Fareed Zakaria Commencement address
Thank you so much President Faust, Fellows of the Corporation,
Overseers, Ladies and Gentlemen, and graduates.
To the graduates in particular, I have to tell you, you'ʹre way ahead of
me already. I never made it to my commencement, either from
College or graduate school. I went to college south of here, in a small
town called New Haven, Connecticut, and well, I celebrated a bit the
night before the ceremony. The honest truth is, I slept through much
of my Commencement. Then, after I had finally made in to Harvard
for graduate school, I took a job before I had finished my Ph. D. and
wrote the final chapters while working in New York. I couldn’t get
away from work for Commencement, and I got my degree in the
mail. So, 19 years later, it is a great honor to receive, in person, a
Harvard degree.
Harvard was, for me, a revelation. Contrary to the conventional
wisdom on this campus, it is possible to receive a fine education at
Yale, and I did. But Harvard’s great graduate programs have an
ambition, energy, and range that, for me, made it a dazzling, electric
experience. Getting a Ph. D. involves many hours of grueling work
but, if you do it right, also many hours of goofing off with friends,
acquiring new hobbies and interests, and working your way through
the great resources here – from the libraries to cafes. I fully availed
myself of these opportunities and the time spent not working (in a
formal sense) was as valuable as the hours in seminar rooms. I learnt
from students, faculty, and visitors. Harvard is really where I learnt
to think and I owe this university a deep debt of gratitude, as most of
you do as well – something the University will remind you of from
time to time.
I have always been wary of making Commencement speeches
because I don’t think of myself as old enough to have any real
wisdom to impart on such an august occasion. I’d like to think I’m
still vaguely post-‐‑graduate. But there’s nothing like having kids to
remind me of how deeply uncool I am, so I accept this task, with
some trepidation.
The best commencement speech I ever read was the humorist Art
Buchwald. He was brief, saying simply, "ʺRemember, we are leaving
you a perfect world. Don'ʹt screw it up."ʺ
You are not going to hear that message much these days. Instead,
you’re likely to hear that we are living through grim economic times,
that the graduates are entering the slowest recovery since the Great
Depression. The worries are not just economic. Ever since 9/11 we
have lived in an age of terror and our lives remain altered by the
fears of future attacks and a future of new threats and dangers. Then
there are larger concerns that you hear about – the earth is warming,
we’re running out of water and other vital resources, we have a
billion people on the globe trapped in terrible poverty.
So, I want to sketch out for you, perhaps with a little bit of historical
context, the world as I see it.
The world we live in is, first of all, at peace -‐‑-‐‑ profoundly at peace.
The richest counties of the world are not in geopolitical competition
with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in
arms races or “cold wars.” This is a historical rarity. You would have
to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power
peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or
hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous
times, but here is the data. The number of people who have died as a
result of war, civil war and yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this
decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five
decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is of course down 99
percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Steven
Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human
history and he must be right because he is a Harvard professor.
The political stability we have experienced has allowed the creation
of a single global economic system in which countries around the
world are participating and flourishing. In 1980, the number of
countries that were growing at 4% a year – robust growth – was
around 60. By 2007 it had doubled. Even now, after the financial
crisis, that number is more than 80. Even in the current period of
slow growth, keep in mind that that the global economy as a whole
will grow 10-‐‑20 percent faster this decade than it did a decade ago, 60
percent faster than it did two decades ago and five times as fast as it
did 3 decades ago.
The result: the United Nations estimates that poverty has been
reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years.
And much of that reduction has taken place in the last 20 years. The
average Chinese person is ten times richer than he or she was 50
years ago – and lives for 25 years longer. Life expectancy across the
world has risen dramatically. We gain five hours of life expectancy
every day – without even exercising! A third of all the babies born in
the developed world this year will live to be a hundred.
All this is because of rising standards of living, hygiene, and of
course, medicine. Atul Gawande, a Harvard professor who is also a
practicing surgeon, and who also writes about medicine for The New
Yorker, writes about a 19th century operation in which the surgeon
was trying to amputate his patient'ʹs leg. He succeeded – at that -‐‑-‐‑ but
accidentally amputated his assistant'ʹs finger as well. Both died of
sepsis and an onlooker died of shock. It is the only known medical
procedure to have a 300 percent fatality rate. We’ve come a long way.
To understand the astonishing age of progress we are living in you
just look at the cell phones in your pockets. (Many of you have them
out and were already looking at them. Don'ʹt think I can'ʹt see you.)
Your cell phones have more computing power than the Apollo space
capsule. That capsule couldn'ʹt even Tweet! So just imagine the
opportunities you that lie ahead. Moore'ʹs Law – that computing
power doubles every 18 months while costs half -‐‑-‐‑ may be slowing
down in the world of computers but it is accelerating in other fields.
The human genome is being sequenced at a pace faster than Moore'ʹs
Law. A “Third Industrial Revolution” involving material science and
the customization of manufacturing, is yet in its infancy. And all
these fields are beginning to intersect and produce new opportunities
that we cannot really foresee.
The good news goes on. Look at the number of college graduates
globally -‐‑-‐‑ it has risen fourfold in the last four decades for men, but it
has risen sevenfold for women. I believe that the empowerment of
women, whether in a village in Africa or a boardroom in America, is
good for the world. If you are wondering whether women are in fact
smarter than men, the evidence now is overwhelming: yes. My
favorite example of this is a study done over the last 25 years in
which it found that female representatives in the House of Congress
were able to bring back $49 million more in federal grants than their
male counterparts. So it turns out women are better than men even at
pork barrel spending. We can look forward to a world enriched and
ennobled by women’s voices.
Now you might listen to me and say 'ʹThis is all wonderful for the
world at large but what does this mean for America?'ʹ Well, for
America and for most places, peace and broader prosperity – “the
rise of the rest” -‐‑-‐‑ means more opportunities. I remind you that this is
a country that still has the largest and most dynamic economy in the
world, that dominates the age of technology, that hosts hundreds of
the world’s greatest companies, that houses its largest, deepest
capital markets, and that has almost all of the world’s greatest
universities. There is no equivalent of Harvard in China or India, nor
will there be one for decades, perhaps longer.
The United States is also a vital society. It is the only county in the
industrialized world that is demographically vibrant. We add 3
million people to the country every year. That itself is a powerful life
force and it is made stronger by the fact that so many of these people
are immigrants. They – I should say we -‐‑-‐‑ come to this country with
aspirations, with hunger, with drive, with determination, and with a
fierce love for America. By 2050, America will have a better
demographic profile than China. This country has its problems but I
would rather have America’s problems than most any other place in
the world.
When I tell you that we live in an age of progress I am not urging
complacency -‐‑-‐‑ far from it. We have had daunting challenges over the
last 100 years -‐‑-‐‑ a Depression, two World Wars, a Cold War, 9/11, and
global economic crisis. But we have overcome them by our response.
Human action and human achievement has managed to tackle
terrible problems.
We forget our successes. In 2009 the H1N1 virus broke out in Mexico.
Now if you looked back at the trajectory of these kinds of viruses, it is
quite conceivable this one would have spread like the Asian flu in
1957 or 1968, in which 4 million people died. But this time, the
Mexican health authorities identified the problem early, shared the
information with the WHO, learned best practices fast, tracked down
where the outbreak began, quarantined people, and vaccinated
others. The country went on a full-‐‑scale alert, banning any large
gatherings. In a Catholic country you couldn’t go to church for three
Sundays. Perhaps more importantly, you couldn’t go to soccer
matches either. The result was that the virus was contained, to the
point where three months later, people wondered what the big fuss
was and asked if we had all overreact. We didn'ʹt overreact; we
reacted, we responded, and we solved the problem.
There are other examples.
In the 12 months following the economic
peak in 2008, industrial production fell by as much as it did in the
first year of the Depression. Equity prices and global trade fell more.
Yet this time no Great Depression followed. Why? Because of the
coordinated actions of governments around the world. 9/11 did not
usher in an age of terrorism, with Al Qaeda going from strength to
strength. Why? Because countries cooperated in fighting them and
other terror groups, with considerable success. When we can come
together, when we cooperate, when we put aside petty differences,
the results are astounding.
So, when we look at the problems we face -‐‑-‐‑ economic crises,
terrorism, climate change, resource scarcity – keep in mind that these
problems are real but also that the human reaction and response to
them will also real. We can more easily map out the big problem than
the thousands of individual actions governments, firms,
organizations, and people will take that will constitute the solution.
In a sense, I’m betting on the graduates in this great audience. I
believe that your actions will have consequences. Your efforts will
make a difference.
And turning to the graduates, I know I am expected to provide some
advice at a Commencement. Should you go into nanotechnology or
bioengineering? What are the industries of the future? Honestly, I
have no idea. But one thing I do know is that human beings will
reward and honor those talents of heart and mind they have always
honored for thousands of years -‐‑-‐‑ intelligence, hard work, discipline,
courage, loyalty and, perhaps above all, love and a generosity of
spirit. Those are the qualities that, at the end of the day, make you
live a great life, one that is rewarded by the outside world, and a
good life, one that is rewarded only by those who know you best.
These are the virtues that people honor, that they built statues for
5,000 years ago. Well, nobody builds statues any more, they build
weird modernist sculptures with strange pieces of metal falling off of
them, but you get my idea. Trust yourself; you know what you
should do. You know the kind of life you should live. You don'ʹt need
an ethics course to know what you shouldn'ʹt do. Just trust in your
instincts, be true to them and you will make for yourself a great and a
good life – and in doing so, you will change the world.
I said that at my age I don’t feel competent to give you much advice,
but I will give you one last piece of wisdom that comes with age. For
all of you who are graduating students or really anyone who is still
young, trust me, you cannot possibly understand the love that your
parents have for you until you have children of your own. Once you
have your own kids, their strange behavior will suddenly make
sense. But don’t wait that long. On this day of all days, give them a
hug and tell them that you love them.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen, and to the graduates of Harvard
University’s Class of 2012, Godspeed.