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Home » Fareed Zakaria’s Speech at Harvard University Commencement 2012 (Transcript)

Fareed Zakaria’s Speech at Harvard University Commencement 2012 (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Indian-born American journalist Fareed Zakaria’s speech at Harvard University Commencement 2012.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Thank you so much, President Faust, fellows of the Corporation, members of the Board of Overseers, ladies and gentlemen, above all, students, graduating students, thank you so much for asking me to do this. I have to say to the students here, you are already way ahead of me.

You see, I actually have never made my commencement either from college or from my Ph.D. program. I did, as you heard, go to a small college south of here in a little town called New Haven and I perhaps got it wrong and celebrated a little bit too much the night before commencement.

And so the honest truth is I slept through my college commencement. When I finally made it to Harvard, I got a job before commencement and I had to be working in New York, couldn’t take the day off. I got my degree in the mail. So 19 years later, I am finally honored to receive in person a Harvard degree.

Harvard Experience

Thank you. Harvard was for me a dazzling revelation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on this campus, it is possible to get a fine education at Yale, which I did, but the great graduate programs of Harvard and their scope and their scale and their worldliness and ambition were just an electric experience and I soaked it in.

Now, to get a Ph.D. involves many, many hours of grueling work. It also involves many hours of goofing off, acquiring hobbies and interests and exploiting the great resources of this university. I mean the libraries and the cafes.

Personal Reflections

And I did all of that and gained from it immeasurably. I learned from faculty, from students, from visitors. But what I remember most was that Harvard is the place that I learned to think and I owe this university as a result a deep debt of gratitude, something I think all of you share with me and something the development office will remind you of from time to time. I’ve always been wary of making commencement speeches.

I don’t think of myself as old enough to really have any wisdom to impart. But there is nothing like having children to remind you of how old you are. My nine-year-old daughter is here with me now or to remind you of how deeply uncool you are.

Commencement Speeches

So I’m going to take on this task with some trepidation. The best commencement speech I ever heard or heard of was by Art Buchwald, the humorist. It was short. It was brief. He simply said, “Ladies and gentlemen, remember, we are leaving you a perfect world. Don’t screw it up.”

Now you’re not likely to hear that message much these days. Instead, you’re likely to hear that we are living in grim economic times. The graduates are going to be told that they are graduating into the slowest economic recovery since World War II.

Global Concerns

And it’s not just economic worries. Ever since 9-11, we have been worried about terrorism, fearful of the dangers of new attacks, and in many ways altered our daily lives. Then there are larger concerns you hear about. The earth is getting hotter.

People are running out of water. A billion people are trapped in terrible poverty. So I want to sketch out for you, perhaps with a little bit of historical perspective, the world as I see it.

World Peace

The world we live in is, first of all, at peace, profoundly so. The richest countries of the world are not in major geopolitical, geomilitary competition with one another. No arms races, no proxy races, no wars, no cold wars among the richest countries of the world.

You would have to go back hundreds of years to find an equivalent period of political stability. I know that you see a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in New York and worry about the safety and security of our times.

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Declining Violence

But here is the data. The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades.

It is down, of course, 99 percent from the decade before that, which was World War II. Steven Pinker argues that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history, and he should know because he is a Harvard professor.

Global Economic Growth

The political stability that we have experienced has allowed the creation of a single global economy that has allowed countries from all over the world to participate and flourish. In 1980, the number of countries that were growing at 4 percent a year, robust growth, was about 60. By 2007, that number had doubled, and even after the financial crisis, that number stands today at about 80.

So countries around the world are thriving and flourishing in a way that was previously unimaginable. Even in the current decade, with all this slow growth, the global economy as a whole will grow 10 to 20 percent faster than it did last decade, 60 percent faster than it did two decades ago, and five times as fast as it did three decades ago.

Poverty Reduction

The result is that the United Nations estimates in the last 50 years poverty has been reduced more than in the preceding 500 years. Most of that reduction has taken place in the last 20. The average Chinese person is today 10 times richer than he or she was 50 years ago, with 25 years more of life expectancy.

Life expectancy has risen across the world dramatically. We gain five hours of life expectancy every day. Imagine that without even exercising.

Medical Advancements

A third of all the babies born in the developed world this year will live to be 100.