Which country does the most good for the world? | Simon Anholt

I've been thinking a lot about the world recently

and how it's changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years.

Twenty or 30 years ago,

if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died

in a remote village in East Asia,

it would have been a tragedy for the chicken

and its closest relatives,

but I don't think there was much possibility

of us fearing a global pandemic

and the deaths of millions.

Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America

lent too much money to some people

who couldn't afford to pay it back

and the bank went bust,

that was bad for the lender

and bad for the borrower,

but we didn't imagine it would bring

the global economic system to its knees

for nearly a decade.

This is globalization.

This is the miracle that has enabled us

to transship our bodies and our minds

and our words and our pictures and our ideas

and our teaching and our learning around the planet

ever faster and ever cheaper.

It's brought a lot of bad stuff,

like the stuff that I just described,

but it's also brought a lot of good stuff.

A lot of us are not aware

of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals,

several of which have achieved their targets

long before the due date.

That proves that this species of humanity

is capable of achieving extraordinary progress

if it really acts together and it really tries hard.

But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days,

I sort of feel that globalization

has taken us by surprise,

and we've been slow to respond to it.

If you look at the downside of globalization,

it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming.

All of the grand challenges that we face today,

like climate change and human rights

and demographics and terrorism and pandemics

and narco-trafficking and human slavery

and species loss, I could go on,

we're not making an awful lot of progress

against an awful lot of those challenges.

So in a nutshell, that's the challenge

that we all face today

at this interesting point in history.

That's clearly what we've got to do next.

We've somehow got to get our act together

and we've got to figure out how to globalize

the solutions better

so that we don't simply become a species

which is the victim of the globalization of problems.

Why are we so slow at achieving these advances?

What's the reason for it?

Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons,

but perhaps the primary reason

is because we're still organized as a species

in the same way that we were organized

200 or 300 years ago.

There's one superpower left on the planet

and that is the seven billion people,

the seven billion of us who cause all these problems,

the same seven billion, by the way,

who will resolve them all.

But how are those seven billion organized?

They're still organized in 200 or so nation-states,

and the nations have governments

that make rules

and cause us to behave in certain ways.

And that's a pretty efficient system,

but the problem is that the way that those laws are made

and the way those governments think

is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems,

because it all looks inwards.

The politicians that we elect

and the politicians we don't elect, on the whole,

have minds that microscope.

They don't have minds that telescope.

They look in. They pretend, they behave,

as if they believed that every country was an island

that existed quite happily, independently

of all the others

on its own little planet

in its own little solar system.

This is the problem:

countries competing against each other,

countries fighting against each other.

This week, as any week you care to look at,

you'll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country,

but even when that's not going on,

there's competition between countries,

each one trying to shaft the next.

This is clearly not a good arrangement.

We clearly need to change it.

We clearly need to find ways

of encouraging countries to start working together

a little bit better.

And why won't they do that?

Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards?

Well, the first and most obvious reason

is because that's what we ask them to do.

That's what we tell them to do.

When we elect governments

or when we tolerate unelected governments,

we're effectively telling them that what we want

is for them to deliver us in our country

a certain number of things.

We want them to deliver prosperity,

growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice

and all of those things.

So unless we start asking our governments

to think outside a little bit,

to consider the global problems that will finish us all

if we don't start considering them,

then we can hardly blame them

if what they carry on doing is looking inwards,

if they still have minds that microscope

rather than minds that telescope.

That's the first reason why things tend not to change.

The second reason is that these governments,

just like all the rest of us,

are cultural psychopaths.

I don't mean to be rude,

but you know what a psychopath is.

A psychopath is a person who,

unfortunately for him or her,

lacks the ability to really empathize

with other human beings.

When they look around,

they don't see other human beings

with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives

and aims and ambitions.

What they see is cardboard cutouts,

and it's very sad and it's very lonely,

and it's very rare, fortunately.

But actually, aren't most of us

not really so very good at empathy?

Oh sure, we're very good at empathy

when it's a question of dealing with people

who kind of look like us

and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray

and wear like us,

but when it comes to people who don't do that,

who don't quite dress like us

and don't quite pray like us

and don't quite talk like us,

do we not also have a tendency to see them

ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too?

And this is a question we need to ask ourselves.

I think constantly we have to monitor it.

Are we and our politicians to a degree

cultural psychopaths?

The third reason is hardly worth mentioning

because it's so silly,

but there's a belief amongst governments

that the domestic agenda

and the international agenda

are incompatible and always will be.

This is just nonsense.

In my day job, I'm a policy adviser.

I've spent the last 15 years or so

advising governments around the world,

and in all of that time I have never once seen

a single domestic policy issue

that could not be more imaginatively,

effectively and rapidly resolved

than by treating it as an international problem,

looking at the international context,

comparing what others have done,

bringing in others, working externally

instead of working internally.

And so you may say, well, given all of that,

why then doesn't it work?

Why can we not make our politicians change?

Why can't we demand them?

Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining

about how hard it is to make people change,

and I don't think we should fuss about it.

I think we should just accept

that we are an inherently conservative species.

We don't like to change.

It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons.

We probably wouldn't still be here today

if we weren't so resistant to change.

It's very simple: Many thousands of years ago,

we discovered that if we carried on

doing the same things, we wouldn't die,

because the things that we've done before

by definition didn't kill us,

and therefore as long as we carry on doing them,

we'll be okay,

and it's very sensible not to do anything new,

because it might kill you.

But of course, there are exceptions to that.

Otherwise, we'd never get anywhere.

And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception,

is when you can show to people

that there might be some self-interest

in them making that leap of faith

and changing a little bit.

So I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years

trying to find out what could be that self-interest

that would encourage not just politicians

but also businesses and general populations,

all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly,

to think in a bigger picture,

not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards.

And this is where I discovered

something quite important.

In 2005, I launched a study

called the Nation Brands Index.

What it is, it's a very large-scale study that polls

a very large sample of the world's population,

a sample that represents about 70 percent

of the planet's population,

and I started asking them a series of questions

about how they perceive other countries.

And the Nation Brands Index over the years

has grown to be a very, very large database.

It's about 200 billion data points

tracking what ordinary people think about other countries

and why.

Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise

are very, very keen on knowing

how they are regarded.

They've known, partly because

I've encouraged them to realize it,

that countries depend

enormously on their reputations

in order to survive and prosper in the world.

If a country has a great, positive image,

like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland,

everything is easy and everything is cheap.

You get more tourists. You get more investors.

You sell your products more expensively.

If, on the other hand, you have a country

with a very weak or a very negative image,

everything is difficult and everything is expensive.

So governments care desperately

about the image of their country,

because it makes a direct difference

to how much money they can make,

and that's what they've promised their populations

they're going to deliver.

So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take

some time out and speak to that gigantic database

and ask it,

why do some people prefer one country

more than another?

And the answer that the database gave me

completely staggered me.

It was 6.8.

I haven't got time to explain in detail.

Basically what it told me was —

(Laughter) (Applause) —

the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries.

We don't admire countries primarily because they're rich,

because they're powerful, because they're successful,

because they're modern, because they're technologically advanced.

We primarily admire countries that are good.

What do we mean by good?

We mean countries that seem to contribute

something to the world in which we live,

countries that actually make the world safer

or better or richer or fairer.

Those are the countries we like.

This is a discovery of significant importance —

you see where I'm going —

because it squares the circle.

I can now say, and often do, to any government,

in order to do well, you need to do good.

If you want to sell more products,

if you want to get more investment,

if you want to become more competitive,

then you need to start behaving,

because that's why people will respect you

and do business with you,

and therefore, the more you collaborate,

the more competitive you become.

This is quite an important discovery,

and as soon as I discovered this,

I felt another index coming on.

I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler

and more and more childish.

This one is called the Good Country Index,

and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

It measures, or at least it tries to measure,

exactly how much each country on Earth contributes

not to its own population but to the rest of humanity.

Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought

of measuring this before.

So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent

the best part of the last two years,

with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people,

cramming together all the reliable data in the world

we could find about what countries give

to the world.

And you're waiting for me to tell you which one comes top.

And I'm going to tell you,

but first of all I want to tell you

precisely what I mean

when I say a good country.

I do not mean morally good.

When I say that Country X

is the goodest country on Earth,

and I mean goodest, I don't mean best.

Best is something different.

When you're talking about a good country,

you can be good, gooder and goodest.

It's not the same thing as good, better and best.

This is a country which simply gives more

to humanity than any other country.

I don't talk about how they behave at home

because that's measured elsewhere.

And the winner is

Ireland.

(Applause)

According to the data here,

no country on Earth, per head of population,

per dollar of GDP, contributes more

to the world that we live in than Ireland.

What does this mean?

This means that as we go to sleep at night,

all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep,

our final thought should be,

godammit, I'm glad that Ireland exists.

(Laughter)

And that — (Applause) —

In the depths of a very severe economic recession,

I think that there's a really important lesson there,

that if you can remember your international obligations

whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy,

that's really something.

Finland ranks pretty much the same.

The only reason why it's below Ireland

is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland's lowest score.

Now the other thing you'll notice about the top 10 there

is, of course, they're all, apart from New Zealand,

Western European nations.

They're also all rich.

This depressed me,

because one of the things that I did not want

to discover with this index

is that it's purely the province of rich countries

to help poor countries.

This is not what it's all about.

And indeed, if you look further down the list,

I don't have the slide here, you will see

something that made me very happy indeed,

that Kenya is in the top 30,

and that demonstrates one very, very important thing.

This is not about money.

This is about attitude.

This is about culture.

This is about a government and a people that care

about the rest of the world

and have the imagination and the courage

to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly.

I'm going to whip through the other slides

just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries.

There's Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st,

Mexico comes 66th,

and then we have some of the big developing countries,

like Russia at 95th, China at 107th.

Countries like China and Russia and India,

which is down in the same part of the index,

well, in some ways, it's not surprising.

They've spent a great deal of time

over the last decades building their own economy,

building their own society and their own polity,

but it is to be hoped

that the second phase of their growth

will be somewhat more outward-looking

than the first phase has been so far.

And then you can break down each country

in terms of the actual datasets that build into it.

I'll allow you to do that.

From midnight tonight it's going to be on goodcountry.org,

and you can look at the country.

You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets.

Now that's the Good Country Index.

What's it there for?

Well, it's there really because I want to try

to introduce this word,

or reintroduce this word, into the discourse.

I've had enough hearing about competitive countries.

I've had enough hearing about

prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries.

I've even had enough hearing about happy countries

because in the end that's still selfish.

That's still about us,

and if we carry on thinking about us,

we are in deep, deep trouble.

I think we all know what it is

that we want to hear about.

We want to hear about good countries,

and so I want to ask you all a favor.

I'm not asking a lot.

It's something that you might find easy to do

and you might even find enjoyable

and even helpful to do,

and that's simply to start using the word "good"

in this context.

When you think about your own country,

when you think about other people's countries,

when you think about companies,

when you talk about the world that we live in today,

start using that word

in the way that I've talked about this evening.

Not good, the opposite of bad,

because that's an argument that never finishes.

Good, the opposite of selfish,

good being a country that thinks about all of us.

That's what I would like you to do,

and I'd like you to use it as a stick

with which to beat your politicians.

When you elect them, when you reelect them,

when you vote for them, when you listen

to what they're offering you,

use that word, "good,"

and ask yourself,

"Is that what a good country would do?"

And if the answer is no, be very suspicious.

Ask yourself, is that the behavior

of my country?

Do I want to come from a country

where the government, in my name,

is doing things like that?

Or do I, on the other hand,

prefer the idea of walking around the world

with my head held high thinking, "Yeah,

I'm proud to come from a good country"?

And everybody will welcome you.

And everybody in the last 15 seconds

before they drift off to sleep at night will say,

"Gosh, I'm glad that person's country exists."

Ultimately, that, I think,

is what will make the change.

That word, "good,"

and the number 6.8

and the discovery that's behind it

have changed my life.

I think they can change your life,

and I think we can use it to change

the way that our politicians and our companies behave,

and in doing so, we can change the world.

I've started thinking very differently about

my own country since I've been thinking about these things.

I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country,

and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country,

but I began to realize, it's not enough.

I don't want to live in a rich country.

I don't want to live in a fast-growing

or competitive country.

I want to live in a good country,

and I so, so hope that you do too.

Thank you.

(Applause)