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Good to go. So, good evening everybody. My name is Tim Bezley and I'm delighted to welcome you to the LSE this evening um for Jeff Sax's lecture which is supported by the Huth initiative for a new political economy which brings
Jeff Sachs at LSE on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations at 250: geography, trade, and why Asia's return to center stage was foreseeable.
Key Takeaways
- Geography shapes trade and development: coastal access and transport costs fundamentally structure the division of labor.
- Smith's insights remain relevant, as his prediction of a rebalancing of global power through trade appears to be unfolding.
- Asia's economic resurgence is a return to its historical position rather than a wholly new phenomenon.
- Long-run economic divergence was an anomaly tied to the era of European imperialism, and income convergence is the more normal state under peace.
- Sustainable development and reduced military spending are presented as key policy priorities.
What the video covers
- Introduction by Tim Bezley of LSE, presenting Jeff Sachs (Columbia University, UN SDSN) for a lecture marking 250 years since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
- Sachs argues Smith's book is underread and rich in concepts: division of labor, trade as its mechanism, and specialization limited by market scale.
- Smith observed that division of labor begins at coasts because sea transport is far cheaper than overland transport, a key idea for understanding geography and development.
- Landlocked countries are structurally disadvantaged, a theme drawn from Sachs's decades of advising such nations, starting with Bolivia.
- Sachs highlights Smith's view that the 1492 and 1498 sea routes reconnected the Old and New Worlds, with lasting harm to native populations.
- Smith predicted that trade and the flow of knowledge would eventually rebalance global power, which Sachs sees as occurring today, with Asia returning to center stage.
- Sachs frames the post-2000 period as a multipolar world, noting China's economy now exceeds that of the United States by IMF measures.
- The lecture covers long-run economic history, including agricultural productivity, nitrogen cycles, empire formation, and population distribution across Asia.
- Sachs argues that historically, income levels per person were broadly similar worldwide until divergence after roughly 1815-1950, with convergence returning when peace prevails.
- He discusses mechanized agriculture, with the US feeding its population using about 1% of the workforce, and calls for sustainable development over military spending.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and welcome
- 05:00Smith's Wealth of Nations and its enduring ideas
- 20:00Geography, coasts, and landlocked countries
- 35:00Columbus, the reconnection of the Old and New Worlds
- 50:00Rebalancing of power and the return of Asia
- 60:00Long-run data on geography, agriculture, and population
- 75:00Empires, imperialism, and divergence
- 90:00Policy implications and Q&A opening
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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people together across the LSC community to develop a new economic paradigm for fairer more sustainable prosperity. Uh Jeff Saxs needs very little introduction. Uh he's a university professor and director of the center for sustainable development at Columbia University and president of the UN
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sustainable development solutions network. As well as making major academic contributions, he's served as special advisor to three United Nations Secretaries General and is the author of numerous books including the ages of globalization, geography, technology and institutions and the end of poverty.
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The title of Jeff's lecture this evening is Geography and the Wealth of Nations. And its title pays tribute to the fact that it's 250 years since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published. Uh he'll speak for around 50 minutes and
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then we'll be there'll be plenty of time for Q&A. Um and uh and that will include our online online audience who I particularly want to welcome um uh uh to to the event. Jeff, the floor is yours.
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Thank you, Tim. I love being at LSE. Uh this has been uh always a high point for me throughout my whole career and I was just reflecting with uh professor Richard Leard, one of my heroes in our profession uh that this is the 35th
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anniversary of uh the Robins lectures that I gave about uh Poland's transformation back in 1991. So, uh, that was a a grand event for me and I feel the same this evening. I'm just thrilled to be here and congratulations
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on this new series and for including me in this new series. And as Professor Bezley just said, this is the 250th anniversary of the Wealth of Nations.
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And frankly, I think we should have done a better job celebrating it. I'm sure there were conferences that I don't know about, but there weren't enough. There wasn't enough said about that remarkable book. By the way, for students, um,
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everyone reads a little snippet about Adam Smith or knows about the wealth of nations or knows that it he was the start of classical economics as labeled by Karl Marx. But I don't know. My guess is most of you have not read The Wealth
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of Nations because it's an old book. It's got no equations. Um, what difference could it possibly make? It's actually incredibly fun to read, by the way, and brilliant.
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It's not just a famous book. It's it's actually an astoundingly interesting book. I admit not every chapter, so you don't have to laboriously go chapter by chapter, but it's got some grand themes.
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And also, it's got economics practiced in the most wonderful way, which is that he was thinking in concepts. Of course, he introduced the division of labor as fundamental. He introduced trade as the mechanism of the division of labor. He
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introduced specialization as limited by the scale of the market. All rather wonderful ideas. But he also knew the world. He was really a scholar. So he had studied world history. He had studied geography. He had studied the uh
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contemporaneous world that he was in. and it shows. And so he talked about the price of transport in different places and mechanisms, very specific, but then drew major principles from that. One of a sentence that for me was a galvanizing
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sentence for uh lots of studies and lots of articles that I published was his observation that most division of labor begins at the coast and only gradually moves inland because sea trade is so much less costly than overland trade. So
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you get uh coastalbased populations engaged in trade. Trade is the basis of division of labor. then you can chart the path of uh the division of labor uh spatially. And he talked about landlock countries which became a a big theme in
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my career because I advise lots of landlock countries. Landlock countries tend to be difficult places. My wife would say only desperate places would call me uh for any kind of help. So almost by definition it was landlocked countries that were so desperate that
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they even went to a crazy professor to ask what should we do? But Smith actually pointed this out. Uh and it took me a while to even recognize that when I started advising landlock countries which was in Bolivia 41 years
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ago. But then I read the text and I said, "Oh, that's really smart. That's actually quite helpful for this." One of the things that Smith said which is really a theme for this lecture and for four articles that I will post that
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I hope you will read. They're long but I need your comments back because I think they're interesting.
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uh is about the long duray of world history as Fernandell would have called it the long sweep of world economic history and a point that Smith made that's quite fundamental is he said that the we'll see it in a moment the discovery of the
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seaw routts from Europe to the Americas Columbus Christopher Columbus and the seaw route from Europe to Asia, Vasco Dama, which were within six years of each other, 1492 and 1498, he said were the two most significant events in the history of mankind.
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Wow, what a weird statement. And how brilliant, by the way, uh and how incisive. But he said that, and I'll we'll see exactly a piece of the quote in a moment, but he wrote that they're the most significant events in the
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history of mankind because they united humanity. They reconnected the old world and the new world which had been separated for the previous uh 10,000 years or 12,000 years because after the end of the ice age and the sea level rose the
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land corridor that connected Asia with the Americas which had was the population route for the Native Americans who lived in the Americas before Columbus's arrived.
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That land route called Bingia was submerged as the ice melted and the sea level rose by many tens of meters and for 12,000 years basically the old world and the new world were separated and Columbus inadvertently reconnected them
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and Smith says this is the most significant event in mankind and he says this should help everybody but in In fact, it emiserated the native populations of the Americas and of Asia, he called it, of the West Indies
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and the East Indies. And then he he explains why he doesn't get it exactly right. Uh I'll talk about that in in a moment. But um then he says, "But someday those uh native populations will rise in force and rebalance the world again."
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And he said the most likely way that that will come is through trade itself because it will be through the flow of knowhow. He doesn't use exactly our words of technological diffusion but he says it will be through the flow of
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knowledge and knowledge is carried by trade. So someday international trade will rebalance the world and it will lead to an equal power in different regions of the world that will stop the abuses by the European empires.
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This is unbelievably smart. And what's for me unbelievably interesting is that's exactly the world we're in right now. The world has rebalanced in front of our eyes in this generation.
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really after 1950 onward which was the end of the imperial European imperial age but especially we feel it now after the year 2000 so I would say that for the last 25 years we've been in a multipolar world
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not just a multipolar world but even as defined by the IMF the ultimate arbiter China's bigger than the United States economy And that is a fundamental change of the balance of power and the European and US share of the world. The so-called west
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which was the dominant part of the world is by far not dominant anymore. And Asia has returned to center stage. I'd like to say it's now half the world economy.
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So that's two things about Smith that I'll just stop and then I will talk about some data. But first, he predicted this. He didn't give a timeline.
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He didn't talk about the GDP numbers because that concept didn't exist and wouldn't exist for another uh hundred 50 years roughly till we started to be able to measure these things in some uh some quantitative meaningful sense. But
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he did say there will be a rebalancing of the world. And the second point I want to mention is he looked forward to it which is an incredible tribute to the Scottish Enlightenment I have to say and to Adam Smith as a human being and a
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very decent human being because he said that's what the world needs is balance in which every part of the world thrives and that is a great concept for economics.
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I think it's the most important fundamental concept for us. It's the reason why we should celebrate China's rise. Not bemoone it. Not say, "Oh, how horrible." But to say, "My god, this is phenomenal. 1.5 billion people, 1.4 billion people who have been lifted from
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extreme poverty in the last 50 years. Great." Instead, of course, we bemoan it. It's horrible. We have to get ready for war. We have to build up our military strength because these people don't read Adam Smith and they don't
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read Aristotle and they don't have their heads screwed on, right? We call them our political leaders. uh but uh they are making a mess of the world because they don't understand economics and they don't understand uh why it's good why
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the common good is good not just uh their small vantage point in the world one more point I will say is that Smith's idea that there will be a rebalancing became It didn't work for about 150 years uh
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from the time Smith wrote until the middle of the 20th century and it didn't work because the natural economic forces that would have made it work were blocked by European imperialism and by Japanese imperialism uh visav East Asia and especially China. So the
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imperial age was an age of divergence in which the powerful became richer and more powerful and the weaker became uh subservient uh and uh basically suffered extraction, abuse, uh in some cases enslavement uh and uh in some cases
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um famine and uh uttered disaster. at the hands of the imperialists. What makes the current age work for what Smith said is that the end of imperialism, which came at the end of World War II, basically after two European civil wars,
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opened the way for sovereignty in the rest of the world. And sovereignty opened the way for catching up and for narrowing the gaps that had arisen during the high imperial age. And that's what led to this period of convergence
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that we are in right now that Smith anticipated 250 years ago. Now it is the mainstream growth theory. My colleague at Harvard Robert Barrow wrote beautifully about this. I think his insights about uh conditional convergence are extremely important.
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They had a big influence in my understanding of events, but they were contingent on a world order in which countries could pursue their own destiny. And that only came after 1950.
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All of this means for me that we have a a big task of understanding the shape of the world.
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How it came to be. How we are now in an age of convergence. What happened that led to that massive age of divergence?
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Is the return of Asia to center stage really a return? Is it something new? Is it something that we could have anticipated and should have anticipated?
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Is it what Smith anticipated? Those are all the questions that motivated the four papers that are uh behind some of the slides I'm going to show you. I can't go into detail on anything because time is very limited, but I want to
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touch a few high points with you. So, I'll see. Oops. That's probably Don't touch that again.
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How do we get that off? Okay. Can I do that? Yes. Okay. So, I'm through Smith and through my own lucky experience of advising landlock countries or countries high in the mountains or a lot of countries burdened by malaria.
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I felt viscerally for a long time that physical geography was absolutely fundamental in understanding the shape of the world economy and world history and I assert that to be true and I praise Adam Smith for knowing it uh in
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certain aspects. He did not understand the role of pathogens in history because it would be another 100 years before the germ theory was the scientific established theory by Koh and Ptor. So he didn't understand what led to the
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misery of the West Indies because the main thing that led to the misery of the West Indies was oldw world pathogens that were carried by the Europeans and that hit a virgin population that had never seen most of the diseases of the
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old world because they didn't carry those p those pathogens didn't even exist in that form 10,000 or 12,000 years ago when the Asians came across Bingia and so they saw these disease carriers plague and and uh and many other
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diseases for the first time and it destroyed the population of the Native Americans around 90% or 95% of the population died between 1500 and 1600 some by war some by suppression but a lot by pathogens pathogens have shaped
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history. Fundamentally, rivers have shaped history, climate has shaped history, mountains have shaped history. The role of geography in understanding these events is absolutely phenomenal and that's really uh the basis of what uh I I want to just share
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with you in some broad outlines. So, as I said, my favorite sentences of the Wealth of Nations are that the discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are
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the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. By uniting in some measure the most distant parts of the world, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial.
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Then he says at the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans that they were unable to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote
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countries and then hereafter perhaps the natives of those countries may grow stronger or those of Europe may grow weaker to rebalance the world. So what I want to describe is how to understand these events in a longer sweep of
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history. And my history in these papers is 2,000 years for most of it, 3,000 years for part of it. And what I have done, our beautiful age right now is we have data that have been assembled that are imperfect but are extremely
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interesting for world populations at every century benchmark for the last 2500 years. We have political boundaries that have been assembled for the last 2500 years. We have land use estimates, estimates of city populations and estimates of farm uh farming populations or land use types
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of farming for 2,000 years. Much of it developed by in the Netherlands by projects that Angus Madison started decades ago and that continue to be built. but now on a geographic information system basis. And what I have done is put all of this on a common
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grid. The politics, the land use, the climate zones, the physical geography, the population estimates, the urban extents, the imperial extents to try to understand what this can tell us of the broad sweep. And the main points are the
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following. The food system was the great shaper of the world economy for thousands of years.
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In fact, it is the defining element of the world economy, I would say, until around 1800.
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The only fundamental change from the principle of food system being the definer came in the 20th century as I'll emphasize with the invention of synthetic uh nitrogen fertilizers because this was the first time in world history that you could break the
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fundamental constraint of growing crops which is to have the right nutrient in the right place at the right time and fertilizer changed everything. That is a new phenomenon. The haberbash process of nitrogen-based fertilizer is 1912 and its diffusion is in throughout the
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20th century and incomplete by the way in Africa until today where fertilizer is not used for because of poverty and lack of economic systems and so yields on crops are desperately low. But for the world as a whole, there was no
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fertilizer, especially nitrogen fertilizer in the uh artificial sense for almost all of our history. And so, as I will emphasize, strangely enough, though it has not been a feature of economic history very much, the nitrogen constraint is probably the
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single most important defining constraint of where people lived, what the population scales were, how they farmed, where cities were, and where political systems were. Strange, but actually quite notable. Second, Maltus was basically wrong. And the theories that we say about Maltus that there is a
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somehow a land constraint and if you ease the land constraint by a productivity increase, you get a population increase and that drives the living standards back down until fertility and mortality balance again is basically not right.
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What limited human populations was not land for almost all of history. And the simple thing to note is that the world population was around 400 million or 500 million people uh up until the 19th century. And so we were using a small
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part of arable land. the entire human history. Land was never really the constraint. What was the constraint was survival mortality and interestingly mortality as best we can judge was not limited by food. It was basically pathogen driven.
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And so there was constant plague uh and other epidemics that routed populations every few hundred years. Those pathogens eventually evolved and those epidemics basically went away. Not because we got richer, but basically because there was enough time and genetic drift from these
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pathogens which by the way were in a way human created because most of our diseases are somehow related to agriculture, somehow related to animal reservoirs, somehow related to zonatotic events thousands of years ago. But basically we adapted to the pathogen set
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and that broke the population constraint. So I argue that the issue is food systems but not in the Malthusian sense. What was holding back population was that it kept getting wiped out uh every 100 or 200 or 300 years in large
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parts of the world. Third, population densities differed radically around the world already 2,000 years ago.
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Why? Nitrogen. Weird. Where could you grow food on a densely settled basis? And that turns out to be not many places only the temperate zones or places with aluvial soils where you have flooding and the nutrients are replenished like
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the Nile or uh the Indis or the Yellow River for example or the Tigris and the Euphrates where you had thick very thick population densities because of a constant aluvial replenishment. ment of nitrogen and other soil nutrients or
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something extremely important and interesting and that is that patty rice replenishes its own nitrogen.
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It's its own fertilizer because patty rice flooded rice which is essentially unique to South and East Asia during most of human history has cyanoacteria in the root structures that produce that fix nitrogen and they are therefore a fertilizer machine and they allow annual
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cropping of rice. And where you could grow rice in flooded patties, you had high population densities. And so for 2,000 years, all the evidence is that India and China were packed with people.
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Europe was kind of middle. Africa very low densities and the Americas very low densities.
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And that I argue is because of different food systems. Now high population density creates states.
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And so where there were organized large states is where there were large populations. And the quintessential case is China.
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China's had the largest continuous organized state of human history. In fact, it's the only place for 2,000 years that was almost always a unified large state typically with about 20% of the world population in it. No other part of the world has anything like that
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record. Second is India which has had long periods of unity under the uh Delhi Sultenate under the Moguls under the British Empire under the uh current uh uh Indian uh polity but nothing like China's record of almost not quite
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unbroken but 80% plus unity of a large state since 2,200 years and that's based on a very dense population and a su and a a unity that did not come to uh other parts of the world. Europe is the other
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place of relatively high population density. Not like the riverine systems of China or India but relatively high population because Europe also solved the nitrogen problem in a distinctive way of mixed farming of animals whose excretita were used to fertilize the
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fields. That's also quite a distinctive farm system not available in the Americas and in Africa for very specific reasons.
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Europe did not politically unify the same way after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire which was 476.
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So what's interesting is you have two uh cases of relatively high population density. High in East Asia, relatively high in Europe. Europe fragmented in 476, never unified again. And uh Asia unified especially in East Asia unified in 221
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BC broke apart for about 300 years from 200 to 500 roughly then unified from 500 till today with very short breaks. So there's a I try to argue that this is quite a significant uh feature. The last point that I would say is that you have
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large states in Asia especially China and India. You have uh many states in Europe, hundreds of individual polies of course because you have dupdoms and uh and uh uh princely states and uh and uh uh all of the different um uh n early
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protonation states of Europe as well generally fighting with each other for more than a thousand year for basically 1500 ers until today unfortunately because Europe seems to like to fight uh and does not seem to have an idea of
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peace uh as a uh a strategy only war as a strategy. Um but Europe ended up dominating the world for about 250 years depending on where you date it. I think it's probably right to say from around 1800
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to 1950, maybe from 1815 to 1950 because you had to get rid of the Napoleonic wars first and then the 19th century was Britain's century. Uh Britain created the largest empire in world history. uh 29 million square kilometers, about a quarter of
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the world population. Nothing like it uh has ever been seen before and nothing like it will ever be seen again, I believe. Um but it lasted a quite short time. Uh it lasted roughly about 130 years and then it ended. By
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the way, uh there's a wonderful quotation of Joseph Chamberlain, one of the great imperialists at the end of the 19th century, saying that uh Britain's empire will last forever. Uh because uh it who could compete with Britain basically what Americans say right now.
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Uh which means that the end is very near uh to all of this. Um, and the naivee is something that is true throughout history. It's called hubris. It's the uh the the arrogance before the the pride before the fall. Um, but we have this
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200 years where Europe dominated and that requires of course an explanation. The explanation that was given for a long time was Europe's superior uh in one of many different ways depending on who was the proponent of it. it's either
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Christian or it's white or it's got the uh right civilization uh or it's genetically uh superior race which unfortunately even the wonderful humanist Charles Darwin uh said in the descent of man in 1871 that the savages would be eliminated uh
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by natural selection uh And um he meant African populations specifically at that point. Of course just to Charles Darwin was a great scientist and also a very wonderful person completely wrong about this but reflective of the dominant view of this
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issue in the end of the 19th century. But what's interesting is actually of course the African population will rise in this century uh from 1950 being around 9% of the world population to being around 35% of the world population
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by 2100 and the reason is nitrogen uh because uh until the 20th century Africa could not sustain intensive agriculture but With fertilizer, Africa can sustain a vastly large population. And that's the population that it's on its way to
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sustain. All of this as an end point is my last point, which is we're back in a multi-olar world. The West should give up on any idea that its natural superiority means that it rules because that's completely p. and the United
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States, the biggest challenge in this world geopolitically is for the United States to calm down uh and get its uh head on straight. But I wish the British government would also calm down a little bit. Too too much uh too much
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rousophobia, too much wararm mongering. We'll see what tomorrow's budget brings, but if it brings a call for more military, please reject it. It's absurd.
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Uh this is uh this is the last thing in the world that anyone needs. It's much cheaper to talk and work out mutual security than it is to have this escalation of war. So I'm probably have used all my time. Uh but I
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want to show you a couple of 10 more minutes. Yeah. Okay. I I want to there's actually interesting stuff to say. Um, wait a minute. Hold on.
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Yeah, maybe this is interesting. Um this this is a model modeled data of what kind of food systems were used in uh 1500. So the red is patty rice. You can see where patty rice is. These are rough estimates and in the
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papers there is a full methodology that explains uh the derivations and uh and the interpretations of the data but basically the brown is what's called Sweden agriculture or slash and burn agriculture.
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It is agriculture of very low population density because you farm. When you farm, you grow food. The food has nitrogen.
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That's the protein. You eat the protein. If you poop, not in your field, but in your home. And the the nitrogen doesn't get back to the field, you have depleted the nitrogen from the field. Okay, that's the basic problem of nitrogen.
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You eat you extract nitrogen and you eat it someplace else and you excrete most of the nitrogen that you eat actually but not in the fields. And the nitrogen that you excrete volatilizes or uh it turns back into atmospheric
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nitrogen N2 rather than some kind of usable nitrogen by plants which is some partially reduced nitrogen, some nitrate or some molecule that the plants can absorb. That's the nitrogen problem. If you want to farm continuously, you have to put nitrogen back in the soil.
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One way to do that is to take your poop and put it back in the soil. And in East Asia, in some places in Japan, that was done. That's night soil. And it was done in places in China. It was not done in
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most places in human history. It was a very highly organized activity of people that collected the excretita and brought it back to the fields. And it took a densely settled population to justify such actions. But most of the time
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that's not how you solve the nitrogen problem. So how do you solve the nitrogen problem? One way is you grow food for a few years, the nitrogen is depleted in the soil and then you let it for 20 years.
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That's the normal way because then nature refixes the nitrogen biologically and through lightning and you get reactive nitrogen again in the soil but it takes 20 years to replenish and that's what Sweden agriculture or slash and burn agriculture is. It means you
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can't crop a place continuously. So you have a huge area and you move around and you crop a place for a couple of years and then you move someplace else. The population density and equilibrium is very low. So that's one solution.
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All of the Americas had that solution and most of Africa had that solution and it's was until the 20th century really the only practical solution in a lot of the human tropics because in the tropics you could not do the other
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solutions. So what is another solution? Another solution is you have a farm and then you have a lot of grazing area and your animals graze. They pick up nitrogen from that distant part, not from where you're cropping. You bring
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them back into the fold. They excrete the nitrogen. You collect it. You put it on the soil. That's the European mixed farming system that works. That's a mixed animal human farming system. In order for that to work, you need a lot
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of things. It's not You need the animals first of all. And if the animals can't survive because of tripanosmiasis and uh and uh other animal diseases, which is true especially in the African context, you can't keep uh livestock. You also
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need a dry season or a cold season. You gather the animals in the cold season.
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You collect their manure. You put it onto the fields. The cold stops the volatilization of the nitrogen back into the air. And so you need a way to make sure that the nitrogen doesn't leech into the groundwater or doesn't escape
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back into the air. That requires usually cold. So mixed animal farming is generally temperate zone farming. That's the second way. A third way is flooding because if you have aluvial flooding, river flooding, that brings nutrients from the upper reaches of the river. And
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the classic case of that is the Nile of course, which flooded until the Aswan Dam was built, flooded every year. It defined Egyptian civilization for 5,000 years. It brought nutrients, not only nitrogen, but it brought nitrogen and other nutrients across all of the Nile
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basin, including the Nile Delta, and it supported a huge population. And indeed, the Nile Delta fed Rome.
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Literally, the the grain was shipped from Egypt to feed Rome. And one of the reasons Rome fell was as the empire expanded, the grain from Egypt was diverted to Constantinople because Egypt fed Constantinople.
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And then Rome was dependent on other grain supplies further to the west of North Africa. And when the Vandals captured those areas, Rome fell because it didn't even have a food supply left in the end. So you needed aluvial
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agriculture. So that's another trick for supporting a high population density because it brings the nitrogen. And then as I said, patty rice is the genius crop because it fixes its own nitrogen.
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It's incredibly labor intensive by the way. So you don't have an easy life. You have a huge population density working round the year in rice fields. But the density is enormous. And it's many times 10, 20, 100 times higher population
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density than in Sweden and maybe 10 times higher population density than in a typical mixed farming environment. So, I track all of these things in this study and use estimates about nitrogen uptake from the crops and the nitrogen
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replenishment to estimate where the populations would live. And we have an incredible concentration of population in the world. 10% of the habitable land area held uh more than 50% of the population routinely. And this was South Asia and East Asia. So those huge
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populations of China and India, that's been true for 2,000 years. That is a farm system effect. That is a rice effect. That's an aluvial agriculture effect more than anything else. It's not a political effect. It's not geopolitics. It's not
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anything different from where you could grow food at very high population densities. And this is where cities developed. Cities developed where there was a high enough population density to feed non-aggricultural populations.
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Generally, our agricultural technology from the last 10,000 years has been barely enough to feed humanity. And in bad periods a lot of people died but the surplus is maybe 10% 5 to 10% and that's what created cities that
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surplus either by tribute or extraction or even market forces enabling it. But you need a surplus to have a city an agricultural surplus. Urbanization everywhere in the world was 10% or less for almost all of human history. And it
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only started to rise to 20% or 30% in 1700 and 1800 with improvements of agriculture in the Netherlands and in England and into and most of the world remained 5 to 10% urban because there was a very small surplus. But where was
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that urban? No Sweden system could support a city. The population densities were far too low. You couldn't collect taxes. You couldn't base a city on a very uh diffuse population. So the cities of the world are incredibly concentrated.
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You It's hard for you to see, but uh if you can see the dots, this is where the world's largest cities are. only in one band that historians uh have come to call the lucky latitudes.
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They didn't really define why those latitudes are lucky. They're lucky because they support a high population density. Nitrogen is actually the key story of that. But almost no cities of large size, these are 48 cities in 1500 with a 100,000 population plus. And this
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is the miracle of our data right now. By the way, I didn't make any of this data.
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I just put it all on a common grid. So, what do we know about population size here? What do we know about where populations are? What do we know about city boundaries? Well, turns out it's here. And it all sits on mixed farming
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or on uh aluvial or flooded farming. Aluvial meaning river or flooded meaning rice basically and that's where the big cities of the world are. Now that's where the empires of the world are as well. And um all empires are based on
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sustained agriculture which is based on intensive which produces intensive populations and even empires like the Mongol Empire which is a step region of course very low population density tiny population but conquered the largest contiguous land area empire in history
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23 million square kilometers. The actual Mongol Empire was settled agriculture ruled over by a small nomadic conquering class. That empire lasted 100 years only but it exploded in 1206 when Chingghaskhan united the tribes. uh it ended uh not a
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hundred years later. It ended about 150 years later and that was but where the empire was was the settled populations again because you need to extract uh this this is showing uh where the states are because we now have
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not only city uh GIS but we have um we have the imperial maps as well at regular time intervals going back 2,000 years in a project called the Cleopatria uh Cleo history patria cities Cleopatra uh Cleopatra but Cleopatria and it gives
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a wonderful GIS coded database for uh the city populations. Final point I want to make is that you have settled populations across that band but you have unity in East Asia and you have fragmentation in western uh on
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the western side in Europe. That's an interesting question in and of itself why that happened. And I offer some ideas in one of these four papers. Uh this is my basic point. China is a box.
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Uh China is a box where the north is the drylands. The south is the tropical rainforest and tropical disease border with with the Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and today's Myanmar. The east of the box is the Pacific Ocean and the
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west of the box is the Himalayas. And that box is defined China for 2,200 years almost with with very little change. There's some footnotes to that.
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Second, most of China is on two rivers that run east west. Yellow River in the north and Yangze River to the south. And in uh five 618 I think it is uh the Grand Canal links the two rivers and China's unified
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and they have the dates of but at any event you have a box and you have a unity of most of the population also in 221 BC ingeniously uh the Chin dynasty created a unified logoraphic script Chinese characters that could be
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read in any language. Hard for us to understand, I have to say. Uh but anyway, that's how it is.
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I've tried to understand that more precisely for decades. I don't I'm not sure I really understand it. But if you speak fukanese or Cantonese or Shanghai which are called dialects but are actually separate languages. Thank you.
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The script is the same and that was developed already in 221 BC. And it enabled a uniform examination system for a unified state also. So everybody could read one language and study one cannon.
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Basically since 146 BC the confusion cannon and that also created a a unity India little bit different because the geography is quite different in the north and the south of India. The population origins are quite different also because the northern Indian
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populations probably came from uh probably came from uh around Iran uh and uh uh step regions.
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Uh but in any event, India semi-unified, Europe fragmented uh and it fragmented in 476 and it did not have any of these features that could lead to long-term unity. Final point and then I'll stop because I know that the time is up.
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Asia had has had for 2,000 years 60 to 70% of the world population for the reasons that I've said.
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China, India together usually between 35 to 50% of the world population and then the rest of Asia lower density total of Asia somewhere usually 60 to 70% of the world population for almost all of history income levels per person were roughly
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equal because every place was essentially uh agrarian uh mostly rural, mostly eking out an existence and not very much different until the 19th century uh and especially the industrial revolution. And so according to Madison data, which is what
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I used for this study, uh the population share and the share of world output was basically the same for as long as one can gather. And I think Madison was not wrong in making those estimates of GDP and GDP per capita that basically
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equality across the world that changed late as you know there is a big debate whether it changed in 1700 or 1800. This is the Pomerance debate. How recent is it? What accounts for it? To my mind, two things can be said about this. The
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divergence came late because even if it's 1700, that's late. And the interesting point is why it persisted. And to my mind, it persisted because of power, not because of economics. In other words, there would have been a rapid diffusion of these
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technologies because the Ottoman Empire was not stagnant and the Egyptian uh state was not stagnant in ideas and China was not stagnant and paralyzed.
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But it was prevented basically from adopting technologies and adapting technologies by imperialism. That's my shorthand interpretation.
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And convergence only was restored with, as I said, independence and the end of the imperial period. What this means is that up until 1820, the share of Asia in world output was 60%.
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It fell to around 19% in 1950 after what the Chinese called a century of humiliation and India suffered basically 200 years of imperial domination which did not treat India well and so this was the low point.
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independence 1947 for India 19 49 for People's Republic of China now we're back to 50% of the world output being in Asia I call it the return of Asia to center stage and I think that this is uh
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why what we're experiencing in this period is completely normal and completely what Adam Smith brilliantly said I want to show you one more point that is interesting. This is the uh centrid of the world economy and world population. So if you calculate the
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center of gravity using uh geodistic distance or economic distance and you can do this in a variety of ways and it's quite interesting to do. uh the center of gravity of the world was always in Asia naturally because that's where the world
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population was centered. But in the 19th century the economic center of gravity went from here to there. Britain was the center of the world economy uh literally uh in 1950 and it felt like that probably a few blocks from here maybe
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here. But the point is this was really odd from the point of view of long-term world history. And now we're on the way back. Uh th this is uh now wait a minute 1950.
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Now we are uh somewhere around there uh in uh the center of gravity of the economy coming back to now the center of Asia and using uh kind of standard convergence equations the curve swings down here because Africa becomes a much larger uh
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center of the world economy and Interestingly, if you calculate the distance between the population center of gravity and the economic center of gravity, if population and output per capita, I mean, if output per capita is equal everywhere, then of course they're
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the same. And that's what you find, which was no difference in distance between the population center of gravity and the economic center of gravity. Suddenly there's 6,000 kilometers difference between where the population center of the world is and where the economic
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center of the world is. Now we're coming back down to what I think is normal again that where people live there will be a relatively equal level of income in the world over time. As long as there's peace
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and independence, there will be convergence. One of the implications of that, by the way, is that Africa will be a very large part of the world economy by the middle of this century and later in the 21st century because Africa, as I
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said, will become about a third of the world population. What makes that possible again is that we don't have the constraint that we had before of nitrogen. There's plenty of nitrogen that can be made in uh by the
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habbash process and now it can be done in a green way as well and that is going to change world history. Thank you very much.
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Okay. So, thank you very much, Jeff. I think I'm going to go straight to the floor. I'm going to take questions in um bashes of three. Um I'll ask you to be super brief. I don't want statements. I
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want short punchy questions and then we'll we'll go back to Jeff and I will take also some questions from the online audience. Um so, the first hand I saw is um down the front Right.
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Sorry. Can I grab the mic? Oh, sure. Yeah. So, the the roving mics, don't ask your question till the mic comes, but keep yourself super brief, please. Um, so that was the first person I saw.
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Right. Right there. Um, then I'm going to come down there. Okay. So, pass that along. Um, okay. Short and punchy.
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Uh, thank you very much for that. Nigel Jeffrey from King's College London. You've emphasized u agricultural production. Um what about consumption and the relative advantage of um plant-based diets being more efficient than uh meat-based diets and the impact
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that that could have had in terms of the eastern population. Okay. So question about consumption.
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I'll come down to the front here please. The next question. Thank you. Good to see you again. Uh we last met at Harvard 1999. uh where yes thank you I'm here the question is also related to uh uh Mark Carney uh who went to Harvard
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as well so he proposed the middle power alliance y and that is anchored on shared values and technology if you were to apply your nitrogen-based food systems to assess which country should be included in that from Asia and Africa which ones would
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you recommend and why okay and then question back there and then I'll come back to Jeff and then we'll just keep going. If people are brief, we'll get a lot of questions in.
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So, thank you. Uh Jeffrey, we spoke in the days of Skype. Hi. Before Zoom, Fernando Morales de la Cruz, we spoke about coffee. I I dare to ask you because you were so passionate about the sustainable development goals
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and involved in coffee. Um, do you really believe that the coffee industry will change one day soon so people can have three meals a day when they live in the coffee lands and they can actually protect the environment? Because if I
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have a coffee at LSE, fair trade coffee, less than 1% goes back to the farmers.
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That's not fair trade. Thank you. Okay, so three questions there, Jeeoff. Great. um in terms of uh consumption and production. um at least in the span of history from what I have been able to uh discern from uh the literature as a
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second the uh secondary literature there is not a big difference of caloric consumption across the world in history.
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This is not uh the differences are not primarily either uh food loss or harvest loss or different levels of uh consumption of proteins and and calories. So, for most of human history, from what I can see, uh people lived, as I said, uh 2,200
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calories a day. Uh and they obtain that depending on what the uh and the endemic species were, what animals uh were present, uh what kind of farm system could be sustained. But I don't see myself and I will go back to examine
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whether there's something decisive on the uh per capita consumption side that accounts for these differences. Again, it's also um generally taken to be the case that there were no significant differences in output per person. Of course for the macromadison data that's
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mostly crop output uh that's being measured in fact because these economies were overwhelmingly agriculture. So I don't think that differences come from the consumption side but I will uh see if uh if if there is any uh more mileage
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that I can uh find on that. Um, in terms of uh the middle income alliance, first Mark Carney was uh one of our best students in the Harvard economics department in the n in the 1980s. We're very proud of him uh and proud of him
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standing up to Mr. Trump uh which is an important thing to do. Um but a few things.
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The world is going to be heavily shaped by a few great powers. There will not be one hegeimon. Uh the United States wanted to be the hegeimon. Turned out uh things were not the way America thought or the American leaders thought. China
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rudely stepped forward and said, "Excuse me, we're here too. We're bigger than you. Uh and uh we're not going away." That was very rude of China. by the way uh because uh nobody gave China permission uh to do that at least of all
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America. China was supposed to assemble our phones and be quiet. Um and uh so uh but China has reached its peak population. The population will decline significantly in the next 75 years.
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According to the UN forecast, China's population will decline far below a billion people and actually in the most recent population revision uh below 800 million people by 2100 and India at that point will be twice the population of China. China will not
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be the world's hegeimon. But I also would stress China has no interest, tradition or desire of being the world hedgeimon. Uh China has never wanted overseas empires. It never tried to build them. It never tried to colonize overseas.
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And um I like the fact that China never once in 2,000 years invaded Japan. Not once.
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Can you imagine? Britain and France were at it every month for about a thousand years across the channel. It never dawned on the Chinese to do anything other than have a tribute exchange. Of course, they wanted the Japanese to bow
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a little bit lower, maybe even to Kowau, but then generally what they gave back to Japan was worth more in value than anything the Chinese tried to extract from Japan. So, the tributary system so-called or the confusion system was
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not an extractive system and China never tried to invade its neighbors. It's fascinating. really important to look at this closely. The Mongols, by the way, tried twice when they ruled China, 1274 and 1281, failing both times to typhoons, the
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so-called kamicazi winds according to Japanese uh tradition. But that was the Mongols. Uh and they didn't try again after 1281. And China never tried.
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Japan, of course, invaded China pretty much non-stop after 1894. And I would like the Japanese to calm down, stop saying that China is a threat, maybe even apologize for what was a very, very terrible period for China, but also not have a
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military buildup and tell America, "Take your soldiers home. We don't need them. we can have a perfectly safe relationship with China. Thank you very much. We don't need the American military here. That would be my own advice to Japan. Uh it would uh I think
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bring a lot of prosperity to Japan actually because Japan has a lot that it could contribute to China and China has a lot that it could do together with Japan. But the point is they never tried. Okay, back to the question though
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about uh the big powers. We have the United States, Russia China India possibly someday Europe if Europe would actually behave as one rather than as 27.
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I'd even like it 28, frankly. Uh, and I think it would be good for the 28th or the 1st or whatever order you want to call it to go back to uh a nice partnership. But in any event, we have
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four major powers right now and we have nine nuclear powers right now. And the middle inome countries can't um can't uh undo the vast difference of power. But what they can do is help to establish and deepen norms of behavior.
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I I would like the world to tell Donald Trump, "Stop it. You're not a thug. We don't behave this way. You can't stand at the well of the General Assembly and say you're deciding whether to annihilate Iran or to make it a great
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country. Either you're nuts or someone should sit down with you and have a chat or take you away or something. but not to accept this as a norm. By the way, when Donald Trump said that he's thinking about annihilating
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Iran after our midterms, which European powers said, uh, excuse me no? That would be at most one, Spain.
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And as far as I know, no others. That's incredible. That is really incredible. So, what I like about very much what Mark Carney is doing is he's telling the truth. This is the biggest shortfall in the world right now is that people are
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afraid and they don't tell the truth. And this is our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is not Russia, by the way. Our biggest problem is not China.
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Our biggest problem is the truth, which is we should stay out of each other's faces. Avoid each other's red lines. Uh stop talking about war coming. I understand British politicians are talking that you need to stock up on
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your water and your food. Are they out of their minds? No. Honestly, have them call me. I will talk to them.
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I call it, by the way, the phantom empire syndrome. The empire is gone, but they still feel it every day. And it's time to stop feeling the empire and get a grip on reality. We don't need a war
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with anybody. That's the main point. Let's go back on coffee. Just to go back to economics.
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Uh you know basically what is going to happen in general in agriculture including in coffee is that it is going to shrink tremendously in the numbers of people working in agriculture and the incomes will converge to the incomes of
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non-aggricultural workers. That's happened in the United States and it's happened in Europe broadly speaking and in Japan and it's happening in China. Agriculture becomes mechanized.
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Uh coffee of course is its own specific set of issues. But agriculture becomes mechanized in the United States. 1% of the workforce feeds the other 99% plus a significant part of the rest of the world. So you just don't need many
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farmers anymore and that will be the way that the world will go. This is co Col Coen Clark pointed this out in 1940. Uh and uh he was right then 85 years ago.
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Uh and it continues to be the right answer now. We will all end up if we work at all the question Kanes asked rightly in 1930. If we work we will work in services because there will be no
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jobs in agriculture. There will be no jobs in mining and there will be basically no jobs in manufacturing either. And I've recently been touring factories in China, manufacturing plants, there no workers there. So if you want the workers to come back, if
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you want the jobs to come back from China, forget it. They don't have jobs in manufacturing. Basically, these are what they call dark factories now. You don't even have to turn on the lights uh because they are all robotic AI
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extraordinarily efficient. Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit, but this is really the direction. We will do services. We'll talk to each other. Uh we'll have coffee for many more hours of the day together. It will be quite wonderful. I promise. But the robots
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will actually harvest a lot of the crop in the end and that will be fine. When it comes to the specifics of coffee, uh because we've worked on this and talked about this together, the idea of a specific coffee fund that would be
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funded by the main roers and the main global companies is actually step by step on the agenda. I was at FAO last week. This was unveiled by Andrea Illy who produces some wonderful coffee.
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But now it is to get the big companies to put funds in it. What is needed is sustainability because drought uh climate stress is a tremendous uh challenge right now which is also why coffee prices have soared recently
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because Brazil has lost a lot of the crop and that is going to get intensified in the future. So there's a lot specific about any crop and about the climate effects and the environmental effects and what to do.
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But broadly speaking in terms of jobs in the future of employment, we'll be able to grow enough food with very very few farmers in the future. And we will have largely urban societies and largely service economies.
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and our manufactured goods and mining which is already being done autonomously in uh a lot of major regions will be uh technologically fundamentally altered.
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Now Jeff, my understanding is you have another speaking engagement which means you have to leave approximately now.
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No, you've got a bit more time. Uh yeah, maybe just a Oops, my watch died. Oh no, 7:50. Okay, no batteries left. Yeah. Why don't we take one more round?
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We'll take one more round. So, we'll go to the online audience first. So, Nikki, you have a question from the audience.
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Yeah, sure. Um, so uh one question said you mentioned the economic centers will move towards population centers in Asia.
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Uh geographic uh aside, Asia is also facing strong democrat uh democratic pressures on birth rate etc. Especially China. How will that affect your analysis about the future of global uh political economy? This is from a student at LC. Um should I go one more?
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No, no, one one. So I'm gonna take someone from the back. So I go right furthest at the back there. So um the hand I can see right on the end end row there. Okay. Should we pass it along?
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Yeah. That gentleman. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Pass along there. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Be brief, please.
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Uh thank you Jeff for your comments. Really a big fan. Uh I want to ask uh through your articles um how do you why is colonialism only an undertone in your findings and how do you address neoc colonialism as well because agriculture
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is very big in Africa and in Asia but there are neo colonialism exploitative methods used by companies uh in Africa and how do you how do you see to address that in your article thank you great okay and I'll come to here at the front
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uh yeah okay thank you and thanks Jeff for wonderful um world history through the lens of geography. Um I wanted to reconnect with your last comments on technology and innovation because you really didn't mention that in talking about world
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history only at the point of pathogens uh you know being stopped to be the so that mortality wasn't no longer the constraint or was the constraint. Uh so uh it seems for to me that it's hard to avoid
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technology at least if we talk about the last 300 years and there seem to be this ongoing interaction between the forces that you have emphasized and technological development and uh so when we use your uh perspective to think
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about the future which seems you want to do how should we think about those joint dynamics between the the the natural forces, the geographical forces and the innovation as it goes on.
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Okay, with huge apologies, these are going to be the last questions. I know there are so many more, but Jeff, if you could wrap up.
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I will wrap them up by trying to link the three together. Um, political economy, neoc colonial, uh, governance and technological development.
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I believe that um the biggest risk we face is conflict and uh a mass disaster because we seem not to understand how threatening that is and how uh close we are to it. uh because my country the United States the state the government
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does not behave properly and it doesn't understand the world properly and I would say uh Europe is having uh similar neurotic reactions basically the US and Europe are still living in a world of western privilege and western predominance
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that's a world that's over and the biggest risk this guy feel is that we have a divergence between the world as it really is right now which is a literate urban world everywhere and a world where the differences are
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not so great and where there's a building middle class everywhere and the idea that the United States or the West still somehow runs the show and it doesn't and that can get us into grave trouble. For example, uh the West so-called can wake up one
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day and say, "Why don't we just bomb the hell out of Iran?" Which is what they did totally, arbitrarily, illegally, crudely, dangerously on February 28th of this year. This is a war that is the most senseless, reckless war imaginable.
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The reason for this war was that they thought they'd win it in 12 hours.
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They're idiots. I'm sorry. The people in my government, they don't know anything. And they had no idea that what they thought was Iran of people in their turbans and so forth was actually a quite sophisticated society of nearly a
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100red million people that actually didn't want to be run by the United States. So that's where divergence comes in. The idea that you run the world, but you don't actually run the world. And when you think you run the world, everything
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is a double standard. We can do what we want because we're good. And if you do the same thing, you're evil because we're good, you're evil. It's simple.
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And that is what gets us into escalating conflicts. So, I view our biggest risk of stepping into some total disaster sometime soon. And we have the tools to do it. Nuclear arms is enough of a tool to end the world. Takes
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about two hours. And I would recommend reading uh Annie Jacobson's book from 2024, nuclear war, a scenario. It will leave you in a cold sweat as it should.
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It's two hours and 10 minutes to the end of the world and it's quite accurate and very well researched. Okay.
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Biotechnology is another way to do this. I'm of the view that COVID was created in a laboratory most likely in University of North Carolina as part of our so-called biodense work in the United States and it got out. Oops. And
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nobody wants to look at the lab records, by the way, uh because why would we?
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That's Pay. Uh that's a conspiracy theory. And I say open the books. We'll see. Uh but in any event, if we didn't create COVID, it's not hard to do right now.
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Okay? It's not hard to create pathogens and to bring them to life. And the third, of course, is AI. Because AI can basically hack any connected system and everything is connected. So it can hack your bank accounts, it can hack
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your uh water supply, it can hack your utilities, and it doesn't have to be an anthropic agent that escapes its sandbox.
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It can be some nasty son of a that escapes its sandbox. And so we're in a period where the tools are extremely powerful, very dangerous.
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We happen to have the worst governance in the United States in our history. And that's saying a lot, by the way, because we've had real doozers before.
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But this guy is really exceptional as he as he knows. Um, a genius of destruction. Um, so this is our biggest problem. The reason I say all of this is if we avoid all of this, there's actually great good
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news. That's the irony, which is we're in a technological wonder age. That's the bad side and that's the good side. all the problems can be solved. Actually, extreme poverty has gone down decisively in this world. When I wrote
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the book end of poverty, uh the poverty extreme poverty well in 1990 was about uh a quarter of the world population.
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Now it's perhaps 6% of the world population. Uh, of course there are a lot of people that are poor but not living in extreme poverty as was the case and it could easily be ended now because the tools are even better than
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20 or 25 years ago. Similarly, we know we can decarbonize the energy system. We know we can uh do what is necessary to avoid the worst of anthropogenic climate change. So if we can get our heads on straight
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and tomorrow if the chancellor doesn't release a budget for more military spending but says let's have some sustainable development we would be on the right course. Um all of these issues can be tremendously relieved. So in political economy we
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will be in a truly multipolar world. We will not be in a China world, a western-led world, a US-led world, an Indileled world. We'll be in a multi-polar world. Great. That's the world Adam Smith envisioned uh back in
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1776. We will not have the neoc colonialism which is very real right now. You have a few agricultural companies, mainly American, that dominate the world market, but those are American privileges that are easily ended. What I recommend for Africa is union, African
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Union. Uh and Africawide standards. And by the way, it was a point, absolute point of American policy for 80 years to ensure that there would be no Arab unity and that there would be no African unity because the idea of
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American primacy is make sure that there's no unity in the rest of the world so that we are the primary power.
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We learned that from the British by the way. Uh it it is it is a a a well- tested strategy and technological development is in a golden age right now. It's absolutely incredible what can be done.
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Demis Hacabus is a genius and he enabled us to figure out or not us but he enabled the figuring out of hundreds of thousands of protein shapes and he's not even a chemist. He's just damn good at deep neural networks and he figured out
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how to do this uh and got the Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. So I think that we're in an absolutely astounding positive age if we want to be and that our risks are ourselves. Basically we have no shortage and the population is
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peaking. It could peak even sooner if all the kids in uh poor countries are in school. The fertility rate will fall a lot faster. the population will stabilize maybe at 9 billion people, maybe at 9.2 or 9.3 billion. It will
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start turning down a lot faster. Even that issue, which was our great challenge, we went from 1 billion in 1820 to 8 billion now. That's a lot to absorb in society. That's a huge increase of capital stock just to what
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we call capital widening just to make sure that there's the basics for the growing population. We don't have that problem anymore. We can do capital deepening in a serious way now which is more technology, more assets, more knowledge,
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more uh social capital, more human capital and more natural capital per person because we're not chasing a rapidly rising population. So there are not fundamental obstacles in my view other than the political economy and geopolitical obstacles. It's mainly our mindset and
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mainly our political systems geared towards very narrow interests and in the US case very corrupted interests mainly the president's family and those who pay his campaign bills and that defines most of American politics right now maybe until next Tuesday. Um
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and uh if we can get past that, we can do wonders. If you are an economics or a politics student, don't just study the trends, but think about design, how to make the world better. This is the most important point and that is to
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my mind. I I have two kind of three guiding gurus in economics I suppose. Adam Smith, John Maynard Kanesh and Yan Tinbergen. Uh Yan Tinberen received the first uh co- prize in economics. But his basic idea was you
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have targets and then you have instruments and you turn your instruments to achieve your targets.
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What a beautiful idea. So if you are in politics or in political economy or in economics, don't just study phenomena, don't just look at predictions, but think of design. How could we reach what we want to reach? And then you look
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at the tools that we have. They're better than ever. and Professor Leard and Professor Bezley are master practitioners in that. So you have gifted teachers for that. Thank you very much.
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So uh so it just remains for me to thank Jeff for his very very engaging uh lecture this evening. Um Jeff has to to leave.
Speaker A
You're already late for your next engagement. Um so could you just stay seated while while Jeff and uh go out the site? Yeah. Yeah.
Topics:Adam SmithWealth of NationsJeff Sachseconomic geographydivision of laborlandlocked countriesmultipolar worldeconomic historydevelopment economicssustainable development
