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People I (Mostly) Admire

127. Rajiv Shah Never Wastes a Crisis

People I (Mostly) Admire

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Society & Culture

4.61.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Rajiv Shah headed the largest humanitarian effort in U.S. history. As chief economist of the Gates Foundation he tried to immunize almost a billion children. He tells Steve why it’s important to take big gambles, follow the data, and own up to your mistakes.

Transcript

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0:00.0

My guest today, Roshaw, is currently the president of the Rockefeller Foundation,

0:09.0

and before that he led US Aid, the centerpiece of American foreign aid.

0:13.4

Within a week of taking that job at US Aid, Raj unexpectedly found himself in charge of the largest

0:19.5

single humanitarian effort in the nation's history.

0:23.6

I got into my office and I saw that I had one bar on my

0:26.7

BlackBerry and I thought, oh my gosh, am I going to miss a phone call from the

0:30.3

president? Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

0:37.0

Somehow Russia has managed over and over to get himself in the middle of huge projects

0:46.6

from the Haiti earthquake recovery to the Ebola crisis to a vaccination program

0:51.6

responsible for immunizing almost one billion children.

0:55.6

His new book called Big Betts, how large-scale change really happens,

0:59.3

recounts its experiences on these projects, both the lessons he's learned and the mistakes he made.

1:09.5

I'm guessing when it comes to sheer intensity for you nothing compares to the events of January

1:15.4

2010 you're absolutely right about that you were 35 years old and somehow you'd

1:22.3

impress people enough that President Obama had just put you in

1:25.8

charge of an organization called USAID which had a budget of 20 billion

1:30.4

dollars a year and it's responsible for most of the US foreign aid

1:34.8

activity. You hadn't even been with that organization for a week when a devastating

1:41.0

earthquake hits Haiti killing hundreds of thousands of people

1:44.8

one of the deadliest single events in recorded history. Do you remember where you

1:50.7

were and what you were doing when you first heard about the earthquake?

1:54.0

I remember absolutely. I had just finished touring the emergency operations center

...

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