ABOUT THE LECTURE:Three billion people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A relative handful of us fare astronomically better. How do economists account for global “haves” and “have-nots”? Roberto Rigobon attributes a vast income inequality across countries to four connecting factors: luck, geography, quality of institutions, and quality of policies. If a country lies close to the 50th parallel, its citizens’ average income is six times greater than that of an equatorial country. Heat takes a toll on nation-building. Take Caribbean and Latin American countries, which experienced a wave of malaria in the 1500’s. Spanish colonists preferred to extract resources and send them home, rather than risk death by staying. Those nations developed impoverished economies and institutions that continue today. Colonists moved to cooler climes settled down, invested in the new world, and created enduring social structures. Rigobon can’t recommend a single, economic, or political doctrine to help a struggling nation achieve prosperity. “The set of rules depends on a country’s culture, history and religion…. In the end the only sustainable regime is democracy, freedom of speech, and the rule of law, but how we get there isn’t irrelevant.” Rigobon encourages developing nations to embrace social and political conflict as “an opportunity to improve.”
Sastry endorses David Kolb's "learning loop" model: concrete experience, observation and reflection, forming abstract concepts, then further implementing and analyzing. She ponders if this cycle can transcend classroom learning to engender change in the world. Her own research and consulting in health care delivery are based on such a stepped method. She stresses that an integrated, holistic perspective is also required. For instance, a malnourished patient will be unable to absorb drugs administered for AIDS; medicine is insufficient without food. As to the larger picture, she says "obviously we've got to tackle global warming and carbon emissions, but we also need to tackle poverty."
