lot of other markets in Ghana. And there was a revival of growth in Ghana that became sort of one of Africa's biggest homegrown success stories. And Ghana eventually transitioned also into political freedom and to becoming a democracy. So over the course of the last three decades, Ghana has moved from extreme economic and political oppression to economic and political freedom to recognizing economic rights like property rights, the right to sell your cocoa at a fair price and political rights like the ability to protest when your government is destroying your ability to make a living for yourself. And all of that together has been the package that has been a great success story in Ghana and other similarly reforming economies throughout Africa and Latin America especially. Now there's sort of a new round of challenges that you're hinting at the formula for all of these success stories. They do rely heavily on taking advantage of the global marketplace. Ghana's ability to export cocoa, China's ability to export textiles and other labor intensive goods. Those are really the key for development success. If there is now this sort of huge backlash against globalization in the rich economies, the rich economies has sort of forgotten that trade is a win-win game in which both sides can gain from trade and have turned against trade and we have a new wave of protectionism. That is really bad news for developing economies. I think this worry about robots replacing unskilled workers in the world economy is a really foolish fear. I think they're much better things to worry about than that one. I mean, nobody is forcing anybody to invest in robots. Robots are just another form of capital. You invest in capital when capital has a high return and labor is expensive. When labor is cheap, you invest in a labor intensive technology. Capital intensive technology is when capital is cheap and labor is expensive. A labor intensive economy is when capital is expensive and labor is cheap. When you have so much unskilled labor in the world, labor is very cheap on a global scale and the rational thing for investors around the world to do is mostly to invest in labor intensive technologies. I think where there is investment in capital intensive technology like robots in rich economies, it's because there is not enough globalization. There's not enough access to importing labor intensive goods from labor abundant economies like China and Ghana around the world. And there's also too much limitation on immigration. That's another way in which rich economies can benefit from the huge surplus of unskilled labor that there is in the world. I think we should be humble and know that usually when there's a big unexpected shock like COVID, we're not gonna know how it plays out until quite a bit later, maybe many years later. So the most obvious thing to say about COVID right now is just do the things that alleviate COVID. I think in the development business, the most obvious thing that we could be doing is just making foreign aid dollars available to fund vaccines for poor countries. Because there obviously is a big problem of unequal access to vaccines that the rich countries are getting a lot more access to vaccines. And we need to sort of have a big purchasing program for vaccines funded by foreign aid to make vaccines available to Africans and Latin Americans and South Asians around the world. I think there's way too much development effort going now on very tiny questions, especially emphasizing randomized control trials. Randomized control trials are great. They really resolve problems of causality and rigorous evidence, but they really limit you to very tiny questions that you can ask. What is the effect of flip charts on test scores? What is the effect of view warming drugs on class attendance? And those are not the big questions in development. The big questions are, how do you achieve rapid economic growth? How do you achieve some success like China? How do you achieve more modest success like Ghana's? Those are the big questions. So we need more intelligent research that's asking what national policies are conducive to rapid economic growth. That's a question that's been relatively neglected in recent years because it's less susceptible to the more rigorous evidence techniques that are in fashion right now. But it's such an important question. We're not gonna stop discussing it just because we don't have rigorous enough evidence. We just do the best we can with the facts that we see before us. And so most of those facts seem to indicate that national policies are very important. Venezuela is a disaster because of national policies. Singapore is a success because of national policies. Understanding those better and getting more subtle about what specific national policies really destroy or make possible economic success, those are the big things that I wish development students from the next generation would be answering.


Give money to provinces as opposed to giving money to ministries. Because ministries don't do anything other than providing a supervisory role. Why not take money to where the implementation takes place, which is in the provinces, which is in the districts. The other thing, Honorable Chairperson, is that we know that in attaining development, Now, development is attained not only from government perspective. They are stakeholders also who are critical. That is the private sector. You know that the copper belt thrives literally on the private sector. The private sector on the copper belt is dead. And it looks like all these crimes we are making are falling on deaf ears. Yes, we may know that there are certain plans that you have on paper or now you want to deal with the issue of the copper belt. But you are not speaking to us. There are no time frame on what measures you are placing on record or in action to deal with the issue of KCM, to deal with the issue of Mopani. We may sound like broken records today because every time we stand up, we are talking about KCM, we are talking about Mopani. But you must know why we are emphasizing on this point is that there is no life on the copper belt without Mopani, there is no life without KCM. And if people were listening, we should have been giving timelines on what intervention we are employing to deal with the issues of the copper belt. As I say, this Honorable Minister of the Copper Belt, you are aware that all our districts are becoming ghost towns. It used to be Luansha, now it's every other town. Mufrila, there's nothing to talk about. Chingola, there's nothing to talk about, including where the minister of mines comes from, Chirirabombwe. There's nothing to talk about today. Sadly for my constituents in Kitwe, when you see young boys looting good from moving vehicles, sometimes we sit and not do anything because we have nothing to tell them. The sad reality of what you are seeing is that in the communities, there is hunger. And eventually, chula people are suffering. The more we sit quiet, the more things are getting worse.


I'm calling you from San Diego. I moved to the United States in 2008 and at present I'm living in San Diego, California. I came from Iran. I'm Iranian. What made you come to America? My brother won a lot of green cards in 1990, 1990, and then he applied green card for my mom and I came by my mom application. So your brother is one of the winners from 1990 of the green card, the Visa Lottery. Yes, that's right. Interesting. How do you like San Diego? I lived in San Diego for a few years. I was beautiful city. Tell us how you like it. Yes, as you said, it's very nice. I like it, especially the area I'm living in. It's a good area for walking, walking. The climate is wonderful. People are very nice here. San Diego is known for its weather. The sky is, I mean, you get off the airplane and it's just blue. You look up at the sky and it says this. Yes, that's right. What do you do in San Diego? Since I wish to have a good job here, I had a degree in my country, but I decided to go to the school here to receive, to get another degree. I'm studying in Miramar College, Computer Business Technology. Oh, that's good. As well, I'm working in the library in the campus in the San Diego Miramar College. Excellent. Do you keep in touch with family back in Iran? Yes, Skype is the best. Yes, Skype is the best. And what about, as I recall, there's an Iranian community.  What about San Diego? Yes, here, the amount of Iranian is increasing every day. I see a lot of Iranians are moving to United States, to San Diego, directly from Iran. Maybe after LA, San Diego will be the largest community of Iranians. We have here a lot of Iranian groceries, restaurants and different Iranian communities. Do you think it's partly because it's almost a Mediterranean climate? Right. That's what I was thinking too, similar to Iran, the weather. Obviously Iran's not on the Mediterranean, but similar to that kind of climate. It's a very calm, very, it's the same year round, right? It's a very warm, sunny location, but not too hot.  And California, from the, every point, is the best. It's a nice thing. Business, everything. Iranians have the best taste for living. And you mentioned there's a large community around you. Is it a specific neighborhood in San Diego, where you would find those Iranian groceries, restaurants and where people live? No, it's in every part of San Diego. Everyone's all over, they're spread out. Well, probably La Jolla too, right? Yes. Wow, you know La Jolla, yes. There is a couple in La Jolla, such Albor's Restaurant, it's in La Jolla. And I know Sahel Bazaar, it's a Persian grocery in La Jolla. Marvin, let me ask you a question. You've been here 10 years. How long have you known about Voice of America and how did you find out about us? Oh, I know Voice of America since I was in Iran. It's a long time. At that time I could hear only through radio, maybe 25 years ago. When I was a student, a teacher recommended us to listen for improving our English listening to listen to Voice of America. There was no internet, no satellite, no TV connection with V.O.M. And gradually the technology developed. I lived almost three years in France. While I was in France, I used to listen sometimes to V.O.M. Well, gosh, you've followed us all the way from Iran to San Diego. Well, Marvin, it's been great talking to you. And good luck with your studies there and getting your new degree and your work with computers. And we'll have to check back with you at some point. Take care, Marvin. Bye, Marvin. Have a good day. You too. Bye-bye.


Ladies and gentlemen, Drew Bae. Give it up. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just going to add to what Doug said, a little bit more nuts and bolts of how to take what he talked about and put it into practice in a workout. Most important aspects of that being the intensity and the volume and frequency of your training. How hard you should be training, how much you should do, and how often. Now, an analogy that I like to use with clients when I'm explaining this and something that came from Arthur Jones, I invented the nautilus equipment, is training is a lot like getting a sun tan. Exercise is physical stress. Exposure to a very intense sunlight is a physical stress. And anytime that you're exposing yourself to a stress for the purpose of trying to get a particular response, you need to consider those three things. The intensity and the volume and the frequency of exposure to that stress. In the case of getting a sun tan, if the sunlight is not intense enough, it's not going to stimulate anything in the way of the tan. You could lay out all day on a cloudy day and nothing's going to happen. However, if it is intense enough up to a point, it'll stimulate a tan. But beyond some point, rather than being a stimulus, it's going to start to cause damage. A similar thing exists with exercise. As Doug mentioned earlier, for exercise to be effective, it has to be very, very intense. You have to push yourself as hard as possible during the workout. But if you are training intensely enough for your workout to be effective, there is going to be a limit to how much your body can tolerate. And this limit is a lot less than what a lot of people have come to believe. Now, the third part, frequency has to do with your body's ability to recover from and then produce the adaptation stimulated by the stress. Now, if you determine through trial and error that you could lay out for about 15 minutes on a clear, very intense sunlight and that that was about as much as you could tolerate after that you would burn. Well, you wouldn't do that and then get out of the sun and then go back out five minutes later and repeat the process because it's not just the volume or the duration of exposure to that stress in a single instance, but the total, the cumulative amount of stress over a period of time that has an effect on your body's ability to recover from and produce the adaptation. Same with the workout. You might do a workout like Doug had discussed consisting of just a couple heavy multi-joint movements. Stimulate the body, leave the gym, but you wouldn't go back an hour later and try and repeat the process. Well, actually shouldn't even go back a day later or in some cases, you know, a couple days later. The body requires a certain amount of time to completely recover from that before it produces an adaptive response. And if you go back into the gym, you work out again before you've allowed your body that much, enough time to do so, it would be the same as tanning, going inside, coming back out five minutes later and trying to repeat the process. Rather than get the results you want to tan or an increase in muscular strength and size, you end up overwhelming your body's ability to tolerate the stress and produce an adaptive response to it. Now also, and just like getting a sun tan, and this is where a lot of the confusion comes from with training, there's a significant amount of variation in how much exercise a person can tolerate and how much recovery time they need between exposure. I've got mostly Western European genetics. My wife is from the Philippines. I can tolerate very little exposure to intense sunlight before I burn and I can't be out too often. She can be out all day. It doesn't make a difference. She tans very easily. Depending on a person's skin tone, their tolerance and the frequency of exposure that they can handle is going to vary significantly. And a similar situation exists with exercise. Some people can tolerate more. Some people can train more frequently. Others have very, very little tolerance and require a lot more recovery time between workouts to be able to determine or to be able to completely recover from and produce the adaptation stimulated by exercise. Now, how do you determine what is or isn't appropriate for you in terms of how much and how often? Most importantly, when you're exercising, what you're doing is trying to stimulate a specific adaptive response and increase in muscular strength. The size just comes along with that. If you're exercising intensely enough that you're stimulating an adaptive response and if you're not overstressing the body by doing too much and if you're allowing the body adequate time to recover and produce the adaptation you should see a measurable increase in strength on a regular basis. If you're not getting stronger, if you're not either able to perform more repetitions or able to use a little bit more resistance every time you work out, either you're not training intensely enough to stimulate the adaptive response you're doing too much, you're overwhelming your body's capability to tolerate the stress and adapt to it or you're training too frequently and not giving your body enough time in between. Now, Doug had mentioned an average of people being around once a week with a pretty significant range. As little as five days for some people, up to ten days or longer for other people. This is kind of middle of the bell curve. You've got some people on the extreme end who can train a little bit more frequently than that. You've got some people who actually require a lot more recovery time. Most people, though, fit right about in that five to ten day timeframe. For the average person starting out most people are not going to train intensely enough at first that they need a lot of recovery. This level of intensity what Doug is talking about requires a bit of building up to. There's some resistance to it psychologically, like Doug mentioned with that panic as you approach the really hard part of the exercise and a lot of people just are not accustomed to or are familiar with how hard they're able to actually push themselves. So I would recommend a person start out on the lower end of frequency or the lower end of their recovery about once every four or five days, about three or four workouts within a two week timeframe. And from there, keeping track of their workouts, how much weight they use, how many repetitions they're able to perform in all their exercises, make adjustments. You'll find over time, as your intensity of training increases, that you might start to see a slowdown in progress. If you're somebody that requires, say, seven, ten, or whatever amount a number of days, when you start to get up to a point where you're training hard enough, you're going to see that you're not making those strength gains on a regular basis anymore. And this would be an indication that, hey, it's time to cut back a little bit either on the amount you're doing or the frequency over a course of however many workouts you're doing per week. Now, as far as the intensity itself, Doug had mentioned about a lot of people reaching that point where the exercise is beginning to get hard, they start to panic, they hold back. There's a couple reasons that people do this. One, the genetic aspect Doug talked about, just a panic at exerting yourself to the point where you are literally almost incapable of further movement. It is, again, like you said, as far as your body can tell, a life or death event. The only time in the course of normal day-to-day activities when any animal would exert themselves to that degree would be if it was a life or death situation.  It's natural to get to that point to hesitate to want to hold back usually, again, because of the panic Doug talked about as well, is because of a lot of people's minds fear of injury. A lot of people associate training hard with the potential for damaging themselves during the exercise. Now, there's kind of an idea that the harder something is or the heavier the weight, the more likely you are to damage yourself in the process, but the weight has nothing to do with it. It's not how heavy the weight is, but the manner that you try to lift it that determines whether or not you're going to injure yourself in the process. For example, and get a little bit off track here, but I'll come back to the intensity. If you were to go out in the parking lot right now and attempt to lift somebody's car or truck, it's not going to happen. It's a much, much heavier weight than anybody's ever going to touch during a workout. But whether you're injured in the process has nothing to do with how much it weighs, but rather the manner in which you attempt to lift it. If you grab the bumper and you just yank at it as hard and fast as you can, you're likely to pull or strain something. On the other hand, if you grab the bumper and you begin to pull gradually.