Mark Zuckerberg: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, and look, while again, I think it’s unequivocally the case that sort of certain kinds of progress in certain places to a certain extent can have harms and externalities and all the rest, and a really important part of progress is figuring out how do we mitigate those, how do we solve them and so on — I think climate change is probably kind of the foremost global example today. But I think it’s really important — or it is easy for us sitting here in the Bay Area in California to undervalue the prosperity and the kind of wealth we’ve been able to generate over the past couple hundred years. Since I was born, for example, global life expectancy has increased by about six years, and infant mortality has fallen by more than 50%. Again, I mentioned the statistic of the number of people who have left extreme poverty. This is incredibly important, right? And so I think there’s — we’re not the first people to say it, but there is a moral imperative to this kind of progress, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that fact. Yeah, I agree. I just think it’s important to acknowledge that a lot of these things are not uniform and you know from running a company that when you look at averages it hides a lot of issues. Your example on the rates of poverty going down I think is an interesting one in this because what a lot of people don’t particularly wanna talk about these days is that most of the benefit of people coming out of poverty has happened in China, and in some places in the world poverty has actually increased. So I generally agree with the premise — and I think studying this stuff will generally help us to make more progress in those places. I mean, that may be a good example because perhaps looking at some of the examples of what has done well in China could be applied to other places where there have been issues. But before we dive into the discussion on this, I just wanted to make sure that we didn’t cover this is a way that comes across as if every step forward comes without a cost. And I’m sure as we talk through the different examples, I mean, that’ll come up as well. Yeah, and we should emphasize that, you know, when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of “progress,” you know, I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly with many of the things we care about. But they’re definitely not the same thing. I think an important question for anybody interested in this area to think about is, well, how should we define progress? And what are the better and worse kinds of it. Again, in GDP, we have a relatively effective metric we can use across countries, but there already is interesting work on what might better measures be, and I think that’s really important to study.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.