Nelson Mandela adviser Ian Goldin on our chances for a new golden age

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This was published 6 years ago

Nelson Mandela adviser Ian Goldin on our chances for a new golden age

By Tim Elliott

A one-time vice-president of the World Bank and adviser to Nelson Mandela says humanity could be on the brink of a new golden age. But, he tells Tim Elliott, we have only an even chance of succeeding.

There's lots to like about Ian Goldin. There's his smile (kindly, almost tortoise-like), his dress sense (smart, unfussy) and, of course, his ideas (large and many). But what strikes me most when we meet in his publisher's Sydney office is his voice, which is burnished, benevolent, and reassuringly authoritative; if not the voice of God, then definitely that of His doorman.

Ian Goldin.

Ian Goldin.Credit: Simon Schluter

"We are living in a moment of amazing progress!" he intones. "The world is on the cusp of a new renaissance. The question is: how do we manage the uncertainties it presents, and the opportunities?"

Goldin lives in Oxford, England, with his psychotherapist wife; his two adult children study nearby. A one-time vice-president of the World Bank and adviser to Nelson Mandela, he now serves as Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University. He has written 20 books, been knighted by the French Government and is a deep-water scuba diver to boot. He is, essentially, one of those big-brained, grandly articulate public intellectuals who seem to have been put on earth with the express purpose of explaining to the rest of us how the world works, where we've come from, and where we're going.

His latest book, Age of Discovery, is a case in point. The world is all mixed up, Goldin says. There's terrorism, climate change. There are also amazing new technologies and unprecedented levels of wealth, health and education. As a species, we seem to have an equal chance of screwing everything up or creating a better, more wonderful world. Making sense of it is hard work, but as Goldin and co-author Chris Kutarna explain, we could do worse than look for guidance to the Renaissance, that gilded period of European history roughly spanning from the 14th to 16th centuries.

"The Renaissance saw an explosion of genius and creativity," Goldin says. "In the 50 years after the invention of the printing press [in 1440] some 20 million books had been published. Ideas took off like wildfire. The church's monopoly on knowledge was broken, and Europe became the most advanced society on Earth."

A similarly seismic transformation is taking place today, Goldin says. Instead of Gutenberg and his printing press, we have Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; instead of the discovery of the New World, we have the re-emergence of China.

As Goldin puts it, "History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." The challenge, then as now, is to manage the upheaval for maximum benefit by, among other things, addressing inequality, thinking critically, and being bold. We need to focus on the long-term consequences of our actions: do they help or hinder the potential for others and future generations to have a better life?

Goldin was born in South Africa in 1955, a detail he prefers I didn't mention ("Isn't it ageist to include birth years?" he emails me). He grew up the youngest of three children in a liberal family marooned in the decidedly un-liberal city of Pretoria, "a conservative and extremely authoritarian place; the closest to hell on earth I've ever been". After the death of his father, the family moved to Cape Town, where Goldin attended university, emerging with degrees in arts and science. In 1978, he left for England, studying at the London School of Economics and Oxford University before working as a senior economist for the OECD and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Then, in 1996, he returned home to head up the Development Bank of Southern Africa and serve as an adviser to President Mandela.

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"Mandela was a great listener," Goldin says. "He interrogated ideas, and wasn't at all ashamed to display his ignorance. Even if you had to explain things twice to him, he'd say, 'I still don't understand. Explain it again.'"

Fortunately, Goldin is a good explainer. He's expert at wrestling clarity from complexity, distilling insights from topics as wide-ranging as trade liberalisation and the future of agriculture. A common thread is the danger of ever increasing connectivity – the power of "super spreaders", such as the internet and the global financial system – to metastasise calamity. (He nominates a pandemic as the most underrated threat of our time. "Watch the film Contagion to see what it could look like," he says.)

So much of Goldin's life has been spent working in the rarefied realms of global governance and development. How, then, does he gauge success? "Modestly!" he says. "The challenges are great, but change is incremental. If you can make a small contribution, then that's great."

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