早稲田商2017 I

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I

Let's talk about inequality. As a person who's at the very top of the one percent, do you see this as one of the great issues of our time?

Well, now you're getting into sort of complicated issues. Should the state be playing a greater role in helping people at the lowest end of the income scale? Poverty today looks very different than, poverty in the past. The real thing you want to look at is consumption and use that as a metric and say, "Have you been worried about having enough to eat? Do you have enough warmth, shelter? Do you think of yourself as having a place to go?" The poor are better off than they were before, even though they're still in the bottom group in terms of income.

Let's talk about climate change. Many scientists and politicians see it as the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.

It's a big challenge, but I'm not sure I would put it above everything else. One of the reasons it's hard is that by the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited. The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

When you look on the horizon over the next 50 years, what is your biggest fear?

I think we will get our act together on climate change. That's very important. I hope we get our act together on large-scale terrorism and avoid that being a huge setback for the world. On health equity, we can reduce the number of poor children who die from more than 6 million down to 2 million, eventually 1 million. I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I'm not an expert on how you get out of those things. I wish there was an invention or advance to fix that. So there'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that- you didn't expect to die from a pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism.

What do you say to people who argue that America's best days are behind us?

That's almost laughable. The only definition by which America's best days are behind is on a purely relative basis. That is, in 1946, when we made up about six percent of humanity, but we dominated everything. But America's way better today than it's ever been. Say you're a woman in America, would you go back 50 years? Say you're gay in America, would you go back 50 years? Say you're sick in America, do you want to go back 50 years? I mean, who are we kidding?

True or False

1. The government does not have to help poor people because, even if they do not have much money, they have enough to eat and a place to live in, unlike poor people in the past.

2. Climate change is a very big problem which we are unable to cope with before it causes worse effects because we lack necessary resources to solve it immediately.

3. We have to make efforts together to address climate change and terrorism over the next 50 year's in order to save millions of poor children from dying.

4. The biggest issue in the future is war, which is out of our control since it is impossible to invent advanced technologies to stop it.

5. Determining whether the past or the present is better is entirely a matter of comparison, and the present American situation is superior to that of 50 years ago in many ways.