Video: Violence and Justice: The Missing Piece in Our Anti-Poverty Agenda

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SHERYL WUDUNN: So I want to welcome you to this panel called Violence and Justice, The Missing Piece in Our Anti-Poverty Agenda. So I'll be moderating the discussion with some amazing panelists. So you know all of them, Gary Haugen who wrote the book, The Locust Effect, Danielle Allen, and Jeffrey Sachs. And you can read about their wonderful achievements in your programs. 

So when we think of global poverty, I know that we often think about the homeless, the hungry. We don't often think about the people who are beaten by the police, or who are victims of the criminal justice system, thrown into jail because they got a judge who was paid off by someone else. We just don't think about those kinds of people. This is exactly what Gary's book, The Locust Effect, is about. The corrosive effect of s that they have on just eating away at the system of justice and equity that we here in the US have come to take for granted. 

So I don't know how many of you have read the book, but we will have Gary here to talk a little bit about it, and then, we will have the rest of us here to address some of the issues that the book raises. But before that, we have a wonderful opening keynote speaker, Jeff Sachs. And I will let him take the stage right now to give the opening salvo for this discussion. 
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JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you very much. Happy birthday, Divinity School. This is AN absolutely wonderful day and a wonderful occasion, a great joy for us. And the day could not be more beautiful, but I suppose this school has the best connections to guarantee that, of any of the Harvard schools. 

We were always told at commencement for the 30 years that I was here at Harvard, that you could almost guarantee a beautiful day but I think with the Divinity School, the almost would go away. And there is nothing more glorious than a spring day like this in Cambridge, and to be here together celebrating the 200th birthday of the Harvard Divinity School is a great, great joy. 

Given that we're at a Divinity School, I'm going to start with a confession. I think it's appropriate. I was a student here for eight years, undergraduate and PhD in economics. I was on the faculty for 20 years in the economics department, and I almost never got here. I almost never made it to the Divinity School. And of course, that was my great, great loss. 

I did come often to Francis Avenue for a different kind of pilgrimage, just halfway up the block. I would turn right for the most scintillating afternoons that I can remember with Ken Galbraith, who was, of course, the famed denizen of this block, the neighbor of the Divinity School, a true moral philosopher. So I didn't lack for getting some good moral philosophy, and a wonderful joy. 

So walking here was a great memory for me also. But it is true that Francis Avenue for me meant Ken. And today, it means a chance to make up a little bit for lost time. And I'm so thrilled to do so, in part, because I feel in my own career and my own arc of work, that this visit is crucial for me. It's also thanks, in part, to one of your most wonderful alumna, Betsy Parker, who is here. Betsy, why don't you stand up just for a moment? Betsy-- 
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Betsy works closely with me on behalf of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, and earlier for UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the fight against poverty. And now, the challenge of sustainable development, which is the global commitment, a commitment not fulfilled but a commitment to make our world fairer and to make our world environmentally sustainable. And I know that there are many champions of those causes here and I want to thank you for that. 

I've learned in 35 years of economic advising around the world that economics issues are important. It's certainly possible to go badly wrong in economics. You just have to follow Washington these days, do the opposite of what's recommended, and you'll be on the right track, pretty consistently, I would say. 

But economics is not our major challenge, and that's really why I'm so joyful to be here. We are a very rich world, if measured at what we call international prices, adding up the world's output in all of the UN member states, gives an annual production, and therefore, an annual income for the world of $127 trillion. 

And even though our global population is large at 7.5 billion people, five times what it was at the start of the 20th century, and I would say, eight times what it was when this school was established in 1816, that still means, by simple division, and that's really the specialty of a PhD in economics, is long division, that still means roughly, $17,000 per person for every person on the planet. 

And that, immediately, should tell you something. That there is no fundamental reason for poverty. Poverty is an utter anachronism. It makes no sense. There is no fundamental reason for people who can't meet basic needs because there is ample opportunity to help them. There is absolutely no reason why in a world of $127 trillion output per year, we couldn't devote what is needed, roughly 1%. 
Admittedly, $1 trillion a year but just 1% in order to fix the environmental damage that we are causing by our dependency, now, on coal, oil, and gas, with the resulting consequences of global warming, with the potentially devastating effects that we court by our neglect of these basic facts. And don't be confused. I'm sure you're not-- There is no scientific debate about this, nor is there even any climate skepticism or denial in Washington. The politicians that say so are just on the take. It's pure and simple. They are on the take of the oil industry. 
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They can't see straight because of their greed, and that's why it's so important that we are here together at the Divinity School. Because at the end of the day, given the wealth, and the wealth is based on marvelous, unimaginably advanced technologies, know-how, like the kind that I've learned from my wife, Sonia Ehrlich Sachs who's here, a great medical doctor and a specialist in public health. 

We can cure diseases. We can break epidemics. We can keep children alive, and all for such a tiny fraction of what we squander for war or violence, our topic today, or on the gazillionaires who somehow think that the first $10 billion isn't enough for them. So that they have to get more and more and more, and fight for the absurd tax cuts that will soon be on the agenda. The last thing in the world this country needs is to cut the taxes. 
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Now, my field is in some ways responsible for this mess, and the fact that I couldn't figure out and I was never told by my advisors, I have to tell you. Take a walk over to the Divinity School is absolutely a real phenomenon. If you go back to the founder of modern economics, who was a great man, a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith, his first professorship was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. So there wasn't that rupture at the time between the study of an economy and the study of what to do. 

Because the study of economics is a study of means, and the study of moral philosophy and of theology is a study of ends. And a field that only specializes in means but not in ends is a field that is going to use and misuse its talents to help greedy people get greedier, to help nasty people be able to do more damage, to lose track of what it is that we are really after. 

And so economics became a field of means, a study of means, what Aristotle called technique, and it's filled with technique. And I could regale you with some very nice lessons about how to manage exchange rates or budgets and so forth. But Aristotle also talked about the fact that technique, if it's separated from wisdom, from phronesis, from the ends, from telos, is useless, even dangerous. 
And that is, unfortunately, what happened in our modern society. We really made a deep division between the Divinity School and between the economics department, and between the engineering school, and between the Kennedy School. It's not so far away, but it seems like a long walk. And unifying our understanding of means and ends is the most essential task that we have today. I'm very-- 
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I'm profoundly honored, and it causes a lot of sleepless nights, I can tell you, to serve as the special advisor of the UN Secretary General. And I've been fortunate to have that position from Kofi Annan, through Ban Ki-moon, and now with Antonio Guterres, three wonderful men committed to peace and committed to global cooperation. 

One thing about being Secretary General, I know from direct and close observation over 17 years, is that there's not a lot of intrinsic power in that position, maybe none. But every problem in the world comes to you. So it's really good for losing sleep, and I'm sleep deprived for the last 17 years, I can tell you, because it gives you a lot of worry and a lot of headaches. 

And perhaps, knowing that all of the problems we're dealing with are solvable makes it even more piercing. If we were looking at tragedies that were unavoidable, they would be tragic. But when we're looking at crimes, that we are committing wars of choice that have absolutely no sense at all. 

$6 trillion that this country has wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan for no purpose, with hundreds of thousands of people being killed, CIA operations overturning governments, trying to overthrow other governments, and knowing that what we should be doing is solving problems that are within our grasp, makes this, in my view, the moment when ethics and when our ethical concerns have to have full primacy. 

Because if we have the ethics, all else will follow. And we have wonderful, moral leadership in this world. It has sometimes a hard chance to be heard, but we're so grateful, for example, for Pope Francis. And I know many people here are working with the Vatican, what a gift for humanity in this time. 

There's no better, no better study of climate change and what to do than the encyclical Laudato Si'. Because by the way, you can teach it in advanced ecology, you can teach it in Earth system science, you can teach it, of course, in your theology classes. You can teach it in moral philosophy, and you can also teach it in political economy. Five chapters, everyone perfect. And so, we have the chance. 
And one of the things I want to close by emphasizing is, we also have something extremely rare, incredibly fragile, but worth fighting for, and that is the following. Our world agrees on precious little, you know that. And as a species, I am convinced by the studies of E.O. Wilson and others. He's my guru in human nature and in evolutionary psychology. 

I'm sure that we are primed deeply, not only to be sociable and altruistic, but also, to have a real spur to not only threaten, dislike, but even kill the other. So our human nature is a dual human nature. That's what this school, and that's what theology has taught for thousands-- what this school is taught for 200 years and what theology has taught for millennia, which is, we have a capacity to do soaring good, and we also have a capacity to do unbelievable crimes, and it's the same parts of our human nature. 

And what-- economics, by the way, just to digress, went seriously wrong. It said at some point in the 19th century, we have our utility functions, they call it. Don't ask where they come from but that's just what they are. Whereas what all of the great moral leaders of history taught is have to work hard to cultivate goodness. You're not just given goodness. You have to work at it. You have to study. You have to be mentored. You have to be trained. You have to look. 

You have to practice by example, and that's what allows for the formation of virtues that make possible a virtuous society. So everything about us as humans is fragile. Nothing should be taken for granted, and therefore, there's also no place for cynicism in this world. Cynicism is simple. To point out flaws in others is a pretty trivial task. But to work for the positive side, that is our calling. And we have a fragile opportunity. In fact, it is a necessity for us. 

Two years ago, I watched in the eyes of the ambassadors of the UN General Assembly, the shared deep worry about this planet because there is no country in the world that is excused from global climate change, from environmental threats, and from the instability that we face globally from a deeply divided world. And so the governments understand that. 

Governments of all kinds, democracies, and autocracies, and authoritarian governments, everybody is worried. That is a shared feature on this planet. Everybody is worried, and for good reason, by the way. And so the governments-- the 193 governments of the UN came together, and in a rare moment, over a course of six weeks, incidentally opened by Pope Francis on the morning of September 25, 2015, in the Hall of the General Assembly, agreed on two major commitments. 

On September 25, they agreed on the sustainable development goals, 17 objectives to make our world more decent, more safe, sustainable for future generations. Among those goals, for example, is to eradicate forced labor, and modern slavery, and end human trafficking. Among those goals is to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking, what we will talk about in just a moment. 

These are now global goals. They're not just private goals. They're not just hopes. They're not just goals of NGOs like the wonderful leadership we have here. These are now globally agreed goals. And then six weeks later, on December 12, the same 193 governments agreed on the Paris Climate Agreement, even Donald Trump. That's saying a lot. Even Donald Trump is not going to pull us out of Paris because-- 
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And if he does, mark my words, it will be a global brawl because it will be 195 other signatories. And just for your notes, that's 193 UN member states, plus newie, Cook Island, and the European Union. It's 196 signatories in all. And if we pull out, it will be 195 to 1, and it's not going to happen, and we're not going to let it happen. 

So over a course of six weeks, the world agreed on two bold shared, unanimously adopted objectives to help push us towards decency. And I'm here to say, don't worry about the economics of it. This is utterly affordable. Full cost for sustainable development, I'd put it at 3% of our annual output, to ensure that everybody has health care on the planet, everybody has quality education, everybody has safe water, everybody has sanitation, everybody has access to modern energy services, and our energy system is converted to a safe-- climate-safe, low carbon system. 

This is 3% of our annual output, no more. Don't worry about that part. Don't let them tell you, "Oh no, we can't do it because the others won't agree." Because everybody has agreed. We need, now, to get on the case of our politicians, to remind them, whether they know it or not, they work for us. They work for future generations. 

As Aristotle said and on politics, they work for the common good. They don't work for themselves, for their family, for their personal enrichment. And we need, more than ever, the ethical knowledge, the training, the leadership that this school represents to help save the world. Thank you Harvard Divinity School. Thank you for having me here. 
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SHERYL WUDUNN: Thank you very much, Jeff. And I'm just about to sit down. I just want to-- that was a real call to action, and a lot of interesting things there. And I specifically like the idea of the fact that solutions are within our grasp. You did remind me that my own roots with Harvard are across the river at that little school over there, so please forgive me. 

I'm glad some of you don't even know which school it is. I won't say. But I would like to ask Gary, now, to come up and give us a little bit of an appetizer about your book. And if you can link it to some of the issues that Jeff raised, that would be great. You could do it from there or you could do it from here. 
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GARY HAUGEN: Well, thank you, Sheryl. And Professor Sachs, thank you for that just very, very stirring, I think, provocation for us to engage the challenges of the world and to engage it from the deeper sources of virtue. I actually was quite familiar with the Harvard Divinity School as an undergraduate myself because I think I was in more desperate need of divine intervention for my academic struggles. 

I can remember very well coming over to Andover Library to try to not fail in Latin, and I succeeded, by divine intervention, I assure you. I also had a life changing course that I took here at the Divinity School as an undergrad on the role of the Christian church in the Civil Rights movement. And that course, I took in 1985 just as I was graduating, and was about to leave to go live in South Africa to work with church leaders in the struggle against the apartheid movement. 

And I remember-- perhaps, the most provocative thing that I can remember encountering as an undergrad, I encountered here at the Divinity School with a little poster that was on one of those bulletin boards that we all walked by. And it simply said this, a modest proposal that the Christians of the world stop killing each other. 

Now, I think this was, in some sense, a call to the troubles in Northern Ireland. But what I, of course, came to understand as a convinced Christian myself, as I went to South Africa, that both the perpetrators of the apartheid regime and the victims of the apartheid regime were both going to church on Sunday. And so, for an earnest seeker of faith myself, it was this struggle to figure out, what is the role of faith in these struggles, these dramatic historic struggles for justice in the world? 

Eventually, I went to law school and went to work at the Department of Justice here in the United States on-- in the Civil Rights Division on cases of police abuse and police misconduct, more than 20 years ago. And it was out of that experience, though, I was then appointed to be the director of the UN's genocide investigation in 1994, just a few weeks after the war was over. 

So my job, if you can picture this, was to go from massacre site after massacre site to gather the evidence against the leaders of the genocide. And when you're doing this as a matter of criminology, what you're trying to do is actually put together the picture of how these massacres take place. And you're actually framing a visual picture of this in your mind. 

And what I can remember so vividly, is I would picture one of those families huddled against the wall of one of those churches or stadiums or schools where the massacres were taking place. And as those machetes make their way towards that family, what was clear to me was this, was that they were not calling out for a sermon. They weren't calling out for food, or for a doctor, or for a job. They were calling out for someone to restrain the hand with the machete. And this is when the power of violence became so vivid for me. 

Since that time of working on the genocide investigation, eventually, came to form this organization called International Justice Mission, which now is about 1,000 workers around the world, serving in very poor communities, helping to serve those who are victims of violent abuse and oppression. And these, really, are four kinds of violence. It's overwhelmingly sexual violence against women and girls, it's forced labor. There are more people in slavery today than in any other time in human history. It is police abuse. And fourth, it's the violent theft of land. 

And so what I'm eager for us to engage together is when we think about this great struggle against global poverty, which Professor Sachs has been just one of the great leaders of this century in beginning to move us in a positive direction to engage, to begin to remember that not only is hunger, and disease, and homelessness, and all of these desperate conditions that picture of poverty. 
But what we must have a picture of, is the great scourge of violence that is endemic to the common poor person, and this is how I want you to picture this. Just a few months, not-- a little while ago, there was a young woman in Oregon. She was home alone in her house in a rural county and it was dark on a Saturday night. And she starts to see this man tearing his way into her house through the window. 

Now, this is terrifying for her because this man had actually assaulted her and put her in the hospital just two weeks before. And now, he's tearing his way into her house again. So she does what any one of us would do in America. She picks up the phone and calls 911, but only to find out from the 911 operator who has to explain to her that because of budget cuts in her county, there is no law enforcement available on the weekends. 

And so, you can listen to this conversation as this woman knows this man is coming towards her through the window, and there's the operator on the phone explaining to her that maybe she could come to the Sheriff's Office on Monday and perhaps get some help. And of course, when we encounter this story, it's one of just complete outrage for all of us. 

This is what we need to understand. The UN recently issued a very careful report that found the following, quote, "Most poor people in our world live outside the protection of law, period." Now, if I said that, there would be very little concrete image that would come to your mind. But what you have to know is that for the common poor person in the developing world, and that's about 2 billion poor people living off less than $3 a day, they have no law enforcement to actually protect them from violence, which has introduced this massive scourge of gender violence, forced labor, police abuse, and the theft of their land. 

And so, what I would just encourage us is that whenever we engage these topics of addressing poverty in the world, making sure that we are engaging the problems of violence, and the need for the basic services of law enforcement that we take for granted every day, that those would be available to the poor. 

But here's the last thing, is that we've engaged in, now, this struggle to try to provide the common poor with access to justice. We have found, as Professor Sachs mentioned, and as Aristotle mentioned, that technique is not enough. And yes, wisdom is necessary. But more deeply than that, what is needed is virtue. Why is this? Because violence fights back. 

And so if you are going to stand up on behalf of those who are victims of violence, this is going to be a struggle. That's going to call forth the greatest demands of what it is that we actually believe inside. And so we found that you need five things. First, you need moral clarity, the capacity to actually see right from wrong. We live in an era in which we are almost proud of moral confusion. 
And yet, one of the most interesting things about history is that while all evil at one point is confusing for contemporaries, in history, it is not. Slavery was confusing to contemporaries. Apartheid was confusing for contemporaries, any-- the Nazis were confusing in the 1930s. But from the point of view of history, there is clarity about those who responded rightly to injustice and abuse, and those who did not. So the first need is for moral clarity. Where will we find that? 

Secondly, there's a need for extravagant compassion. The capacity to extend the willingness to bear the suffering of others who are unfamiliar or far away and unlike us. In a world where we're being encouraged more and more to think of our smaller circle of need and our smaller circle of pain, what is going to be the basis for us extending extravagant compassion to those who are vulnerable to violence in our world? 

Thirdly, you need a source of persevering hope because you're going to face defeats in a long struggle for justice. The victims of abuse in our world don't need our spasms of passion. They need a long obedience in the same direction. And so, from where we'll come this place of persevering hope. And finally, you will need sacrificial courage because at the end of the day, those forces of evil and violence and abuse, they will come after those who raise a voice on behalf of those who are hurting. 

This past summer, one of our lawyers in Kenya ended up being murdered by the very police he was trying to restrain from the way they abused very common people in the slums of Nairobi. He was willing to place his body between those who were being abused and the abusers who came after them, and he did so with this fierce, fierce courage. That comes from a deep place of virtue. 

And I would just express great gratitude, Dean, and to the whole team here at the Harvard Divinity School, for that exploration, yes, of the great problems in the world, the great challenges of poverty and war, but not only from the perspective of the techniques that we need to have, and the broader wisdom that we need from history and other fields, but also from the deep virtue within, and for just the challenge and the encouragement that we might go forth as best we can to secure that, not even just for ourselves, but on behalf of others. Thank you very much. 
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SHERYL WUDUNN: Thank you, Gary. That was very, very moving. And I know you spoke about the woman from Oregon, and also about your colleague in Kenya. I wanted to add that what's very what's something hopeful for us to realize is that here in the US, although there are some 10,000 girls-- because you mentioned trafficking, teenagers-- children, basically, who are trafficked-- sex trafficked every year, runaways who are picked up by pimps, so to speak, there are solutions. 

And there are many small mom and pop organizations that are cropping up all over the world, fueled by people like yourself here, graduates of divinity schools across the country who, really, have reached out to try and solve some of these problems. And they're doing it on a very local level and it's extremely encouraging to hear. 

So I do think it's important to have that hope, and it's really encouraging to see that there are these organizations. So now, I'd like to invite Danielle to talk about some of the issues relating to violence here in the US, and what kinds of social justice these people really do get or not. 
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DANIELLE ALLEN: Thank you, Sheryl, and thank you very much, Gary, Professor Sachs, for moving and inspirational remarks, in both cases. And happy birthday, Divinity School. I've only been at Harvard for two years, but I got here faster than Professor Sachs, I can say. And I got here-- actually, the first instance not just today, but because I direct the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. 

And our core premise is precisely that means and ends thinking have to go together, and that the work of philosophers, and the work of scholars in the Divinity School, and the work of theologians, and those who are responsible for pastoral care must be connected to fields like economics and business and law and policy. And so I've been delighted to have the chance to engage colleagues from the Divinity School in work that we're doing at the Edmond J. Safra Center. 

But one of the first reasons I came over, actually, so I get to trump both of you for connection to the Divinity School, is that Emily Click, who is here at the Divinity School, guiding and mentoring people as they become teachers and leaders, was my youth group organizer when I was a kid in Southern California. 
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So I do feel that I have a personal connection to the Divinity School for which I'm very grateful. I want to build on the remarks that have come before me, to say, not only that we need to link means and ends, and to prepare ourselves with the resources of virtue for a long, hard fight, but also, that we have to think about the capacity of seeing as one that people with all kinds of responsibilities should cultivate. 

What do I mean by seeing, exactly? Before you can even know how to do the things that you think we should do, you have to have a diagnosis of the state of affairs in the world. You have to see the spread of poverty, as Professor Sachs laid out. You have to see violence. And I want to tell a personal story about how hard it is, actually, to see violence. 

I think if we can't begin by seeing, even if we do the best possible job of understanding how means and ends connect, we won't even know where to begin to engage. So this personal story is a story about my cousin, and it is a story about violence here in the US, my baby cousin, Michael. So I have a book coming out in the fall about him, it's just called Cuz, C-U-Z, means cousin. It also means, because. 

And so what was the question I had to answer? My baby cousin, somebody I grew up with, eight years younger than me, was arrested at the age of 15 in Los Angeles for an attempted carjacking, a terrible thing. It was his first arrest. The good news is that the only person who was hurt was him. His victim got his gun and shot him, and he was sentenced to prison for 13 years, and served 11 and was released on parole. 

I was the cousin on duty when he was released, so to speak. The one responsible for helping with reentry, school, job, place to live. We worked hard at this. And then three years after he was released, he was killed by somebody he met in prison. So the why questions I had to answer were, why was he killed at that final point? Why had he been in prison for so long, from 15 to the age of 26, come of age in prison. 

Why had he, in the first place, ended up there on a street corner holding a gun? He had an extended family that loved him, that extended family had resources. His own family was poor, it's true, but the extended family had resources. And we were in each other lives. We weren't separate or apart from one another. So why? So I've spent the last couple of years interviewing family members and trying to understand my cousin's story. 

And the single most powerful and disturbing thing that I acquired from trying to understand my cousin's story was the discovery of how much violence had washed through his life from beginning to end, and none of us saw it, right there, that close, none of us saw it. So for instance, his mother had been abused by her-- the father of the three children, her partner, she lived with him. They weren't married but they lived together as a marital family. 

She was abused and so she fled. She fled because of that abuse. And then she worked hard. She acquired a nursing degree. She worked her way up. She met somebody else, they got married. She didn't know, but that man abused her children and then they moved back to his hometown. And other people-- he was admired in a web of violence and vendetta, in a very rural poor part of Mississippi. 

And I won't even tell you all the things that happened, but they involved weapons, and difficulty, and people fleeing in the middle of the night for their lives. And so, off they were, again, on a journey. And then the rest of their journey involved arson at various point in times, people stalking them with guns. Really, honestly, for each of these details, one of our family members would know maybe two of them, but nobody knew everything. 

And the kids, when they came back to Southern California, even to the beautiful leafy college town where I grew up in, and I know where some of your alumni had connections, Mr. Bennison, I just spoke to at the beginning of this section, even in that leafy college town, they-- 

In some instance, his sister joined a gang out of the need for protection, OK? So this is an important point, that as we watch young people between the ages of 10 and 12 being sucked into gangs, the reason they do this is because they need protection. And this is to Gary's point, around the world where you don't have operating structures of rule of law, people turn to alternatives. 

And those who can provide that protection prey on them and take advantage of them. And that, fundamentally, is the structure that we're all watching in urban cities in this country as we watch cartels abroad connecting to gangs in this country, maintaining a practice of recruiting young people into them in order to shore up their enterprise, fighting with the state for those young people, creating conditions of violence that over and over and over again, force young people to turn to the only people nearby offering protection, the people with guns, and they're not the policemen, OK? And so that's the dynamic that entrenches patterns of violence. 

One last little detail, a broader sociological context to bring to bear here. So not many people are aware that in the middle of the 20th century, homicide clearance rates across America, including in major cities, were at about 90%. What's a homicide clearance rate? This is the rate at which the police close a homicide case. 

In Detroit, before the bankruptcy, we were down into the teens in terms of rate of clearance. In most major cities right now, Chicago, Los Angeles, were about 30%. This is incredibly significant because it does mean, even in our own cities, we're not actually protecting people from violence of the worst kind. 

The point is not that this then simply means that there's a culture of lawlessness. There's something else that happens. Economists, in fact, Rajiv Sethi at Barnard has pointed this out. Note that there's a shift in the basic social equilibrium. When you live in a context where you know that if somebody hurts you, they won't be stopped or blocked, what are you going to do? You're going to hit first harder. You develop a culture of preemptive violence. 

And there's a phase shift in terms of the rates of violence in places where the rule of law does not obtain. So that's the big sociological picture that surrounds the specific lives of young people, boys and girls who have to try to make their way and look for protection wherever they can find it, and then find it in the wrong places, and so you have an unending cycle. 

To wrap this up, so not only did my family not see the particular instances of violence and the collection of them, that just constant pattern of this, even my cousin's mother-- even my cousin's mother, Michael's mother, never saw that he'd gotten involved with gangs. We didn't see this. We didn't see this about his sister either. And again, we were with them all the time, all right? 

And why did we not see this? Because at the end of the day, the world of drugs is a world of illegality and secrecy, and the secrecy of adolescence is deepened and tightened by that fact. And so, I want to put to you the question, we've been fighting that world of secrecy, of hiding, of not seeing violence aggressively with very powerful state instruments of violence. It's not worked. Do we have any alternatives? 

Portugal has tried a different path. They've pursued a combination of legalization and decriminalization. And one of the virtues is that makes the problem of drugs and the violence that surrounds that visible, and people put their hands up for help. I don't know if that's the solution, but the message that I want to leave is simply, what does it take for us to see the violence that plagues the world of the poor? 
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SHERYL WUDUNN: Thank you, Danielle. Thank you for-- we're going to try using our microphones here from the stage, so please let us know if you can hear us. So I know we only have a few more minutes to actually discuss among ourselves. And I do want to remind you that Danielle, your story was very moving. 

But again, I really think that there are solutions now that are being propagated throughout the country so that there is hope, because I really have heard of organizations like Cure Violence, for instance, that operates in Chicago, that really tries to use an epidemiological approach to stop violence in its tracks, the way you stop an infectious disease. And it's actually run, believe it or not, by a doctor because he was an epidemiologist and he saw that violence spreads the way a disease spreads. 

So if you can use medical approaches, then he thinks that he could help with violence, and he actually has in the neighborhoods that he's worked in, reduce violence by anywhere from 10% to 26%. It's very interesting. So there are methods, and we have become a much less violent society. Just think back to the days of Alexander the Great when it was a great achievement to kill your first man at 12. We do not have those goals anymore, thankfully. 

But unfortunately, there is an underside of our country as well, and we do still have quite a bit of violence. And if you get sucked into those worlds, then it is hell. It is the same as hell. So my first question to the panel is, given that even here in the US we have not yet been able to solve the problem completely of violence, how can we even begin to address overseas? What can we do both here and abroad to actually further address these problems of violence? 

GARY HAUGEN: Well, I would like to take off on that theme of hope. First of all, in regard to violence, Steven Pinker here at Harvard has written a fabulous book called The Better Angels of Our Nature, which does look at the big scope of history, and show that there is so much less violence than there has ever been in the scope of human history. 

It can feel like we live in an extremely violent era, but if you compare this to other eras of human history, there's a very, very positive trend. The negative trend is that we are dividing into two separate worlds, those who can afford to be safe and those who are poor and are not. But here's what I also want to point out as to instances of hope. 

In the Philippines, we were able to do a project with the Gates Foundation to address the problem of child sex trafficking. And we started in one city of Cebu, the second largest city in that country, which had a terrible problem of child sex trafficking. And by helping a local team of advocates turn around local law enforcement, so it actually started to enforce those laws, the goal of the project over five years was to show a 20% reduction in the sex trafficking of children. 

When the auditors came back and looked at the progress, they actually found a 79% reduction in child sex trafficking in that city in just a five-year period of time. That has now been replicated in the capital city of Manila, and in the third city of Pampanga, which is the other big heart of child sex trafficking in that city-- in that country, and we have seen reductions now over a period of four to six years of 75% and 86%. 

So I would just like to reaffirm the sense of hope. That if we can see we actually do have the capacities to bring to bear a strengthening of that own community struggle for basic justice, they can see transformation so they can actually have a reasonable amount of peace and stability to build lives that allow them to escape poverty. 

SHERYL WUDUNN: So Jeff, I want to call on you because what I also saw very similar to what Gary, you've mentioned, is that in many ways, some of the violence is-- especially when it's related to trafficking-- sex trafficking, also has to do with economic incentives. So when we were in Cambodia, my husband had been reporting on this brothel. And so he would repeatedly go to the brothel as a reporter, of course, and he would meet with this brothel owner. 

And over the years, he would come to know how her business was doing. And so, at the same time, the State Department has this thing called the TIP report, the trafficking in persons report, which, basically, allows the State Department to threaten sanctions against a country that does not make progress against trafficking. 

So Cambodia happened to be on the watch list. And so, the local authorities were really trying to improve their record on trafficking. And what that meant was that the local police authorities were demanding higher bribes in order to turn their eyes-- a blind eye to all the trafficking that was going on. 

And so this a local brothel owner was complaining and she had explained the last time that we went to see her. She said, "Well, the bride price got so expensive that I really just had to shut down my brothel and open a grocery store." So, an economic incentive, really, turned things around. So what can you see? I mean, is that something that can be scaled? 

JEFFREY SACHS: I'll think about that in the next grocery store I go into. I want to come back to the US, just for a moment. We're the most unequal of all of the high income countries. And inequality is associated with not only poverty, but with the violence that has been talked about, and with repression. 

So we are the society-- the only high income society that locks up our young people, especially people of color. And we've deliberately created, over the past 40 years, a gulag in our country. It is a kind of slave labor, actually, because not only did we lock up millions and millions of young African-Americans for crimes that should not even be crimes, they're nothing, or completely trumped up charges. 
But then, we privatize the prisons and we gave over the labor of these workers, basically, as forced labor, within our own society. So it's shocking. This is something we don't see because we don't see inside what's happening. So we ought to establish a goal in this country of radical deincarceration. With the numbers-- 
[APPLAUSE]

Our prison rates are 10 times the prison rates of Northern Europe. It's an absolute disgrace. We had a panel with the police commissioner of New York a couple of weeks ago in a public forum that I hosted. And what was very clear, the African-American community was not too happy with the commissioner. 

In part, because one particular offense, arrest for lighting up a joint, marijuana, is the entry point for hundreds of thousands of police interventions, for locking kids up, and for a massive amount of the abuse, and the search, and the violent interactions between-- or the terrifying interactions that take place between the police and the community. 

So first, when it comes to the drug issue, which is complicated, I have no doubt that this decriminalizing marijuana period from the sake of keeping our kids out of jail, this is unbelievable that we do this. And getting the police to work on other things than this, because this is really a major entry point for violence and abuse. So that's an easy starting point. 

Now, I want to turn the question back though, to our experts on this. At the UN, my job, especially because I'm an economist, all we really know is long division, but I showed off earlier. But my job is to listen to experts tell me what to do, and then to say, there's a way to do it. So the malariologist say, "Here's how malaria can be controlled." Or the AIDS doc say, "Here's what we can do about the AIDS epidemics." 

And then I use long division to say, "That's not very expensive after all." So I want to ask both Danielle and Gary, operationally, in these communities, what would you recommend from a really programmatic way that I could say, "Here is something that could get scaled up." Leave aside the money issue, how to do it for the moment, but-- and leave aside the high idealism which is part of it, of governments are going to suddenly be law enforcing and so forth. 

So imagine it's violence, imagine the poverty continues, imagine that you're there as you are in Cebu or in some other place, if you had more resources, not for a demo project but for a scale up, what exactly would you recommend? What we're recommending on public health, for example, is a million health workers, low cost in the communities. Could there be community justice workers? Is there a way to train people from the communities and that won't get them killed? So that's my question for both of you. 

GARY HAUGEN: Yeah. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: So maybe I'll jump in first, and then-- 
GARY HAUGEN: Please do. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: You know more so I'll be brief. 
GARY HAUGEN: Yeah, yeah. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: But I would point to two things. I mean, the first is actually not-- it's not a financial one at all, it's political. And so that's to the-- I mean, to the issue you raised. These things are doable, or Sheryl raised, these things are doable. Why can't we do them? Very often, the answer is politics and the complexity of that. 

So the UN has been trying to support conversations on changes to drug control policy and to bring in the rest of the world, not just the US, Central America and South America is fully supportive at this point, of a change to a combination of legalization, decriminalization for good reason. 

The $100 billion hunger for drugs in this country is destroying Central America. We have refugees on our border because of our illicit desires, which we don't speak about publicly or take responsibility for. What's the blockage? Russia on the one hand, and now, the US. Let us say Putin has been the strongest advocate of maintaining the status quo of drug policy, and now, Donald Trump is joining him in a similar orientation. So there's a big political conundrum for what to do, though the UN, to its credit, has been trying on that point. 
If I were going to point to a second thing, I don't know how I would design a program, but I would focus very specifically on the transition of young people between the ages of 8 or so, and 12, into employment structures of some kind, and in a structure that's about coordinated care. So, how can you make visible what the school teacher knows, what the parent knows, what the person at the grocery store who sees the kids come by after school knows? We actually know what's happening to young people. It's just that we don't put the pieces together. So how can we make those puzzles fully visible? 

GARY HAUGEN: I think, Professor, what I would point to is that 20 years ago, I think we did not know how you could turn a broken brutal criminal justice system in the developing world into one that actually protected the common poor person from crime. We didn't know how to do that. There are now enough experiments that have demonstrated that if you are committed to about a 10 to 12-year timeline, there are a half a billion poor people now living in countries which are not failed states. 

There is not a war going on, but they live in places where they have a broken criminal justice system in which the colonial model of policing, court systems, and prosecution systems have never been re-engineered to actually protect the common poor. And if you go through a three-step process of doing casework with that system to diagnose, as you said, why is this broken so you can see, you build trust with that system to then work with the experts and champions within it. 

Not bringing from the outside the expertise or the power to change, but it must be locally owned. You walk through that phase of then transforming those critical ways that are keeping that law enforcement from actually being delivered, and then hang on to the transformation in a third phase that allows it to run on its own. 

We now have the evidence that makes it clear that there are half a billion poor people who right now would have access to transformable systems, another half billion don't, but a half billion do. And if we were just to engage with the resources and the long haul, there could be a half billion poor people who, right now, live in lawless chaos, who could know-- who could a reasonable peace and functioning community. 

SHERYL WUDUNN: So I would just like to add that-- two things. One is that there is something called Youth Villages, which is a very interesting organization that really tries to capture youth before they go astray. And they use a lot of their own relatives, the extended family, to try and reach out and become, in the same way as what you were to your cousin, but they do it in a more systematic way. And they provide support, and training, and all that, but it's hard to scale and again, they're struggling with funds and stuff like that. 
The other thing that I would suggest is-- and I know this is a long term solution, but I think that one has to get-- a society at large has to get started on that. And I think early childhood education is extremely important. We think, oh my gosh, that's a long thing. It takes so long to do. But it is really the foundation of building a really strong society, because you have to start young. 

Our interventions often don't work so well because we start them too late. When someone's brain is already formed, it's really-- when they're an adult, it's just too late in many ways. You can change them but it takes more money, more resources, more time, and more sophisticated techniques. 

If you can actually reach kids before-- as their brain is forming, to get them onto a right path, to teach the parents also how to raise their kids in a way to get them on the right path, it's not 100% surefire that's going to work, but the odds are greater that the kids are going to survive in a better environment. So I do think early childhood education is one model. 

I also would like to ask, what other countries have you seen as role models for how they have changed and transformed the social justice system to the benefit? Now, I would throw out China as one. It's still a work in progress. It has improved the rule of law, but it is still awful. And certainly, on criminal justice, the poor people there get ripped off just as much as the poor people here. But I do wonder, what other countries have you seen that have done it well? 

GARY HAUGEN: Well, fascinating. I'd love to go back to Cambodia with Nick to see what's happened in Cambodia. 13 years ago, we began our work in Cambodia. I was taken to the back room of one of those brothels in after about-- I'd been in the city about 15 minutes, and I was taken to the back room of a brothel and presented with a dozen kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years of age who were being sold to foreign pedophiles and sex tourists. 

We began a program over 13-year period of time, of working cases with local law enforcement, finding out what was broken and corrupt, working with local heroes to actually prosecute and throw out the leaders within the police department who were making the money off of those bribes. 13 years later, experts came and did a review of what has happened to child sex trafficking in Cambodia, and they have seen an 80% reduction from what that was 13 years ago. 

So it is a story about international pressure was important for getting the government to prioritize it. There were actually heroes within the system who needed to be empowered and instead of being marginalized, and they led the fight. And what the study showed was that they, long after the International Justice Mission project had been unbolted from the project, three years later, they were still sustaining excellent performance in, actually, being able to protect the poor from these kinds of abuses. 

So sometimes, in these unlikely places, one can actually see great signs of hope. And I would have us point to not to the places of the world, necessarily, that are failed states and are places that are the most impossible places to try to carry out these transformations, those do need attention and a set of interventions for-- that are appropriate to them, but there are hundreds of millions of those who are poor who are living in reasonably stable contexts where these criminal justice systems are actually ripe for reform, that will be transformative for the common poor. 

JEFFREY SACHS: One of the things that, really, could help, maybe it's been done. Your book does an absolutely wonderful job of reporting, diagnosing, explaining. We need, if I may say, to put this on a documented, globally transparent, known basis as the approach to push. 
GARY HAUGEN: Yeah. 
JEFFREY SACHS: And there's an advantage now. I read you some of those targets from these agreed goals. It's interesting, and you might doubt it, but once the governments have agreed to these targets, even though that's just agreement in rhetoric, you can still hold in their face what they've agreed to if you can say, "This is what can do it, and there is credibility and consensus around that." 
And I can give examples where, especially in the area of public health, we've used that approach many times. Because in the Millennium Development Goals, there were promises about what to do with malaria, what to do about AIDS. I use that to say, "We need a Global Fund and here's what the Global Fund can do, A, B, C, D, E, because these are the best practices. 
And a wonderful editor of a major journal, The Lancet, which is one of the premier public health journals, published every six months or so, a definitive study, best practices in malaria control, best practices in AIDS treatment, best practices in maternal survival. So what I would suggest to you, maybe it's done and I just need to be pointed to it. But maybe you could do it. I'd help you to do it. 
GARY HAUGEN: Yes. 
JEFFREY SACHS: Which is, get the top people in your field. You're a leader in this. You're a pioneer in this. Bring together a group from around the world that has done it. And there-- there's Nobel laureates and others you can bring into this. And then in a systematic documented way, say with a consensus, "These are the practical approaches." 
And then turn back to me and I go to the Secretary General, it's not a magic solution, but the argument then is, fund this. And that-- because in the end, you will get stymied. Of course, the Gates will do a trial and it's hugely successful, but then what? And so this, I think, what you're saying is extremely powerful, but I would use the Sustainable Development Goals as your hook right now. Say, "Do you know you agreed to do exactly this? And here are five ways to make it done, and we'll take the case global for you." 
GARY HAUGEN: Well, I would just-- I would love to piggyback on that. 
[APPLAUSE] 
And just note the date, it's April 28, 2017, when the world started to be transformed to give protection to the poor and it started here at Harvard Divinity School in a discussion. Because here is the point. When I was-- just before I came to Harvard in 1981, 52% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. In 2015, now, it is below 10%, from 52% of the world's living in extreme poverty to less than 10%. That's called progress. That's called forward movement. 

One of the important parts of that was the Millennium Development Goals, which got us to 2015, but the Millennium Development Goals left out the problem of violence. Now, the Sustainable Development Goals have embedded this fight against violence as part of that. Goals well set, now a program well developed, and then, the resources to fund it. I'm going to mark this date April 28, 2017. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: Here, here. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: OK, so now, we'd like to open it to the audience for Q&A. And please, we're short on time so if you can be brief in your question, that would be great. So first question in the back. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: There's a mic over here. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: Yeah, can you-- 
GARY HAUGEN: Do you care for some? 
SHERYL WUDUNN: She's back there. 
SPEAKER: All your mics work. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: OK. 
SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: OK. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: But there's question in the back. 
AUDIENCE: Right here. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: Oh, I'm sorry. She also is back there. I'm sorry, go ahead. 
AUDIENCE: OK. Hi. Jeffrey, I think you'll understand this better-- maybe better than the other people here. But you talked about-- you talked about stopping your walk on this street before you got to the Divinity School. I say the same thing about addressing the death penalty. People do not speak about it. 

We talk about climate change, we talk about sex trafficking. But the death penalty, how it really works, how we've moved from the plantation system to the prison system, how so many members of murder victims' families do not want the offender to be put to death. There is so much of what goes on-- 

SHERYL WUDUNN: Can you please just state your question because we are short on time. Thank you. 
AUDIENCE: I'm saying, are you up there willing to speak loudly and often about how the death penalty is practiced in this country? 
SHERYL WUDUNN: Thank you. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: Well, I could commend a new book to you by Carol Steiker in the law school. It's just out although I'm not going to be able to remember the title, I'm embarrassed to say. But it is a history of the death penalty in America, and it's an important book to read. So we are, at the moment, seeing, obviously, what looks like a resurgence of use. We had the terrible executions on Monday. 
But it looks-- I mean, in her account, which I find compelling, there's good reason to think that we're very close to seeing the end of the death penalty in America. Public opinion has shifted profoundly. You're right that we do need to keep articulating that view. One can't just expect it to happen without saying out loud that this is wrong, but go get Carol Steiker's book, I encourage you, and give it to everybody you know. 
AUDIENCE: I was the director of Mass Citizens Against the Death Penalty many, many years. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: Thank you very much. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: Thank you. 
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] tell you that it's harder than you think, [INAUDIBLE]. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: Thank you so much for your question. 
AUDIENCE: Yeah, as an urban pastor surrounded by drug addiction and sex trafficking and so forth, I really appreciated your comments about decriminalization. And I thought, perhaps, we should just decriminalize everything, including the really hard drugs, but not promote them, including marijuana, alcohol. If we treated it more like tobacco, where it's not illegal, not criminalized, but not promoted, to me, that would be a middle ground. 
DANIELLE ALLEN: So as Professor Sachs said, drug policy is extremely complicated. Addiction is an incredibly challenging and terrible thing. There's no question that to suggest legalization for some drugs and decriminalization for others is by no means to suggest giving up on drug control. The question is, really, whether or not you can shift from a criminal justice paradigm from drug-- for drug control to a public health paradigm. 

That people need treatment around addiction, you need really intense work around prevention. Just to be clear, the distinction between legalization and decriminalization is that legalization is, it's just legal, OK? You can sell it legally, et cetera, et cetera. Decriminalization means you take things that are felonies, for example, possession of cocaine, and you turn that into a misdemeanor or an administrative violation of some sort. 

So you take the worst of the felonious element out of it, but you continue to target and track and block high level drug traffickers. But you switch the criminal justice work from the low level participants to the high level folks, and you work really hard on prevention and rehabilitation for users. 

So there is no easy solution to this. You can't wave a magic wand and get rid of the problem of drugs, nor can you get rid of a black market completely. But the question is really, what do you do? And this is for me, and a question to economists. What do you do with really big black markets? Because they're just bad for society and there's no way around that. But we find it very hard to talk about. 
JEFFREY SACHS: Well, one thing I can tell you. I had a very distressing and rather alarming conversation with the leadership of the National Institutes of Health about addiction, not about marijuana but about the really addictive drugs. And they said there is no cure, now that almost all of the programs do not really work. They were terrified about our opioid epidemic, about how absolutely alarming and weak their tools are. 

And I will not call myself an expert or give any advice on it, except to tell you, it was very unsettling because these were the leaders of our scientific studies and they were saying there's no easy answers here. Not that they were calling for a particular approach or not, they were just saying how hard this is on the human level, that we do not have tools for rehabilitation from addiction that are, what they would consider, effective. And I don't want to be-- I don't want to misquote them, except to say it's alarming. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: I also-- 
JEFFREY SACHS: Quite clear that the criminalization approach is hopelessly wrong for most of what we're doing. It has nothing to do with the problem, but how to handle this from a societal point of view is a major issue. But let me make one point, if I could, about American society. We have a grotesque tolerance for inequality. 

That has been true of our society, from the first days, and the first slaves that were brought, and the first genocides against Native Americans. So this is a culture and a society that has a blindness to justice for its entire existence, actually. Let's be clear about that. 
[APPLAUSE] 
And there are heroes that have fought against this and opened the eyes of people as well. We have more inequality in our country than at any time in our modern history. We know that absolutely clearly going back to the beginning of the 19th century now-- I'm sorry, beginning of the 20th century, excuse me. And everything that Donald Trump says is only to exacerbate that because he's surrounded by greedy billionaires that have no business being anywhere near our politics. And that's the truth. But the point-- but the point-- 
[APPLAUSE] 
The point I want to make is the following. This ends up showing up as violence. This ends up showing up as incarceration. This ends up showing up as failed schools. This ends up showing up in courts where defendants in America can't afford lawyers, period. We had Ralph Gants, our classmate from class of '76 at our 40th reunion earlier this year. He's the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, a great classmate and friend, by the way, and a wonderful justice. 

And he said, "Massachusetts courts, there's-- there are no lawyers for poor people in this state because when they're getting eviction notices and so forth, nobody can afford lawyers among-- even in Massachusetts." So the point I'm making is that, when we look to what's wrong in the health system, when we look to what's wrong in the schools, we blame the teachers, or we blame this, or we blame that. 

We are seeing the symptoms of grotesque inequality that has no place in a civilized high income world and high income country like ours. We are so rich. And within my neighborhood and Sheryl's neighborhood, there are more than 40 billionaires, and New York's booming at the top. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: Yeah. 
JEFFREY SACHS: So this is our problem, because we'll never solve these problems until we address the fundamental inequalities in society. 
SHERYL WUDUNN: No, I do think that there are large issues with inequality. I just like to make two comments and then go to our last question. So one is that, sometimes, these issues are very complicated. And I just want to point you to some of the research done by Angus Deaton and Anne Case at Princeton, which showed that they looked at mortality rates and most of them are declining for all segments of society, except for middle aged whites. 

And so in fact, in-- depending upon who you look at for the statistics, it might even be increasing for middle aged white women, and stabilizing, or possibly increasing for middle aged white men. And the reasons, they're called deaths of despair. So they are opium-- basically, drug overdoses, alcohol overdoses, and suicides. So we do-- this is really showing up in the statistics. 

The second thing I just want to mention is that these are so complicated issues, and I understand the comments about decriminalization and legalization. In sex trafficking, it is really complicated. So if you look at what Amsterdam did versus what Sweden did, and Amsterdam, they legalized it. They decriminalized it too. And so what happened was, everyone was like, "This is great because now people can openly find out, test women for HIV. And we can distribute condoms." 

What happened was there was an-- people like doing things in secret. They like to do things that are illegal, so to speak. there's this behavior, this instinct to want to do something that isn't so above board. They started looking for the younger girls. They needed younger girls to actually have sex with. So now, you've got this underage, underbelly society which is illegal, that has developed. 
Whereas Sweden, when they actually decided, no, this was not going to be legal. We are going to persecute the Johns. Sorry to use that name, it really shouldn't be called the Johns but the people who are demanding the sex, they actually really clamped down on those people, and that seems to be a little bit more effective. Nothing is perfect, but there are other ways and it's a very complicated issue. So I want to go to our last questioner over there. Thank you very much. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Professor Sachs, and you all. Time being sought, Professor Sachs, I would like to address the question of creativity and beauty. Now, in our engagement with eradication of poverty and transformation of poverty, are we continuing the approach of war on poverty or the challenge is to learn with people who are labeled as poor? 

It is in this context, unless we try to learn with people the beauty of living in a poor way, not romanticizing beauty, it is in that context we need to learn to practice an art of voluntary poverty. Pope Francis and Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Junior, and Mother Teresa. So I just want to bring the issue of aesthetics of poverty, not just a target for elimination, but a challenge for all of us to embody a life which is poor and simple. 

SHERYL WUDUNN: And-- go ahead. 
JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I think that there are-- I think that there are two senses, and Pope Francis talks about a church of the poor-- a poor church, he calls it, because he looks for the beauty and the human dignity everywhere. And of course, he lives the-- he lives Matthew 25, that he who feeds the least among the feeds me. 

And so, the virtues of tending to poverty, the virtues of living modestly, the virtues of addressing human dignity, wherever it is, is of course, the virtues that we're talking about. But there's another side of poverty. Poverty kills. Poverty mangles. Poverty is painful. There is nothing romantic about poverty as it is. 

Not only the horrific examples that Garry writes about in his book, and the tragedy that Danielle told us about, but the suffering of hunger, the suffering of disease that can't be cured. I've worked for 35 years in poor countries. I want to end material poverty. I don't want to celebrate it. 

I want to bring an end to material poverty because it is pain and people suffer. And we should not ever neglect that fact. And even Mother Teresa, I must say with all the wonderful decency, there's also a question of treatment. And could people have been treated more? And should that be also what is needed? 

There's a debate about that I'm hardly an expert on, specifically, about her, but there are claims that she tended to the poor, but didn't necessarily help with the treatments as much as was possible. Let's just be aware of that. I'm married to a medical doctor. I believe in curing disease. I've watched it I've watched Sonia save lives. That, I think, is what we should be doing. And I can tell you, poverty literally kills. 

And just to leave you with a number. In 1990, 12.5 million children under the age of five died that year, almost all from preventable and treatable causes like diarrhea, or absence of a vaccine, or childbirth that was not safe and attended, and so on. Because of the progress in fighting poverty, that number fell sharply. But in 2015, the most recent year of data, 5.9 million children under the age of five still are dying, basically, of poverty. 

And almost all of those deaths could be ended and ended now with the technologies that we have, with the know-how that we have. And I've spent a long time on my favorite activity, long division, to calculate that this is 0.1 of 1% of the income of the rich world is the financing gap to save more than 5 million children per year. So this is why we're really talking about a moral problem, not an economic problem. 

SHERYL WUDUNN: So I just want to conclude with the message that trend is up because it went from 13 million to 5, so we are on a positive trend, and you can be a part of that. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
[APPLAUSE]

DANIELLE ALLEN: Nice to meet you. 
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