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. All this is, of course, because of rising standards of living, of hygiene and medicine. Atul Gawande, another Harvard professor who is also a practicing surgeon, who also writes for the New Yorker magazine, tells of a 19th century operation, perhaps not so uncommon, in which a surgeon was trying to amputate a patient’s leg.

He succeeded. He also, however, amputated his assistant’s hand. The two patients, I suppose one would call them, died of sepsis.

Technological Progress

An onlooker died of shock. It is the only known medical procedure to have a 300 percent fatality. We’ve come a long way. To understand the astonishing age of progress, just look at the cell phones you have in your pockets.

And yes, I know many of you don’t have them in your pockets. They’re already out. You’re looking at them right now.

Computing Power

That cell phone has more computing power than the Apollo space capsule that went to the moon. That capsule couldn’t even tweet. So imagine the opportunities that lie ahead. Moore’s law, which says that computing power will double every 18 months while costs halve, may be petering out in the realm of information technology, but there are other arenas in which it is accelerating.

The human genome is being sequenced at a pace faster than Moore’s law. A third industrial revolution involving material science and the customization of manufacturing is yet in its infancy.

Intersecting Fields

And all these fields are beginning to intersect and produce new opportunities in ways that we can’t even imagine. The good news goes on. Look at the number of graduates globally from colleges.

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That number has risen fourfold in the last 40 years for men. It has risen sevenfold for women.

Women’s Achievements

And if you’re wondering whether or not that age-old question, are women smarter than men, has been answered, the evidence is now overwhelming. The answer is yes. My favorite example of this is there was a study done that over the last 25 years, female representatives, members of the House of Representatives, have managed to get $49 million more in federal grant money than their male counterparts.

So even at pork barrel spending, it turns out women are better than men. And so I look forward from the villages in Africa to the boardrooms of America to the increasing participation of women, which is going to enrich and ennoble our world.

America’s Position

Now you might listen to all this and say, well, this is all very good for the world, but what does it mean for America? Well, a world at peace and broader prosperity, the rise of the rest, is going to be particularly good for the United States. Because let me remind you, this is the country with the largest and most dynamic economy in the world, that hosts hundreds of the world’s greatest companies, that dominates the age of technology.

It has within it almost all of the world’s great universities. There is in China and India no Harvard, and there will not be for decades, perhaps ever.

American Demographics

The United States is also a vital society. It is the only country in the industrialized world that is demographically vibrant. We add three million people to this country every year.

That is itself a powerful life force, and it is made stronger by the fact that so many of these people are immigrants. They, I should say we, come to this country with aspirations, with drive, with determination, and we develop a fierce love of this country.

Future Prospects

America in 2050 will have a better demographic profile than China. So this country has its problems, but I would rather have America’s problems than most any other countries in the world. When I tell you that we are living in an astonishing age of progress, I am not urging complacency. Far from it.

We have been through a century of extraordinary troubles, world wars, depressions, cold wars, and dozens of other smaller challenges. But each of those challenges has been met by a response.

Human Achievement

Human action and human achievement have managed to take on and best terrible problems. We forget our successes. In 2009, the H1N1 virus broke out in Mexico.

Now if you look back at the trajectory of these kinds of viruses, it’s quite conceivable that this one would have spread like the Asian flu of 1957 or 1968, which cost 4 million lives. But this time the Mexican health authorities identified the problem early, shared the information with the World Health Organization, learned best practices, tracked down where the outbreak took place, quarantined people, vaccinated others.

Global Response

The country went on a full-scale alert. In a very Catholic country, it was not allowed to go to church for three Sundays. Perhaps more importantly, you couldn’t go to a soccer game for three weeks.

But the result was that the virus was contained to the point where three months later, people asked what was the fuss and wondered whether we had overreacted. We hadn’t overreacted.

Collective Action

We had reacted. We had responded. And we had dealt with the problem.

There are other examples. In the 12 months following the economic peak in 2008, industrial production worldwide fell as much as it did in the first year of the Great Depression.

Economic Recovery

Equity prices and global trade actually fell more. Yet this time no Great Depression followed. Why?

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Because of the coordinated actions of governments around the world. 9-11 did not usher in an age of terrorism with al-Qaeda going from strength to strength.

Combating Terrorism

Why? Because countries cooperated in fighting them and other terror groups around the world with considerable success. When we come together, when we put aside our petty differences, when we cooperate, the results are astounding.

So when we look at all these problems we face, economic crises, terrorism, climate change, resource scarcity, keep in mind that these are real problems, but that the human reaction and response to them will be real. You can easily map out the big problem, but it’s much more difficult to map out the thousands of individual actions that governments, firms, organizations, researchers, scientists, and ordinary people will take that will collectively constitute the solution.

Betting on Graduates

In a sense, I’m betting on the graduates of this great university. I believe that your actions will have consequences. Your efforts will make a difference.

And turning to the graduates, I know at this kind of event I’m supposed to provide some advice. So, should you go into nanotechnology or bioengineering?

Future Trends

And the answer is, I haven’t a clue. I honestly don’t know what the great trends of the future or industries of the future will be, but I do know one thing, that human beings will probably continue to reward those talents of heart and mind that they have always rewarded for thousands of years. Intelligence, hard work, discipline, courage, perhaps above all, love and faith.

These are the things that at the end of the day make for a great life, one that is rewarded by the outside world, and equally importantly, a good life, one that is rewarded by only those you know best. These are the virtues that people honor.

Timeless Virtues

These are the virtues that people have built statues for 5,000 years, and to which they will build statues for the next 5,000 years. Well, nobody builds statues anymore. They build weird metal modernist sculptures with strange doodads going off, hanging off them, but you get my general point.

Trust yourself. You know what kind of life you should live.

Final Advice

You don’t need an ethics course to tell you what not to do. Trust in your instincts and you will build a great life, you will build a good life, and you will change the world. You know, I said at my age that I don’t have much specific wisdom to impart.

I have one final piece of advice for the graduates, and it is a piece of advice that is gained from experience, not books. Trust me about this.

Parental Love

You will never understand how much your parents love you until you have children of your own. Once you have children of your own, once you have children of your own, all that strange behavior, the stalking, the worrying, will all make sense. But do me a favor, don’t wait so long.

My mother lives 8,000 miles away and I think about this every day. Don’t wait so long. Get up today of all days and hug your parents and tell them you love them.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and to the graduates of Harvard, Godspeed. Thank you.

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