Mark Twain once said “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Saving the world is kind of like that. A lot of people talk about it, but it’s rare that someone comes up with a plan to make it happen. So along comes Mark Malloch Brown, head of the UN Development Programme. He says the time for thinking small is over, and that unless the world community is willing to get serious about slashing poverty by half, reversing the tide of HIV-AIDS, and educating all the world’s children, by the year 2015, they should pack up their aid agencies and go home.
All this won’t come cheap and that’s why he’s asking American voters and their leaders to cut a check for an extra $25 billion dollars each year to make it happen.
Guests:
Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme
Lant Pritchett, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.