Navigating the new world disorder

The structural claim comes first and reframes everything after it. About 800 million people live on less than three dollars a day, which he is careful to say is not the largest such figure ever recorded: thirty-five years ago 30 percent of the world’s population was in extreme poverty and today it is 10 percent. What has changed is concentration. Around 60 percent of those 800 million are now in states affected by conflict and disaster, against 10 percent in 1990. So on his account the biggest division in the world is not democracy against autocracy, since a stable state can be either, but whether you were born into a state that functions at all. That reframing is what lets him treat an apparently impossible global problem as a tractable one, because it means the work is concentrated rather than diffuse.

What that disorder looks like on the ground is Sudan, which he calls the biggest humanitarian disaster recorded since the Second World War and which he presents as typical rather than exceptional. The war is internal but sponsored from outside, with regional states backing different sides; America and China cannot click their fingers and stop the fighting, and are wringing their hands at the side; gold and other minerals are among the interests in play; the country sits on the Red Sea near another chokepoint with potential global consequences; and the relief effort is grotesquely underfunded. His general diagnosis of why the world feels scarce is that competition has risen because interdependence has, so risks have gone global in a hyper-connected system with multiple power centers and a technological revolution running underneath it. He also corrects the premise he is handed. Rich countries have never been richer, but they have rarely been as unequal, and the lopsided distribution of thirty years of growth is itself part of why scarcity is what people feel.

The energy section turns on a distinction that is easy to lose. Roughly 750 million people have no access to electricity and the number is rising by about two million a year, because population growth outpaces delivery. In sub-Saharan Africa some 90,000 health facilities have no electricity or interrupted electricity. What he finds infuriating is that it has never been cheaper or easier to give people distributed energy, and his framing of the switch is not the familiar climate one. Running a water pump or a clinic on diesel is worse for the environment, but his emphasis is that it is also more expensive, and that the diesel is intermittent, unreliable and does not arrive in a steady way. He puts a diesel-run water pump at about ten dollars per person per year against three dollars for solar operating cost. On climate he is more careful than the usual claim: sixteen of the twenty countries on his organization’s watchlist sit in the top quartile of the Notre Dame index of climate vulnerability, which he calls at least a correlation, and then says he thinks is more than one. The chain he gives is that climate stress produces resource stress and resource stress is one of the drivers of conflict, which makes the climate crisis an indirect driver of people flow and a direct driver of movement within countries.

The blockage he identifies is therefore financial and specific. Operating costs are covered; people pay them. What is missing is the initial capital expenditure, and he is explicit that this is not an investment proposition but a philanthropic one, affordable in his account because the running costs afterwards are low. Alongside that sits a second and different tool. His organization’s venture arm, Airbel Ventures, invests in outside companies rather than building everything internally, on the reasoning that the humanitarian sector is too closed a market and bad at importing ideas, so the commitment is to co-invest and then test and use the product itself in order to break the market open. He is markedly less hopeful about minerals. Asked whether resource demand gives poor countries leverage, he invokes the resource curse: the competition it attracts is military as well as social, the extraction and corruption take the value away from the people, and the great rebalancing is not happening. He calls what is happening a new scramble, with few rules, settled at gunpoint too often. His closing position follows from all of it. The answer to a new world disorder is not a new world order but multiple orderings, multiple coalitions of innovators, funders, implementers and integrators, set against the negative network effects already loose in the world.