I come from one of the most liberal, tolerant, progressive places in the United States, Seattle,

Washington. And I grew up with a family of great Seattlites. My mother was an artist, my father
was a college professor, and I am truly grateful for my upbringing, because I always felt
completely comfortable designing my life exactly as I saw fit. And in point of fact, I took a route
that was not exactly what my parents had in mind. When I was 19, I dropped out of college. And I
went on the road as a professional French horn player, which was my lifelong dream. I played
chamber music all over the United States and Europe, and I toured for a couple of years with a
great jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird. What a great life. And you know, my parents never
complained. They supported me all the way through it. It wasn't their dream. They used to tell
their neighbors and friends, "Our son, he's taking a gap decade."
There was, however, one awkward conversation about my lifestyle that I want to tell you about. I
was 27, and I was visiting my parents for Christmas, and I was cooking dinner with my mother,
and we were alone in the kitchen. And she was quiet, too quiet. Something was wrong. And she
said, "Your dad and I are really worried about you." And she said, "I want you to be completely
honest with me: have you been voting for Republicans?"
Now, the truth is, I wasn't really political, I was just a French horn player. But I had a bit of an
epiphany. You see, I had become an enthusiast for capitalism, and I want to tell you why that is. It
stems from a lifelong interest of mine in, poverty. When I was a kid growing up in Seattle, I
remember the first time I saw real poverty. We were a lower middle class family, but that's of
course not real poverty. That's not even close. The first time I saw poverty, and poverty's
face, was when I was six or seven years old, early 1970s. It was a picture in the National
Geographic Magazine of a kid who was my age in East Africa, and there were flies on his face
and a distended belly. And he wasn't going to make it, and I knew that, and I was helpless. Some
of you remember that picture, not exactly that picture, one just like it. It introduced the West to
grinding poverty around the world. Well, that vision kind of haunted me as I grew up and I went to
school and I dropped out and dropped in and started my family. And I wondered, what happened
to that kid? Or to people just like him all over the world? And so I started to study, even though I
wasn't in college, I was looking for the answer: what happened to the world's poorest
people? Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better?
And I found the answer, and it changed my life, and I want to share it with you.
See -- If you ask Americans, "Has poverty gotten worse or better around the world?", 70 percent
will say that hunger has gotten worse since the early 1970s. But here's the truth. Here's the
epiphany that I had that changed my thinking. From 1970 until today, the percentage of the
world's population living in starvation levels, living on a dollar a day or less, that percentage has
declined by 80 percent. There's been an 80 percent decline in the world's worst poverty since I
was a kid. And I didn't even know about it. This, my friends, that's a miracle. That's something we
ought to celebrate. It's the greatest antipoverty achievement in the history of mankind, and it
happened in our lifetimes.

So when I learned this, I asked, What made it possible? Because if you don't know why, you can't
do it again. If you want to replicate it and get the next two billion people out of poverty, because
that's what we're talking about: since I was a kid, two billion of the least of these, our brothers and
sisters, have been pulled out of poverty. I want the next two billion, so I've got to know why. And I
went in search of an answer. And it wasn't a political answer, because I didn't care. You know
what, I still don't care. I wanted the best answer from mainstream economists left, right and
center.
And here it is. There are five reasons that two billion of our brothers and sistershave been pulled
out of poverty since I was a kid. Number one: globalization. Number two: free trade.Number
three: property rights. Number four: rule of law. Number five: entrepreneurship. It was the free
enterprise system spreading around the world after 1970 that did that.
Now, I'm not naive. I know that free enterprise isn't everything we need to build a better
world. But that is great. And that's beyond politics. Here's what I learned. This is the
epiphany. Capitalism is not just about accumulation. At its best, it's about aspiration,which is what
so many people on this stage talk about, is the aspiration that comes from dreams that are
embedded in the free enterprise system. And we've got to share it with more people.
Now, I want to tell you about a second epiphany. The best quote I've ever heard to summarize
the thoughts that I've just given you about pulling people out of poverty is as follows: "Free
markets have created more wealth than any system in history. They have lifted billions out of
poverty."
Who said it? It sounds like Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan. Wrong. President Barack Obama
said that. Why do I know it by heart? Because he said it to me. Crazy. And I said, "What an
opportunity."
You know what I was a thinking? It was at an event that we were doing on the subject at
Georgetown University in May of 2015. And I thought, this is the solution to the biggest problem
facing America today. It's coming together around these ideas, liberals and conservatives, to help
people who need us the most. Now, I don't have to tell anybody in this room that we're in a
crisis, in America and many countries around the world with political polarization. It's risen to
critical, crisis levels. It's unpleasant. It's not right. There was an article last year in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is one of the most prestigious scientific
journals published in the West. And it was an article in 2014 on political motive
asymmetry. What's that? That's what psychologists call the phenomenon of assuming that your
ideology is based in love but your opponents' ideology is based in hate. It's common in world
conflict. You expect to see this between Palestinians and Israelis, for example. What the authors
of this article found was that in America today, a majority of Republicans and Democrats suffer
from political motive asymmetry? A majority of people in our country today who are politically
active believe that they are motivated by love but the other side is motivated by hate. Think about
it. Think about it. Most people are walking around saying, "You know, my ideology is based on

basic benevolence, I want to help people, but the other guys, they're evil and out to get me." You
can't progress as a society when you have this kind of asymmetry. It's impossible.
How do we solve it? Well, first, let's be honest: there are differences. Let's not minimize the
differences. That would be really nave.
There's a lot of good research on this. A veteran of the TED stage is my friend Jonathan
Haidt. He's a psychology professor at New York University. He does work on the ideology and
values and morals of different people to see how they differ. And he's shown, for example, that
conservatives and liberals have a very different emphasis on what they think is important. For
example, Jon Haidt has shown that liberals care about poverty 59 percent more than they care
about economic liberty. And conservatives care about economic liberty 28 percent more than
they care about poverty.
Irreconcilable differences, right? We'll never come together. Wrong. That is diversity in which lies
our strength. Remember what pulled up the poor. It was the obsession with
poverty, accompanied by the method of economic freedom spreading around the world. We need
each other, in other words, if we want to help people and get the next two billion people out of
poverty. There's no other way. How are we going to get that? We need innovative thinking. A lot
of it's on this stage. Social entrepreneurship. Yeah. Absolutely. Phenomenal. We need
investment overseas in a sustainable, responsible, ethical and moral way. Yes. Yes.
But you know what we really need? We need a new day in flexible ideology. We need to be less
predictable. Don't we? Do you ever feel like your own ideology is starting to get
predictable? Kinda conventional? Do you ever feel like you're always listening to people who
agree with you? Why is that dangerous? Because when we talk in this country about
economics, on the right, conservatives, you're always talking about taxes and regulations and big
government. And on the left, liberals, you're talking about economics, it's always about income
inequality. Now those are important things, really important to me, really important to you. But
when it comes to lifting people up who are starving and need us today, those are distractions. We
need to come together around the best ways to mitigate poverty using the best tools at our
disposal, and that comes only when conservatives recognize that they need liberals and their
obsession with poverty, and liberals need conservatives and their obsession with free
markets. That's the diversity in which lies the future strength of this country, if we choose to take
it.
So how are we going to do it? How are we going to do it together? I've got to have some action
items, not just for you but for me. Action item number one: remember, it's not good enough just to
tolerate people who disagree. It's not good enough. We have to remember that we need people
who disagree with us, because there are people who need all of us who are still waiting for these
tools. Now, what are you going to do? Where does this start? It starts here. You know, all of us in
this room, we're blessed. We're blessed with people who listen to us. We're blessed with
prosperity. We're blessed with leadership. When people hear us, with the kind of unpredictable
ideology, then maybe people will listen. Maybe progress will start at that point. That's number

one. Number two: I'm asking you and I'm asking me to be the person specifically who blurs the
lines, who is ambiguous, who is hard to classify. If you're a conservative, be the conservative who
is always going on about poverty and the moral obligation to be a warrior for the poor. And if
you're a liberal, be a liberal who is always talking about the beauty of free markets to solve our
problems when we use them responsibly.
If we do that, we get two things. Number one: we get to start to work on the next two billion and
be the solution that we've seen so much of in the past and we need to see more of in the future.
That's what we get. And the second is that we might just be able to take the ghastly holy war of
ideology that we're suffering under in this country and turn it into a competition of ideas based on
solidarity and mutual respect. And then maybe, just maybe, we'll all realize that our big
differences aren't really that big after all.
Thank you.