What’s the Point of Freedom if You Don’t Do Something With It?
New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast
08/10/23
•12m
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Shahidul Alam is many things: world-class photographer, Bangladeshi human rights activist, teacher, and author. He is also a provocateur, whose words and pictures force one—sometimes gently, sometimes less so—to confront reality.
Alam is also part of the Tällberg Foundation's Global Leadership Network. In that capacity, he recently delivered a short provocation reflecting on the realities of democracy and the challenges of freedom.
This is not the usual New Thinking for a New World conversation, but we think you'll find it worth a listen.
Previous Episode
Pricing the Priceless: The ultimate, maybe the only climate solution
July 27, 2023
•37m
Humanity is hardwired to value the valuable, to conserve even to hoard treasure. The atmosphere, the oceans, earth’s ecosystem are vital to life, yet we essentially view them as free goods. The inevitable result is overconsumption, waste and pollution. Paula DiPerna’s key insight in her new book, Pricing the Priceless, is that the only way to break the cycle that is obviously damaging, perhaps destroying the temperate environment that mankind needs to prosper is to pay for the environmental services we consume every day.
Why, she asks, do markets value companies like Uber—which provides a convenience that we can live without— at almost $100 billion, but the atmosphere essential to life that we are filling with toxic waste gases at $0?
DiPerna, who is a policy expert and author, recently joined host Alan Stoga for a New Thinking for a New World discussion of Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Precious Assets.
Next Episode
Worth Repeating: Is India Back?
August 17, 2023
•37m
India's backstory is largely unknown in the West. Between the 1st and 17th centuries AD, the country had the world's largest economy, controlling as much as one-third of global wealth. But that seemingly endless prosperity was followed by almost 500 years of decline as India was plundered and pushed aside by modern powers.
Fast forward to 2023: India is the world's most populous nation with one of the largest economies. The three trillion dollar Indian economy is expected to grow faster this year than any other major country in the world. Foreign investment is pouring in, partly looking for a safe haven from China's geopolitical ambitions and partly seeking to participate in India's new dynamism.
The man who has presided over this renaissance—Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in office since May 2014—is a global rock star. Indeed, some pollsters make the case that he is the most popular leader in the world. He has brought a degree of stability to a country where political violence used to be endemic and somehow produced an economically and geopolitically resurgent India. His and the country's importance are recognized by India's 2023 presidency of the G-20, as well as the West's aggressive courting of Modi and India as rivals to Xi and China.
Yet Western (as well as some Indian) critics worry that Modi's version of democracy is too autocratic and inward-looking, too rooted in Hindu nationalism to be sustainable. And they are skeptical that India has an economic model that can sustain the kind of outsize growth that transformed China from a country with lots of people to an economic superpower. Is India's continuing rise inevitable? Can India leverage all those people and their aspirations into supersized economic growth and power? Or might the underlying centrifugal forces of religion, inequality, and nationalism—and the sheer weight of almost 1.5 billion people—overwhelm what Modi and other Indian public and private sector leaders have set in motion? Could India really become an alternative to China?
Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and an accomplished India watcher. He shared some answers in a recent New Thinking for a New World podcast.
What do you think: Will India continue its evolution to become a global power?
This podcast was first published on May 18, 2023
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