I'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are, how globalized we aren't, and why it's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments.
And the leading point of view on this, whether measured by number of books sold, mentions in media, or surveys that I've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the World Trade Organization, is this view that national borders really don't matter very much anymore, cross-border integration is close to complete, and we live in one world.
And what's interesting about this view is, again, it's a view that's held by pro-globalizers like Tom Friedman, from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted, but it's also held by anti-globalizers, who see this giant globalization tsunami that's about to wreck all our lives if it hasn't already done so.
The other thing I would add is that this is not a new view.
I'm a little bit of an amateur historian, so I've spent some time going back, trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing.
And the best, earliest quote that I could find was one from David Livingstone, writing in the 1850s about how the railroad, the steam ship, and the telegraph were integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world.
Now clearly, David Livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time, but it does seem useful to ask ourselves, "Just how global are we?"
before we think about where we go from here.
So the best way I've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat, may not even be close to flat, is with some data.
So one of the things I've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders, and I've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total.
I'm not going to present all the data that I have here today, but let me just give you a few data points.
I'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow, one kind of flow of people, one kind of flow of capital, and, of course, trade in products and services.
So let's start off with plain old telephone service.
Of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year, what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls?
Pick a percentage in your own mind.
The answer turns out to be two percent.
If you include Internet telephony, you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent, but it's nowhere near what people tend to estimate.
Or let's turn to people moving across borders.
One particular thing we might look at, in terms of long-term flows of people, is what percentage of the world's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants?
Again, please pick a percentage.
Turns out to be a little bit higher.
It's actually about three percent.
Or think of investment.
Take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010.
What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment?
Not quite ten percent.
And then finally, the one statistic that I suspect many of the people in this room have seen: the export-to-GDP ratio.
If you look at the official statistics, they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent.
However, there's a big problem with the official statistics, in that if, for instance, a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod, and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S., that component ends up getting counted multiple times.
So nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is, so I thought I would ask the person who's spearheading the effort to generate data on this, Pascal Lamy, the Director of the World Trade Organization, what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of GDP, without the double- and triple-counting, and it's actually probably a bit under 20 percent, rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we're talking about.
So it's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that I talk about in my book, "World 3.0," that we're very, very far from the no-border effect benchmark, which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85, 90, 95 percent.
So clearly, apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case.
But it's not just the apocalyptics, as I think of them, who are prone to this kind of overstatement.
I've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be.
Let me share with you the results of a survey that Harvard Business Review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people's guesses along these dimensions actually were.
So a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide.
First of all, there is a suggestion of some error.
Okay.
(Laughter) Second, these are pretty large errors.
For four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent, you have people guessing three, four times that level.
Even though I'm an economist, I find that a pretty large error.
And third, this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review.
I've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world, and in all cases except one, where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-GDP ratio, people have this tendency towards overestimation, and so I thought it important to give a name to this, and that's what I refer to as globaloney, the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars.
Especially because, I suspect, some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims, I think it's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney.
A couple of different reasons come to mind.
First of all, there's a real dearth of data in the debate.
Let me give you an example.
When I first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called Foreign Policy, one of the people who wrote in, not entirely in agreement, was Tom Friedman.
And since my article was titled "Why the World Isn't Flat," that wasn't too surprising.
(Laughter) What was very surprising to me was Tom's critique, which was, "Ghemawat's data are narrow."
And this caused me to scratch my head, because as I went back through his several-hundred-page book, I couldn't find a single figure, chart, table, reference or footnote.
So my point is, I haven't presented a lot of data here to convince you that I'm right, but I would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we've been bombarded with actually are correct.
So dearth of data in the debate is one reason.
A second reason has to do with peer pressure.
I remember, I decided to write my "Why the World Isn't Flat" article, because I was being interviewed on TV in Mumbai, and the interviewer's first question to me was, "Professor Ghemawat, why do you still believe that the world is round?"
And I started laughing, because I hadn't come across that formulation before.
(Laughter) And as I was laughing, I was thinking, I really need a more coherent response, especially on national TV.
I'd better write something about this.
(Laughter) But what I can't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question.
The perspective was, here is this poor professor.
He's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years.
He really has no idea as to what's actually going on in the world.
So try this out with your friends and acquaintances, if you like.
You'll find that it's very cool to talk about the world being one, etc.
If you raise questions about that formulation, you really are considered a bit of an antique.
And then the final reason, which I mention, especially to a TED audience, with some trepidation, has to do with what I call "techno-trances."
If you listen to techno music for long periods of time, it does things to your brainwave activity.
(Laughter) Something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers, all political barriers, all geographic barriers, because at this point I know you aren't allowed to ask me questions, but when I get to this point in my lecture with my students, hands go up, and people ask me, "Yeah, but what about Facebook?"
And I got this question often enough that I thought I'd better do some research on Facebook.
Because, in some sense, it's the ideal kind of technology to think about.
Theoretically, it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door.
What percentage of people's friends on Facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we're analyzing are based?
The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent.
Non-negligible, so we don't live in an entirely local or national world, but very, very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect, and the reason's very simple.
We don't, or I hope we don't, form friendships at random on Facebook.
The technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have, and those relationships are what the technology doesn't quite displace.
Those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are.
So does all this matter?
Or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues?
I want to suggest that actually, globaloney can be very harmful to your health.
First of all, recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration, whereas if we thought we were already there, there would be no particular point to pushing harder.
It's a little bit like, we wouldn't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference.
So being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more, something that would contribute further to global welfare.
Which brings me to my second point.
Avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization.
So I actually spend most of my "World 3.0" book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate.
I'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today, so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what I have in mind.
Think of France and the current debate about immigration.
When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants, the answer is about 24 percent.
That's their guess.
Maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue.
Or to take an even more striking example, when the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations did a survey of Americans, asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid, the guess was 30 percent, which is slightly in excess of the actual level — ("actually about ...
1%") (Laughter) — of U.S. governmental commitments to federal aid.
The reassuring thing about this particular survey was, when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data, some of them — not all of them — seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid.
So foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here, because if you think about it, what I've been talking about today is this notion -- very uncontroversial amongst economists -- that most things are very home-biased.
"Foreign aid is the most aid to poor people," is about the most home-biased thing you can find.
If you look at the OECD countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person, and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries, the ratio — Branko Milanovic at the World Bank did the calculations — turns out to be about 30,000 to one.
Now of course, some of us, if we truly are cosmopolitan, would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one.
I'd like to make the suggestion that we don't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are.
If we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one, we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the Rio Summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on.
So in summary, while radical openness is great, given how closed we are, even incremental openness could make things dramatically better.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Applause)
The discovery of an alien monolith on planet RH-1729 has scientists across the world racing to unlock its mysteries.
Your engineering team has developed an elegant probe to study it.
The probe is a collection of 27 cube modules capable of running all the scientific tests necessary to analyze the monolith.
The modules can self-assemble into a large 3x3x3 cube, with each individual module placed anywhere in the cube, and at any orientation.
It can also break itself apart and reassemble into any other orientation.
Now comes your job.
The probe will need a special protective coating for each of the extreme environments it passes through.
The red coating will seal it against the cold of deep space, the purple coating will protect it from the intense heat as it enters the atmosphere of RH-1729, and the green coating will shield it from the alien planet’s electric storms.
You can apply the coatings to each of the faces of all 27 of the cubic modules in any way you like, but each face can only take a single color coating.
You need to figure out how you can apply the colors so the cubes can re-assemble themselves to show only red, then purple, then green.
How can you apply the colored coatings to the 27 cubes so the probe will be able to make the trip?
Pause here if you want to figure it out yourself.
You can start by painting the outside of the complete cube red, since you’ll need that regardless.
Then you can break it into 27 pieces, and look at what you have.
There are 8 corner cubes, which each have three red faces, 12 edge cubes, which have two red faces, 6 face cubes, which have 1 red face, and a single center cube, which has no red faces.
You’ve painted a total of 54 faces red at this point, so you’ll need the same number of faces for the green and purple cubes, too.
When you’re done, you’ll have painted 54 faces red, 54 faces green, and 54 faces purple.
That’s 162 faces, which is precisely how many the cubes have in total.
So there’s no margin for waste.
If there’s any way to do this, it’ll probably be highly symmetrical.
Maybe you can use that to help you.
You look at the center cube.
You’d better paint it half green and half purple, so you can use it as a corner for each of those cubes, and not waste a single face.
There’ll need to be center cubes with no green and no purple too.
So you take 2 corner cubes from the red cube and paint the 3 blank faces of 1 purple, and the 3 blank faces of the other green.
Now you’ve got the 6 face cubes that each have 1 face painted red.
That leaves 5 empty faces on each.
You can split them in half.
In the first group, you paint 3 faces green and 2 faces purple; In the second group, paint 3 faces purple and 2 green.
Counting on symmetry, you replicate these piles again with the colors rearranged.
That gives you 6 with 1 green face, 6 with 1 red face, and 6 with 1 purple face.
Counting up what you’ve completely painted, you see 8 corner cubes in each color, 6 edge cubes in each color, 6 face cubes in each color, and 1 center cube.
That means you just need 6 more edge cubes in green and purple.
And there are exactly 6 cubes left, each with 4 empty faces.
You paint 2 faces of each green and 2 faces of each purple.
And now you have a cube that’s perfectly painted to make an incredible trip.
It rearranges itself to be red in deep space, purple as it enters RH-1729’s atmosphere, and green when it flies through the electric storms.
As it reaches the monolith, you realize you’ve achieved something humans have dreamt of for eons: alien contact.
This is the sound of orcas off the coast of Vancouver.
(Whale chirps and squeaks) They make these fantastic sounds not just to communicate, but also sometimes to echolocate, to find their way around and to find food.
But that can be tricky sometimes, because, well, here is the sound of a ship passing by, recorded underwater.
(Screeching oscillating sound) You know, when we think about marine pollution, I think we usually think about plastics.
Maybe toxic chemicals, or even ocean acidification from climate change.
As a science journalist who often writes about environmental issues, those are the things that have passed my desk over the past 10 years or so.
But as I recently realized when I was writing a feature for the science journal "Nature," noise is another important kind of pollution.
One that often gets ignored.
You know, maybe you've heard of the dark-skies movement, which aimed to raise awareness of the issue of light pollution and create pockets of unilluminated night, so that people and animals could enjoy more natural cycles of light and dark, night and day.
Well, in much the same way, there are people now raising awareness of the issue of noise pollution and trying to create pockets of quiet in the ocean, so that marine life can enjoy a more natural soundscape.
This is important.
Noise isn't just an irritation.
It can cause chronic stress, or even physical injury.
It can affect marine life's ability to find food and mates and to listen out for predators and more.
Think of all the sounds we inject into the ocean.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic is the seismic surveys used to look for oil and gas.
Air guns produce loud blasts, sometimes every 10 to 15 seconds, for months on end.
And they use the reflections of these sounds to map the ground beneath.
It can sound like this.
(Explosion sounds) Then, there's the sound of the actual drilling for oil and gas, the construction of things like offshore wind farms, sonar and of course, the nearly constant drone from more than 50,000 ships in the global merchant fleet.
Now the natural ocean itself isn't exactly quiet.
If you put your head under the water, you can hear cracking ice, wind, rain, singing whales, grunting fish, even snapping shrimp.
Altogether, that can create a soundscape of maybe 50 to 100 decibels, depending on where and when you are.
But mankind's addition to that has been dramatic.
It's estimated that shipping has added three decibels of noise to the ocean every 10 years in recent decades.
That might not sound like a lot, but decibels are on a logarithmic scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes.
So a small number can actually represent a large change.
Three decibels means a doubling of noise intensity in the ocean.
A doubling.
And that's only an estimate, because no one is actually keeping track of how noisy the ocean is all around the world.
There is a body called the International Quiet Ocean Experiment, and one of their missions is to try and plug the hole in that data.
So for example, last year, they managed to convince the Global Ocean Observation System to start including noise as one of their essential variables for monitoring, alongside things like temperature and salinity.
We do know some things.
We know that sonar can be as loud, or nearly as loud, as an underwater volcano.
A supertanker can be as loud as the call of a blue whale.
The noises we add to the ocean come in all different frequencies and can travel great distances.
Seismic surveys off the East Coast of the United States can be heard in the middle of the Atlantic.
In the 1960s, they did an experiment where they set off a loud noise off the coast of Perth, Australia, and they detected it as far away as Bermuda, 20,000 kilometers away.
So what does all this sound like to marine life, what do they hear?
It's kind of difficult to describe.
Sound travels further, faster in water than it does in air, and it also packs a different punch.
So sound of the same pressure will have a different intensity whether you measure it in the air or underwater.
Then there's the fact that whales don't have ears exactly like human ears.
Creatures like zooplankton don't even have what you would consider to be ears.
So what does this mean, what is the impact on all this marine life?
Perhaps the easiest thing for scientists to assess is the effect of acute noise, really loud sudden blasts that might cause physical injury or hearing loss.
Beaked whales, for example, can go into panicked dives when exposed to loud noises, which may even give them a condition similar to the bends.
In the 1960s, after the introduction of more powerful sonar technologies, the number of incidents of mass whale strandings of beaked whales went up dramatically.
And it's not just marine mammals, fish, if they stray too close to the source of a loud sound, their fish bladders may actually explode.
The airgun blasts from seismic surveys can mow down a swath of zooplankton, the tiny creatures near the base of the food chain, or can deform scallop larvae while they're developing.
Well, what about chronic noise, the more pervasive issue of raising background noise from things like shipping?
That can mask or drown out the natural soundscape.
Some whales have responded to this by literally changing their tune, a little bit like people shouting to be heard in a noisy nightclub.
And some fish will spend more time patrolling their borders and less time caring for their young, as if they're on high alert.
Chronic noise can affect people too, of course.
Studies have shown that people living near busy airports or really busy highways may have elevated levels of cardiovascular disease.
And students living under busy flight paths may do worse on some educational tests.
And even while I was researching this subject, they were actually blasting out about three meters of solid granite from the lot across from my home office to make room for a new house, and the constant jittering of the rock hammer was driving me completely insane.
And whenever the workers stopped for a moment, I could feel my shoulders relax.
This effect has been seen in whales, too.
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, international shipping largely ground to a halt for a little while in the waters off the East Coast of the United States.
And in that lull, researchers noticed that endangered right whales in that region had fewer chemical markers of stress in their feces samples.
As one researcher I spoke to likes to say, "We were stressed, but the whales weren't."
Now you have to remember, we have evolved to be a visual species.
We really rely on our eyes.
But marine life relies on sound the way that we rely on sight.
For them, a noisy ocean may be as befuddling and even dangerous as a dense fog is for us.
And maybe sometimes that just means being a little more stressed, maybe sometimes it means spending a little less time with the kids.
Maybe some species can adapt.
But some researchers worry that for endangered species already on the brink, noise may be enough to push them over the edge.
So take, for example, the southern resident killer whales that live in the waters off my hometown of Vancouver.
There are only 75, maybe 76, animals left in this population.
And they're facing a lot of challenges.
There are chemical pollutants in these waters, and they are running low on the salmon that they really rely on for food.
And then there's noise.
When researchers studied these and similar killer whales, they found that they spend between 18 and 25 percent less time feeding in the presence of loud boat noise.
And that's a lot for a species that's already struggling to find enough food to thrive.
The good news, as I heard from all the researchers I spoke to, is that you can do something relatively easily about ocean noise.
Unlike the wicked problems of climate change and ocean acidification, you can just dial down the knob on ocean noise and see almost immediate impacts.
So for example, in 2017, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority started asking ships to simply slow down when going through the Haro Strait, where the southern resident killer whales are feeding in late summer.
Slower ships are quieter ships.
And because it's Canada, you can just ask, it can be voluntary.
(Laughter) (Applause) In that 2017 trial, most of the ships complied, adding about half an hour to their travel time, and reducing noise by about 1.2 decibels or 24 percent of noise intensity.
This year, they decided to extend the length of time and the area over which they're asking ships to slow down.
So hopefully that has a positive impact for these whales.
In 2017, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority also introduced discounts in docking fees for ships that are physically designed to be quieter.
You know, weirdly, a lot of the noise from a ship like this comes from the popping of tiny bubbles off the back of its propeller.
And you can simply design a ship to do less of that and to be quieter.
The International Maritime Organization has published a huge list of ways that boats can be made quieter.
And they also have a target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from global shipping by 50 percent by 2050.
And the great news is that these two things go hand in hand.
On the whole, a more efficient ship is a quieter ship.
People have also invented quieter ways of hammering in the giant posts needed for giant wind turbines, like this one, and gentler ways of doing seismic surveys.
And there are some incentives for using quieter technologies.
The European Union, for example, has a healthy marine system directive for 2020.
And one of the ways that they define a healthy marine system is by how much noise is going in those waters.
But on the whole, most waters remain completely unregulated when it comes to ocean noise.
But again, most of the scientists I spoke to said that there's real momentum right now in policy circles to pay attention to this issue and maybe do something about this issue.
We already know enough to say that quieter seas are healthier seas.
But now scientists are really scrambling to come up with the details.
Just how quiet do we need to be?
And where are the best places to make quiet or preserve quiet?
And how best can we hush our noise?
And you know, I'm not trying to tell you that noise is the biggest environmental problem on the planet or even in the ocean.
But the point is that humankind has a lot of impacts on our environmental system.
And these impacts don't act in isolation.
They act together, and they multiply.
So even for the ones that are not so obvious, we really need to pay attention to them.
I'll tell you about one last experiment, just because it's so beautiful.
So Rob Williams, one of the researchers who works on southern resident killer whales, also does some work in Bali.
And there, they celebrate a Hindu tradition called nyepi, or a day of silence.
And this day, apparently, is very strictly observed.
No planes take off from the airport, no boats go out fishing, the tourists are gently led off the beach back into their hotel rooms.
And Rob Williams put some hydrophones in the water there to see what the impact was, and it was dramatic.
Sound levels dropped by six to nine decibels, about the same as in the waters after 9/11.
For an "acoustic prospector" like Williams, which is what he calls himself, this silence is golden.
Now he and other researchers can go back to this place and see what the fish choose to do with all this additional acoustic real estate.
(Soft bubbling) I like to think of them having their own holiday, feasting and finding mates.
Celebrating their own spot of calm in an otherwise noisy world.
Thank you.
(Applause)