The Economist’s Vijay Vaitheeswaran: Can Innovation Save the World?
In the opening session of the 66th CFA Institute Annual Conference in Singapore, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, author and award-winning correspondent for the Economist, quoted Mahatma Gandhi, who, when asked whether he thought India could follow the British model of industrial development, said, “It took Britain half the resources of this planet to achieve its prosperity. How many planets will India require for development?”
Today, the challenge of sustainable development in a world of finite resources seems greater than ever. “We’ve entered a century of wicked global problems we have yet to come to grips with,” warned Vaitheeswaran, author of Need, Speed, and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems.
But while terrorism and financial crises continue to grab headlines, he believes that, as serious as these issues are, they pale when compared with three mega-trends humanity must address in the coming decades — and which are likely to affect all of our lives:
- The trend of urbanization that will place 70% of the earth’s peoples in cities by mid-century;
- Demographic trends that will inevitably result in older and longer-living populations; and
- The continued economic rise of China, India, and other emerging countries, which Vaitheeswaran expects could amount to a transformative economic force akin to the discovery of the New World.
