COMMENTATOR (COMM.): Previously on Life...
ROBERT REICH: When you are in your own little exclusive communities of prosperity with good schools, good recreational facilities - and perhaps a gated wall around you - it's easy to forget that there are so many people who are not nearly as comfortable.
COMM: This year there are six billion people sharing the planet Earth. In Life we've told some of their stories. In this last of the current series, we look at back at what they've told us and forward to some practical solutions and to some visions of the future. A health clinic in Uganda where we met young victims of malaria - a disease that kills almost a million people a year. The clinic does have pills for malaria. But it doesn't have a vaccine. No vaccine for malaria has yet been discovered. The fear is drug companies aren't trying hard enough to find one because they think the poor countries most affected by malaria wouldn't be able to afford it. But there are ideas that could help.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS, Director, Centre for Int'l Development, Harvard University: One basic approach which I am very much in favour of is for the rich countries, for example, to make very clear and credible that if the private sector anywhere - biotech firms or major pharmaceuticals - create a malaria vaccine there would be a large amount of money available to actually buy it up at a reasonable price and distribute it, usually for free, to the very poorest people. So I want the rich countries to make a commitment well in advance, because it may take ten years to get a vaccine. But to say, "Here's the prize - here's the market prize! Maybe it's two and a half or three billion dollars that we'll pledge today! And when a company comes with an effective vaccine, they're gonna make a lot of money. No - the normal market isn't there because the people that need your product are too poor. But we'll provide the market." And by making that kind of advance commitment you could stimulate a tremendous amount of scientific effort.
COMM: In South Africa we joined the Phelophepa train which takes volunteer doctors to visit some of the country's poorest and remote communities. If you have malaria or any other disease it's perhaps your only chance of seeing a doctor - or of seeing at all. In Bangladesh we found an even more radical initiative - doctors tackling not just illness, but the conditions that cause it. Doctors have built workshops to create jobs for local women who now have the money to afford drugs and feed their families. It involves a revolution in the way doctors see their profession.
FRED SAI Professor of Community Health, University of Ghana: I think the health professionals, by and large, are doing a great job of work in many countries. Some of them are misguided into thinking that all they have to be is a specialist within a clinical setting and when they have finished their job there, that's enough. Some of them would not even devote any attention to reading their national papers and getting involved in national debates. Er, they would just stay within the clinical areas and settings. In many developing countries the people really educated and in the power structure are not so plentiful. So - if doctors remove themselves from that kind of arena they are doing health an injustice. And I think doctors have to see themselves not only as people with a biotechnology skill that they bring to bear on their type of problem, but as leadership within a community that helps to analyse total community problems. If they don't do that, they are alienating themselves to national thinking and that will be disastrous for both health and general development.
COMM: The Posse are a rap band in Brazil. They're determined to clean up their community in São Paulo but they know the key to development is education. Dinha's become the first person from her school to get to University. We found Juan who used to work as a circus clown studying alone. Both know there are some thing you have to do yourself.
LESTER THUROW Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Author 'The Future of Capitalism': When you move into a knowledge economy your key asset is educated people. What's the thing that the Third World has the biggest shortage of - the answer is educated people.
STEVE BRADSHAW: So literacy - education - is the way out.
LESTER THUROW: It's the way out.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How does the rest of the world help developing countries help accomplish that?
LESTER THUROW: Well the answer is - if they can't get organised we don't.
STEVE BRADSHAW: 'Get organised' meaning...?
LESTER THUROW: Organised to set up a village school. If they can get a village school organised and get organised to get people there we can help them pay for it but they got to do the organisation. And it wouldn't be any good to give money to a lot of countries in the world because they couldn't efficiently organise those schools. You see the very bottom level here is social organisation.
COMM: And here in Benin we found that's what local people were doing - starting a school to help people who haven't traditionally had an education - especially girls.
COMM: In China we also found women determined to empower themselves. Not just through education but through business. Micro-credit schemes offer women loans of a few dollars to start them on the economic ladder.
JAMES WOLFENSOHN President, The World Bank: For us the enfranchisement or the giving of opportunities to women is totally central to the issue of whether you're going to have effective development. If you educate a woman, they say, you educate a family - if you educate a man, you educate a man. So we are very, very anxious and have been for years focusing on the issue of gender.
STEVE BRADSHAW: You say that you want to see women enfranchised but how can you help do that without interfering in other countries affairs particularly say in Moslem countries where they may regard a woman's place as being in the home?
JAMES WOLFENSOHN: My experience with Moslem women and I've met Moslem women's groups throughout the world. Is that the Moslem women are doing a pretty good job themselves in trying to change society. Some of the most effective women I've met in today's world are in fact Moslem women. All we can do is to be supportive and not interfere. What you can't do is to try and set yourself up as the arbiter of morals and culture.
COMM: But some things seem so immoral they demand a response. Assam is a twelve-year-old silk weaver. He works ten hours a day without lunch. The question is what to do about child labour. Some economists warn that sanctions could lead to protectionism - others claim they are the only way of helping.
SUSAN GEORGE, Author 'A Fate Worse Than Debt': What could be done in developing countries is insist that products imported from countries where labour standards are particularly horrible be subject to a tax. Then you could say okay, if you get the worse grade your products will be taxed - I don't know, say - 20%. If you get the top grade at that level of development your products won't be taxed at all. Use the proceeds of that tax to encourage those who are doing a good job and to discourage those who are doing a bad job and give them an incentive to do better.
COMM: There is another way of helping badly paid workers in the Third World - let them come to the First World. Many of those who want to work in countries like the USA have to resort to desperate measures. We followed one Mexican who came to work illegally in America as a boxer. And ended working as a waiter. In a world where workers have to cross borders covertly, while capital can flow freely, even some on the Right say it's time to redress the balance.
IRWIN STELZER, Director of Regulatory Studies, The Hudson Institute: Thirty five per cent of the new jobs that have been created in America in the past five or six years have been filled by immigrants and that's happening all over.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Does that mean to have a fair and just kind of globalisation you do need a relatively free movement of labour?
IRWIN STELZER: Oh, I, I - absolutely. I mean you do need free movement of capital and you need free movement of labour.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Do you think we have that at the moment?
IRWIN STELZER: Well, we don't have it enough. I mean, America restricts immigration somewhat unfortunately - I think people are starting to realise that now - we've just relaxed restrictions on highly trained technicians er and we've solved the problem at the lower end of the labour market with illegal immigration. Er, I - that is unfortunate - it shouldn't be illegal, we should just let anybody who wants to come to work, come to work.
COMM: With wages so low, most people in developing countries like Bolivia still live on less then a dollar a day. And yet most Western countries have been cutting aid budgets -politicians claim the money's often wasted on élites in the cities or even on the corrupt. Even in countries that benefit from aid many people agree it often ends in the wrong hands. And in countries like Uganda, they've have taken to the streets to say so.
CLARE SHORT, Secretary of State for Int'l Development, UK: I think people have become cynical about aid. All the stories of corruption. My own view is that if we use the international development targets, measure progress and our publics can see - because they love, British public opinion loves the idea that by 2015 every child in the world will be in education. And if we can show we're spending the money well - it's not big money - and that we're making real progress, I think our publics will agree to increasing the aid budget. But at the moment it's declining - public opinion cares; you see that in the charitable contributions, but they don't think aid works. We've got to show people that it does work and we know what we're doing and then I think we'll be able to increase the budgets.
PART TWO
COMM: In Java, Life met Kamidi from a community that knew too little about the need for iodine in salt. As a result he suffers from a condition called cretinism. By putting a few pence worth of iodine in salt, cretinism can, as Western aid agencies have pointed out, be easily prevented. And coming back from a visit to Dhaka in Bangladesh for Life, English doctor, Sam Everington, felt he had much to learn from the Third World. He's even more convinced that medicine is about communities. As well as prescriptions. For the next generation, sharing lessons and spreading knowledge is ever more important.
PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN, 1998 Nobel Laureate, Trinity College, Cambridge: I think there is a lot that can be done at a relatively little cost and which is not just a question of transferring simple sums of money from one country to another. It is just the wrong way of thinking about helping.
STEVE BRADSHAW: And the right way is?
PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN: The right way is to recognise that you live in inter-dependent world. That we learn from each other; what we learn from each other depends to a great extent about what we know from each other and what we know from each others successes and failures. America has something to learn from Europe about health care. Europe has something to learn from America about employment policy. And similarly the rest of the world. I mean, the developing countries have a lot to learn from the role of education in Europe, in Japan, particularly, in Korea, in Taiwan, in East Asia. But Korea, Taiwan and East Asia have something to learn from a social security system. And from the vigour of a, of a press, from opposition, even from India. So there is a whole lot of lessons to learn from each other and I would say it's the international civil society that's the most important thing to focus on at this time.
COMM: In Washington students protest against what they call sweatshops abroad.
DEMONSTRATOR ON ARCHIVE: Its about a basic level of human compassion that's missing in our world today - I mean, although we care about the people we know, we have no concern for the repercussions of our actions outside our daily lives.
COMM: Not everyone they want to help agrees with them - what they call sweatshops some Third World workers call the chance of a job. But many supporters of the free market agree an active civil society is healthy for democracy.
PROF. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, George Mason University, Author 'The End of History': The one thing that the growth of this international civil society does is it creates, in a way, an alternative form of governance. That is to say: if Shell does something that people object to in Nigeria or Brent Spar or other places like that, there, you know, there may not be a global regulatory agency - environmental protection regulatory agency -but you do have certain watchdog NGOs that can, you know, give voice to the concerns that people have. Not just in the country but trans-nationally. And so I think that in-in for lack of a formal set of governing institutions whose creation I can't very well visualise in the given present circumstances, it's not such a bad thing I think to have this layer of trans-national civil society.
COMM: When world leaders met this summer in Geneva, the hopes of many of those in civil society were disappointed. The idea had been to review progress on social issues since the UN Social Summit in Copenhagen five years ago. But the fine words at the General Assembly in Geneva often rang hollow. While the UN's NGO forums seemed a world away from the anti-globalisation protests of Washington or Seattle. Jacques Baudot - who chaired a panel at Geneva - was a behind-the-scenes organiser of the Copenhagen Summit.
COMM: Monsieur Baudot is now based in New York. He fears that with the triumph of the globalised free market the very word "development" is falling out of favour.
JACQUES BAUDOT, Director, The Copenhagen Seminars: For a number of reasons "development" is, at this point, not a word - not a concept which is proposed to mobilise the energies. There were many, many decades where it was believed that development would be achieved. So there is a disappointment with the, with the realisation that it is really rather complicated process to bring a society from one stage to another. Secondly, I think this question of environment again, of a- of a sustainability, has played a role. And thirdly all the - I mean the human, the human weaknesses and a question of corruption, the question of the image of the er, of the development efforts and of er - has been er, has been - has been important too. And an excessive emphasis now on - on the role of private investment - versus the role of development in the sense of public actions. All this reason means that world development is sort of relegated into a - another age.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Another age?
BAUDOT: Another - it's past. Er, I am dreaming of the - of the word "progress" would come back.
COMM: Even in a hi-tech age "progress" can seem like yesterday's game. In India we heard reports that the number of babies with low birth-weight is increasing. It's a sign that malnourishment amongst young mothers is also on the rise - even as living standards generally improve. And in some countries in Eastern Europe, overall life expectancy is falling as the rise in living standards slows or even goes into reverse. In countries like the Ukraine, prostitution drugs and street crime have increased dramatically. Easy perhaps to see why some longstanding observers question, not only the notion of development, but of progress itself.
ROBERT HEILBRONER, Author 'Visions of the Future': I was brought up and went to college in the days of the New Deal when social change and social idealism were in the air - and very intoxicating to breathe, I must say. And in those days you had the feeling that you'd escaped from the world of the past, which was a world of - what shall I say? Stasis. Unchangeability: everything goes on, nothing happens - to the world of progress. And I, I felt - we all felt - the New Deal was a wonderful thing and the world was changing around our-around us, underneath us and with us into a world where things were tangibly changing. And that lasted for a while and then came World War II - very discouraging. The collapse of the Soviet Empire also, in its awful way discouraging and encouraging, both. And Hitlerism and one damn thing after the other and the dream of the New Deal - what shall I say? "Improvement-ism" - that seemed to embrace the world faded. And in its place came something quite different. It was, 'Oh my God!' and 'What's coming next?' and 'Are we all going to blow up in a huge atomic thing?' And that too has faded - though that's always in the background somewhere. But now these days, these last, sort of, ten years, I felt - and I think many of my friends have felt - that we live in an age that's neither an age of improvement (that's already naïve, I mean, generalised improvement) nor an age of incipient disaster (that's always a possibility but not an immediate one). We live in an age of anxiety. And we live in an age that still have hopes but we don't cling to them with the same firmness that we once did. And there are always these dreadful scenarios one plays out in one's head - you don't quite believe they're gonna happen. But when you're in a world that's half between a 'could be' and 'would be' and 'would be' and 'isn't be' you are very uneasy. I think unease is another word for anxiety. There I am.
COMM: Washington - the summer of 2000 - a silent demonstration over Third World sweatshops. The mood of the new century may be one of apprehension. But globalization and its discontents are now on the public agenda. This may be the Age of Anxiety but it's not the Age of Apathy.
PROF. NOAM CHOMSKY, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Author 'Manufacturing Consent': There's an answer - it's called democracy and human rights. Institute democracies, struggle for human rights, education, organisation and activism is exactly what has worked for all through recorded history to overcome oppression, injustice, impoverishment and so on. That's - yeah, that's exactly how it's always happened and that's the way it's going to continue to happen.
UGANDAN SCHOOLGIRLS ON ARCHIVE: Ah now we are very poor, Poverty is on our back. Poverty is on our back. Let's be united and fight poverty!
NOAM CHOMSKY: The reason we live in more or less, to some extent, decent societies is because of centuries of popular struggle. You have to do something about it and it's mainly based on popular struggle.
UGANDAN SCHOOLGIRLS ON ARCHIVE: Fellow Ugandans, Let's be united and fight poverty!
END
ROBERT REICH: When you are in your own little exclusive communities of prosperity with good schools, good recreational facilities - and perhaps a gated wall around you - it's easy to forget that there are so many people who are not nearly as comfortable.
COMM: This year there are six billion people sharing the planet Earth. In Life we've told some of their stories. In this last of the current series, we look at back at what they've told us and forward to some practical solutions and to some visions of the future. A health clinic in Uganda where we met young victims of malaria - a disease that kills almost a million people a year. The clinic does have pills for malaria. But it doesn't have a vaccine. No vaccine for malaria has yet been discovered. The fear is drug companies aren't trying hard enough to find one because they think the poor countries most affected by malaria wouldn't be able to afford it. But there are ideas that could help.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS, Director, Centre for Int'l Development, Harvard University: One basic approach which I am very much in favour of is for the rich countries, for example, to make very clear and credible that if the private sector anywhere - biotech firms or major pharmaceuticals - create a malaria vaccine there would be a large amount of money available to actually buy it up at a reasonable price and distribute it, usually for free, to the very poorest people. So I want the rich countries to make a commitment well in advance, because it may take ten years to get a vaccine. But to say, "Here's the prize - here's the market prize! Maybe it's two and a half or three billion dollars that we'll pledge today! And when a company comes with an effective vaccine, they're gonna make a lot of money. No - the normal market isn't there because the people that need your product are too poor. But we'll provide the market." And by making that kind of advance commitment you could stimulate a tremendous amount of scientific effort.
COMM: In South Africa we joined the Phelophepa train which takes volunteer doctors to visit some of the country's poorest and remote communities. If you have malaria or any other disease it's perhaps your only chance of seeing a doctor - or of seeing at all. In Bangladesh we found an even more radical initiative - doctors tackling not just illness, but the conditions that cause it. Doctors have built workshops to create jobs for local women who now have the money to afford drugs and feed their families. It involves a revolution in the way doctors see their profession.
FRED SAI Professor of Community Health, University of Ghana: I think the health professionals, by and large, are doing a great job of work in many countries. Some of them are misguided into thinking that all they have to be is a specialist within a clinical setting and when they have finished their job there, that's enough. Some of them would not even devote any attention to reading their national papers and getting involved in national debates. Er, they would just stay within the clinical areas and settings. In many developing countries the people really educated and in the power structure are not so plentiful. So - if doctors remove themselves from that kind of arena they are doing health an injustice. And I think doctors have to see themselves not only as people with a biotechnology skill that they bring to bear on their type of problem, but as leadership within a community that helps to analyse total community problems. If they don't do that, they are alienating themselves to national thinking and that will be disastrous for both health and general development.
COMM: The Posse are a rap band in Brazil. They're determined to clean up their community in São Paulo but they know the key to development is education. Dinha's become the first person from her school to get to University. We found Juan who used to work as a circus clown studying alone. Both know there are some thing you have to do yourself.
LESTER THUROW Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Author 'The Future of Capitalism': When you move into a knowledge economy your key asset is educated people. What's the thing that the Third World has the biggest shortage of - the answer is educated people.
STEVE BRADSHAW: So literacy - education - is the way out.
LESTER THUROW: It's the way out.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How does the rest of the world help developing countries help accomplish that?
LESTER THUROW: Well the answer is - if they can't get organised we don't.
STEVE BRADSHAW: 'Get organised' meaning...?
LESTER THUROW: Organised to set up a village school. If they can get a village school organised and get organised to get people there we can help them pay for it but they got to do the organisation. And it wouldn't be any good to give money to a lot of countries in the world because they couldn't efficiently organise those schools. You see the very bottom level here is social organisation.
COMM: And here in Benin we found that's what local people were doing - starting a school to help people who haven't traditionally had an education - especially girls.
COMM: In China we also found women determined to empower themselves. Not just through education but through business. Micro-credit schemes offer women loans of a few dollars to start them on the economic ladder.
JAMES WOLFENSOHN President, The World Bank: For us the enfranchisement or the giving of opportunities to women is totally central to the issue of whether you're going to have effective development. If you educate a woman, they say, you educate a family - if you educate a man, you educate a man. So we are very, very anxious and have been for years focusing on the issue of gender.
STEVE BRADSHAW: You say that you want to see women enfranchised but how can you help do that without interfering in other countries affairs particularly say in Moslem countries where they may regard a woman's place as being in the home?
JAMES WOLFENSOHN: My experience with Moslem women and I've met Moslem women's groups throughout the world. Is that the Moslem women are doing a pretty good job themselves in trying to change society. Some of the most effective women I've met in today's world are in fact Moslem women. All we can do is to be supportive and not interfere. What you can't do is to try and set yourself up as the arbiter of morals and culture.
COMM: But some things seem so immoral they demand a response. Assam is a twelve-year-old silk weaver. He works ten hours a day without lunch. The question is what to do about child labour. Some economists warn that sanctions could lead to protectionism - others claim they are the only way of helping.
SUSAN GEORGE, Author 'A Fate Worse Than Debt': What could be done in developing countries is insist that products imported from countries where labour standards are particularly horrible be subject to a tax. Then you could say okay, if you get the worse grade your products will be taxed - I don't know, say - 20%. If you get the top grade at that level of development your products won't be taxed at all. Use the proceeds of that tax to encourage those who are doing a good job and to discourage those who are doing a bad job and give them an incentive to do better.
COMM: There is another way of helping badly paid workers in the Third World - let them come to the First World. Many of those who want to work in countries like the USA have to resort to desperate measures. We followed one Mexican who came to work illegally in America as a boxer. And ended working as a waiter. In a world where workers have to cross borders covertly, while capital can flow freely, even some on the Right say it's time to redress the balance.
IRWIN STELZER, Director of Regulatory Studies, The Hudson Institute: Thirty five per cent of the new jobs that have been created in America in the past five or six years have been filled by immigrants and that's happening all over.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Does that mean to have a fair and just kind of globalisation you do need a relatively free movement of labour?
IRWIN STELZER: Oh, I, I - absolutely. I mean you do need free movement of capital and you need free movement of labour.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Do you think we have that at the moment?
IRWIN STELZER: Well, we don't have it enough. I mean, America restricts immigration somewhat unfortunately - I think people are starting to realise that now - we've just relaxed restrictions on highly trained technicians er and we've solved the problem at the lower end of the labour market with illegal immigration. Er, I - that is unfortunate - it shouldn't be illegal, we should just let anybody who wants to come to work, come to work.
COMM: With wages so low, most people in developing countries like Bolivia still live on less then a dollar a day. And yet most Western countries have been cutting aid budgets -politicians claim the money's often wasted on élites in the cities or even on the corrupt. Even in countries that benefit from aid many people agree it often ends in the wrong hands. And in countries like Uganda, they've have taken to the streets to say so.
CLARE SHORT, Secretary of State for Int'l Development, UK: I think people have become cynical about aid. All the stories of corruption. My own view is that if we use the international development targets, measure progress and our publics can see - because they love, British public opinion loves the idea that by 2015 every child in the world will be in education. And if we can show we're spending the money well - it's not big money - and that we're making real progress, I think our publics will agree to increasing the aid budget. But at the moment it's declining - public opinion cares; you see that in the charitable contributions, but they don't think aid works. We've got to show people that it does work and we know what we're doing and then I think we'll be able to increase the budgets.
PART TWO
COMM: In Java, Life met Kamidi from a community that knew too little about the need for iodine in salt. As a result he suffers from a condition called cretinism. By putting a few pence worth of iodine in salt, cretinism can, as Western aid agencies have pointed out, be easily prevented. And coming back from a visit to Dhaka in Bangladesh for Life, English doctor, Sam Everington, felt he had much to learn from the Third World. He's even more convinced that medicine is about communities. As well as prescriptions. For the next generation, sharing lessons and spreading knowledge is ever more important.
PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN, 1998 Nobel Laureate, Trinity College, Cambridge: I think there is a lot that can be done at a relatively little cost and which is not just a question of transferring simple sums of money from one country to another. It is just the wrong way of thinking about helping.
STEVE BRADSHAW: And the right way is?
PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN: The right way is to recognise that you live in inter-dependent world. That we learn from each other; what we learn from each other depends to a great extent about what we know from each other and what we know from each others successes and failures. America has something to learn from Europe about health care. Europe has something to learn from America about employment policy. And similarly the rest of the world. I mean, the developing countries have a lot to learn from the role of education in Europe, in Japan, particularly, in Korea, in Taiwan, in East Asia. But Korea, Taiwan and East Asia have something to learn from a social security system. And from the vigour of a, of a press, from opposition, even from India. So there is a whole lot of lessons to learn from each other and I would say it's the international civil society that's the most important thing to focus on at this time.
COMM: In Washington students protest against what they call sweatshops abroad.
DEMONSTRATOR ON ARCHIVE: Its about a basic level of human compassion that's missing in our world today - I mean, although we care about the people we know, we have no concern for the repercussions of our actions outside our daily lives.
COMM: Not everyone they want to help agrees with them - what they call sweatshops some Third World workers call the chance of a job. But many supporters of the free market agree an active civil society is healthy for democracy.
PROF. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, George Mason University, Author 'The End of History': The one thing that the growth of this international civil society does is it creates, in a way, an alternative form of governance. That is to say: if Shell does something that people object to in Nigeria or Brent Spar or other places like that, there, you know, there may not be a global regulatory agency - environmental protection regulatory agency -but you do have certain watchdog NGOs that can, you know, give voice to the concerns that people have. Not just in the country but trans-nationally. And so I think that in-in for lack of a formal set of governing institutions whose creation I can't very well visualise in the given present circumstances, it's not such a bad thing I think to have this layer of trans-national civil society.
COMM: When world leaders met this summer in Geneva, the hopes of many of those in civil society were disappointed. The idea had been to review progress on social issues since the UN Social Summit in Copenhagen five years ago. But the fine words at the General Assembly in Geneva often rang hollow. While the UN's NGO forums seemed a world away from the anti-globalisation protests of Washington or Seattle. Jacques Baudot - who chaired a panel at Geneva - was a behind-the-scenes organiser of the Copenhagen Summit.
COMM: Monsieur Baudot is now based in New York. He fears that with the triumph of the globalised free market the very word "development" is falling out of favour.
JACQUES BAUDOT, Director, The Copenhagen Seminars: For a number of reasons "development" is, at this point, not a word - not a concept which is proposed to mobilise the energies. There were many, many decades where it was believed that development would be achieved. So there is a disappointment with the, with the realisation that it is really rather complicated process to bring a society from one stage to another. Secondly, I think this question of environment again, of a- of a sustainability, has played a role. And thirdly all the - I mean the human, the human weaknesses and a question of corruption, the question of the image of the er, of the development efforts and of er - has been er, has been - has been important too. And an excessive emphasis now on - on the role of private investment - versus the role of development in the sense of public actions. All this reason means that world development is sort of relegated into a - another age.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Another age?
BAUDOT: Another - it's past. Er, I am dreaming of the - of the word "progress" would come back.
COMM: Even in a hi-tech age "progress" can seem like yesterday's game. In India we heard reports that the number of babies with low birth-weight is increasing. It's a sign that malnourishment amongst young mothers is also on the rise - even as living standards generally improve. And in some countries in Eastern Europe, overall life expectancy is falling as the rise in living standards slows or even goes into reverse. In countries like the Ukraine, prostitution drugs and street crime have increased dramatically. Easy perhaps to see why some longstanding observers question, not only the notion of development, but of progress itself.
ROBERT HEILBRONER, Author 'Visions of the Future': I was brought up and went to college in the days of the New Deal when social change and social idealism were in the air - and very intoxicating to breathe, I must say. And in those days you had the feeling that you'd escaped from the world of the past, which was a world of - what shall I say? Stasis. Unchangeability: everything goes on, nothing happens - to the world of progress. And I, I felt - we all felt - the New Deal was a wonderful thing and the world was changing around our-around us, underneath us and with us into a world where things were tangibly changing. And that lasted for a while and then came World War II - very discouraging. The collapse of the Soviet Empire also, in its awful way discouraging and encouraging, both. And Hitlerism and one damn thing after the other and the dream of the New Deal - what shall I say? "Improvement-ism" - that seemed to embrace the world faded. And in its place came something quite different. It was, 'Oh my God!' and 'What's coming next?' and 'Are we all going to blow up in a huge atomic thing?' And that too has faded - though that's always in the background somewhere. But now these days, these last, sort of, ten years, I felt - and I think many of my friends have felt - that we live in an age that's neither an age of improvement (that's already naïve, I mean, generalised improvement) nor an age of incipient disaster (that's always a possibility but not an immediate one). We live in an age of anxiety. And we live in an age that still have hopes but we don't cling to them with the same firmness that we once did. And there are always these dreadful scenarios one plays out in one's head - you don't quite believe they're gonna happen. But when you're in a world that's half between a 'could be' and 'would be' and 'would be' and 'isn't be' you are very uneasy. I think unease is another word for anxiety. There I am.
COMM: Washington - the summer of 2000 - a silent demonstration over Third World sweatshops. The mood of the new century may be one of apprehension. But globalization and its discontents are now on the public agenda. This may be the Age of Anxiety but it's not the Age of Apathy.
PROF. NOAM CHOMSKY, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Author 'Manufacturing Consent': There's an answer - it's called democracy and human rights. Institute democracies, struggle for human rights, education, organisation and activism is exactly what has worked for all through recorded history to overcome oppression, injustice, impoverishment and so on. That's - yeah, that's exactly how it's always happened and that's the way it's going to continue to happen.
UGANDAN SCHOOLGIRLS ON ARCHIVE: Ah now we are very poor, Poverty is on our back. Poverty is on our back. Let's be united and fight poverty!
NOAM CHOMSKY: The reason we live in more or less, to some extent, decent societies is because of centuries of popular struggle. You have to do something about it and it's mainly based on popular struggle.
UGANDAN SCHOOLGIRLS ON ARCHIVE: Fellow Ugandans, Let's be united and fight poverty!
END