06/16/16 – Aubrey Fox – The Scott Horton Show

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Trying to get these wars ended.
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Introducing Aubrey Fox.
He is the executive director of the Institute for Economics and Peace USA.
They have this project, Vision of Humanity, the Global Peace Index Report.
Welcome to the show.
Aubrey, how are you?
Good.
How are you?
I'm very good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Happy to do so.
First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your group?
I see here you guys got reports going back a few years, but I don't think I've ever heard of you before.
Yeah.
We're the Institute for Economics and Peace.
We're a global think tank.
What we do really is to measure peace, its causes and its economic consequences.
We're all about measurement and the use of analytic tools to try to answer some of the biggest questions of the day.
Is the world becoming more or less peaceful?
What are the drivers of peace?
What does violence cost us?
All right.
I guess probably there's more bad news than good news, so good news first.
Well, yeah, it's a mixed bag.
Our signature research product is the Global Peace Index.
It ranks 163 countries on their peacefulness.
We've been doing this for 10 years.
It's a report that's released every June.
We have data going back 10 years.
You're right that overall, peace has declined slightly over the last 10 years, but what we found is really what we would call growing inequality in peace.
There are some countries and regions of the world that are becoming more and more peaceful, so even reaching historic levels of peacefulness.
Then some countries and regions are becoming much less peaceful over time.
It depends on your perspective that glass is either half full or half empty.
If you're seeing it as half full, a question that you should ask yourself is, what are the dynamics of these countries that are allowing them to become so peaceful?
Are there things that we can learn from their experiences that we could apply in other parts of the world?
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's a real important point, what's working.
You talk about in the ...
Well, at least I didn't read the whole report, but I read the splash page for it here, the Vision of Humanity site.
You talk about positive peace, not just desolation and call it peace, but places where peace is actually working.
As you're talking about, there are places that are getting more and more peaceful all the time.
What exactly is positive peace?
Yeah.
It's a great question, Scott.
We measure peace in two ways.
We measure both negative peace and positive peace.
Negative peace, we define as the absence of violence or fear of violence.
It's basically what's not working in a country.
We also wanted to look at what is working, which is a question of obvious importance, but it's one that often gets ignored because people tend to focus on chaos and conflicts.
Because we have 10 years of data, and because we have access now to a world that's much more data rich, we've actually been able to examine thousands of datasets and identify eight factors of more peaceful societies.
That system of eight factors is what we call positive peace.
Those are things like sound business environment, well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, good relations with neighbors, low levels of corruption, high levels of human capital, acceptance of the rights of others and free flow of information.
Countries that are able to invest in those factors tend to get more peaceful over time.
All right.
Now, I hate to be too simplistic about this, but I'm really trying.
I'm thinking, I'm Googling, I'm doing my best, and I can't think of hardly any real violent conflict going on in the world that is not at least partially the responsible of the government of the United States of America.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Islamic State, North Africa, Somalia, Yemen, even the Congo.
America, of course, you know, CIA backing this group versus that group, et cetera.
South Sudan.
Are there any real violent conflicts in the world that are not the fault of the Clintons and the Bushes?
Well, I think I should be very clear that we're not a political organization.
We're a think tank.
We're trying to put out facts about the world.
I know, but I'm just saying, have you heard of any that America didn't do it?
I think it's pretty clear that the world's a complicated place, that, yes, there are, the U.S. has been involved in a number of ongoing conflicts, as you point out, and that's reflected in their score.
But I think that there's plenty of countries and conditions that, you know, don't have, can be directly attributed to U.S. actions.
But that's what I'm looking for.
Like, you know, if Cambodia and Vietnam have a border clash and it's, and America didn't have anything to do with it, I want to know about it, but I just can't think of any.
That's all.
Well, I mean, there's, you know, there's long, long standing tensions between countries like India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea.
I mean, you know, the world's a complicated place.
There's a lot, there's a lot going on in the world.
I mean, one thing that I would point out that does stand out.
I mean, those are two major ceasefires that you just named, which, and America's, of course, involved in both, but still, I mean, I'm talking about actual wars.
Yeah.
I mean, one thing that might be interesting to point out and interesting for your, interesting for your listeners is we've, what we've found another dynamic is the changing nature and how people experience violence and conflict.
So you'll note that in our definition of negative peace, we say the absence of violence and fear of violence.
So we're not just talking about war.
We're talking about everyday criminal violence, fear of violence.
And one of the trends that we've detected, and we're not alone in detecting this trend is that violence between warfare between nations has decreased somewhat, but conflict within nations has increased greatly.
And that could be civil war or, you know, significant internal battlefield conflict, but it also could be everyday criminal violence.
You're much more likely to die as a result of a homicide as you are to die in a battlefield death.
And if you look in countries in South and Latin America, some of those countries are ranked very low in our index and they're not involved in any kind of war or ongoing conflict.
What they're struggling with is, you know, very high rates of homicide and everyday criminal violence within their borders.
So it's, it's, it's a very different way of looking at the world when you expand your definition of peace to include both violence and war.
Yeah.
Well, even then Honduras was an American backed coup.
That's now the murder capital of the world, right?
Well, yeah, there are many countries that in Latin South America that are really struggling with, with that kind of violence.
We do, we do a separate index in Mexico where we rank the peacefulness of Mexico's 32 States.
And, you know, Mexico is struggling clearly with problems of violence within its country.
And there are a number of reasons why, but, you know, one, just to get back to the positive peace framework, Mexico has very extreme problems of corruption, corruption of the police force and the judiciary.
And that, that, that factor of corruption, which is experienced all over the world is really uniquely debilitating to peace.
And I think trying to understand in a broader sense, you know, what is, what are the, some of the things that contribute in both a positive and negative way that to peacefulness is really important.
Right.
Well, now this is, you know, partially tied to what you're talking about here.
And for the life of me, I've tried to find this article and I cannot find it anywhere.
It was, it may have even been popular science or something like that.
It came out maybe almost a year ago that talked about how standards of living across the planet are on such an upswing and how since, if you go back to say the fall of the Soviet union, the percentage of people on earth living in dire poverty, either starving or hungry or desperate by in those measures, the, I don't know the numbers, but the percentages were just way down from, you know, a fifth to 10% or something like that or less.
And, and, you know, openness and international trade between formerly completely desperate and poor countries are now on such an upswing.
And particularly sub-Saharan Africa is like the miracle story, the most ignored story of the last generation is the incredible benefits that markets and new limitations on corruption and tax levels and this kind of thing have, have really wrought for them.
And it's, you know, it really is.
John Mueller writes about this a lot too, about how, well, and as you mentioned, everybody focuses on, you know, if it bleeds, it leads everybody focuses on the crisis.
That's what this show is about is the crisis, but man, there's a lot of real good going on in the world in terms of the average schmuck in even third world countries now actually has a chance to live the old age and have a prosperous life.
You're absolutely right.
And, and, and so there have been real improvements in basic living standards around the world.
You know, many of your listeners are probably familiar with the millennium development goals, which guided the work of UN member States from 2000 to 2015 and set some very basic goals around improvements in maternal mortality, improvements in children's education, improvements in just daily income.
And there has been significant impact on the eight goals that were embedded in millennium development goals.
But what's interesting is that what has held back the world from even greater progress is conflict, in fact, conflict and violence.
And so we know when we look at how countries performed against the millennium development goals, the countries that weren't able to make and reach these basic development milestones weren't able to because they were experiencing a lot of conflict and violence within their borders.
Yeah.
And so I, I would point not only to improvements in living standards is a huge positive story, but more sophistication now about on the part of policymakers around this idea that you can't consider development in one corner and peace and conflict in another, like these issues have to be understood jointly, they impact each other, and they, they, they're correlated with one another.
And the sustainable development goal framework, which the UN recently passed, and will guide the next 15 years of work of member states, explicitly has a peace goal embedded in the framework, because there's an overwhelming recognition now that you can't, you can't have development without peace and vice versa.
Another very simple point to make the World Humanitarian Summit just met.
And one of the really striking observations is that now 80% of humanitarian aid is directed to countries that are experiencing violence and conflict and only 20% to countries that are experiencing what you would call natural disaster, like a typhoon or earthquake.
10 years ago, those ratios were reversed.
And so really, a lot of what we're experiencing in the world today is driven by violence and conflict and kind of getting to terms with that.
And understanding what tools and leverage you have, not just to respond to countries that have fallen off the cliff, so to speak, but to preventing violence and conflict.
So in other countries that are different points in this cycle, is really important.
Right?
Yeah.
And it's, you know, I like the way you talk about this, and you write in the report about just how interdependent all of these different factors are.
So if you have a much less corrupt and a more open government, it's then therefore less likely to get involved in interstate conflict, or there's less likely to be a civil war over who gets to take all the spoils, that kind of thing.
And not to put too cynical of a brush on it.
But I mean, basically, the lesson here for these, you know, pseudo becoming democratic sort of governments in the developing world is that if you let your population make money, there will be more of it to tax.
So keep your rate at something reasonable, and you'll end up not to sound like a supply side or whatever here, but you'll end up with more revenue if your country is that much more prosperous.
And this is the kind of, you know, it's just a change from kind of short term thinking to long term thinking.
I read a thing about in Afghanistan, that where the Americans were trying to get these two warlords to stop fighting, so that they could work together to develop some oil resources and get rich.
And instead, the quote from Eikenberry was, well, they rather kill each other over cows, then become billionaires and friends, you know, and so that that's the kind of thing is that kind of mentality, once they realize that, hey, you know, actually, if I would just wait a little while I would have a lot more that ends up benefiting everybody around them.
I mean, to put it in kind of a cynical way, but it's not like the people of sub Saharan Africa are going to have total liberty, but to go from none to a bit is pretty good.
Yeah, and yeah, another point to make is, and it's part of our report is we now know a lot more about what violence costs the world.
I mean, it's typically thought of for good reason is like a human or moral problem, but it's also a huge economic problem.
And so our report estimates that violence costs the world about $13 trillion a year, that's about 13% of global wealth.
That's an enormous sum of money, it really holds back economic growth.
And if you go and you look at that by a country by country basis, which we're able to do, there are some countries that are spending, you know, 30 to 50% of their total wealth on violence.
So Syria, Syria, we estimate that 54% of its GDP is spent on containing violence, Iraq is the same.
But then you go down the list, and you find Venezuela 43% of its total wealth spent on violence.
But now, how does that mean you get to 13 trillion?
Because do you know what's the global GDP?
So that would, we estimate the global economic impact of violence is $13.6 trillion, which is about 13.3% of world GDP.
So out of 100 or so trillion dollars, violence is taking out of the economy 13.6 trillion.
That is so much money.
It's unfathomable.
I mean, when you say it like that, it almost just sounds unreal.
But okay, so so help me with my perspective here a little bit.
Because say, for example, Joe Stiglitz, and Linda Bilmes, they estimated that the entire Iraq war, and this includes all the VA costs from now on for the veterans and everything, would be $5 trillion.
And that was a big one.
That was the biggest one of the 21st century so far.
Yeah, no, it's stunning.
I mean, that the way we wait, but I'm saying that was like a 10 year war.
And they're saying it's $5 trillion for the whole thing.
So how is it that if we don't have, you know, that level of ground troop kind of spending, I mean, there are a lot, there's a lot of fighting going on in Iraq, but obviously, not at the expense that it costs to have the US Army there by 200,000 men, right?
So I'm just saying, how do we get to 13 trillion per year when we have these seemingly smaller wars compared to that, which the whole thing was five?
Yeah, no, I mean, so our methodology for determining the global economic impact of violence, so we count up several things.
We count up what we call direct expenditures.
So how much do you spend on your military, your judiciary, your police force, but we also count up what we would call indirect costs.
So there are a lot of so if you're a homicide victim, for example, like your lost lifetime earnings, they're gone, you're no longer producing money for the economy.
And then the third kind of cost we include what we call a multiplier effect, essentially, a dollar spent on violence, there's an opportunity cost there could have been spent on something much more economically productive.
And in fact, that's a very conservative estimate, the number we've come up with, because violence really profoundly depresses economies.
If you're afraid to go out at night, because you don't feel safe in your neighborhood, you're not going to go to dinner, businesses isn't going to open, business is going to invest a lot of money on gates on their windows, they're not gonna be able to attract customers.
And so there's an enormous flow on costs for violence in economies.
And so the Stiglitz analysis was very much focused on this one particular kind of military campaign, but it shows just how expansive the cost can be.
But when you include the kind of full set, the full plant panoply of costs of violence, it really does start to add up.
And it's pretty enormous, right?
It's, it's Bastiat is what you're talking about, right?
The scene versus the unseen.
We know how much it costs to build a bomb.
And we know how much goes out in salaries for the bomb makers and to the dividend checks to the stockholders in the bomb making company, and that kind of thing.
But we can only begin to scrape the surface of imagining where that money could have gone and what kind of good could have come out of it.
Instead of creating an explosive to destroy property, we might have used that money to invest in a brand new invention that would create more property.
And it's Yeah, but really, all we can do is is just guess.
So I see what you mean.
We're $13.6 trillion per year, destroyed or never come into being could be a very conservative estimate compared to what could have been.
Yeah, just just to go without your logic, which I agree with you for a moment, if you if we accept our numbers, if the world decreased violence by only 10%, that would result in the amount of money that's more than the total global foreign direct investment in 2014 10 times the total official development assistance in 2014.
And the value of global food exports in 2014.
So even small reductions in violence actually free up quite a bit of money for more productive use.
Yeah, it's like Bill Hicks used to say, you know, yeah, I see the footage of shooting a bomb right down the chimney.
And I admit, that's pretty impressive.
But couldn't we use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
You know, here's a banana.
Yeah.
And it doesn't have to be, you know, centrally planned in any way.
It doesn't have to be the military bringing people bananas.
But it's, it's just let them get out of the way and see if people can distribute can figure out new methods to distribute bananas to all the people who demand them and sit back and watch the miracle of capitalism work.
And really, that's the lesson of all of this, right is the supreme victory of humankind over these horrible circumstances that our governments keep inflicting on us, that we're still doing all right, anyway.
Yeah, I mean, I, I think we would argue that it's not that we're advocating that no money be invested in military security.
Again, we're not a political organization.
I think this bit, it's probably true that some countries, you know, they do need to make investments in these things.
But our point is, number one, you know, that is a reflection of a world where there is violence or fear of violence, right?
So it will, if you have to understand that as, as being a reflection of a world that isn't at peace, and that the the sheer amount of money being spent on violence, once you get past those requirements is, is vast.
So trying to understand the violence containment industry as an industry, just like we've talked about healthcare and education, and how much it costs, and whether we're getting the kind of accountability we want from those, those industries, I think we should try to bring that perspective to the violence containment industry.
And that's, we're trying to encourage that kind of conversation by publishing these facts.
Yeah.
Well, it's very important work.
And I really appreciate it.
I'm only sorry that I haven't been following you all along.
I mean, it does sound familiar.
But I guess the I mean, the the project does, but vision of humanity and all that stuff doesn't.
So I don't know why I didn't know about this all along.
But anyway, it's really great work that you're doing.
I really appreciate your time.
Yeah, well, so we have a global peace index comes out every June, we have a global terrorism index that comes out later in the year.
And we do work in Mexico and positive peace regularly.
So you know, feel free to check us out.
Okay, great.
And in Mexico, your Mexico work is that focus on the drug war and those kind of consequences?
Or what exactly are you dealing with there?
I mean, again, we're trying to provide kind of basic facts and a comprehensive view of what's going on in Mexico, the state of peace in Mexico, but you can't talk about the state of peace of Mexico in Mexico without looking at issues like the drug war.
There's no doubt about it.
Right?
Well, great.
I'll look forward to looking into that and your work on that.
Really appreciate it.
Okay, thanks.
All right, y'all.
That is Aubrey Fox from vision of humanity.org.
He's actually the executive director of the Institute for Economics and Peace USA.
And if you go to vision of humanity.org, you'll find this PDF file.
And they have a whole right on an article 1000 word article right up for you there.
Global Peace Index 2016.
All right, y'all Scott Horton show.
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