Baroness Minouche Shafik: What do we owe each other?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The idea of a social contract between the individual and the state is a staple of political philosophy. But what happens when that contract is threatened by forces beyond the control of any government, like a climate crisis or, right now, a global pandemic? Stephen Sackur speaks to Baroness Minouche Shafik, director of the London School of Economics and former top official at the World Bank. Is humanity capable of collective action to meet global challenges?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today boasts a CV, which puts her firmly in the category of the global power elite. |
| 0:11.5 | Baroness Minous Sheafiq was born in Egypt, raised in the US and is now settled in the UK. She's a trained economist who's forged a career in the overlapping worlds of academia and |
| 0:23.4 | government. For 15 years, her home was the World Bank. She became the youngest ever, vice president |
| 0:29.4 | at just 36. She went on to be deputy managing director of the IMF, chief civil servant in the UK |
| 0:36.5 | government's Ministry for Development, and then a deputy governor of the BankF, chief civil servant in the UK Government's Ministry for Development, and then a |
| 0:39.4 | deputy governor of the Bank of England. Now she's director of the London School of Economics. |
| 0:45.3 | In short, hers is an influential voice in global economics, and right now she's using it to |
| 0:51.5 | express deep concern about the failure of the world, |
| 0:54.7 | both at state level and internationally, to deal with long-term systemic challenges, |
| 1:01.7 | namely rising inequality, demographic shifts, a deepening climate crisis, |
| 1:07.1 | and latterly, the impact of the COVID pandemic. |
| 1:14.1 | She claims that the social contract that underpins the relationship between the individual and the state is under severe strain. So how do we humans |
| 1:21.6 | find a path to effective transnational collaboration? Are we capable of putting the common good first? Well, |
| 1:31.4 | Baroness Manus Sheffik joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you very much. Lovely to be here. |
| 1:37.7 | It's a pleasure to have you on the show. You have written extensively through a long career as a top |
| 1:43.1 | economist about the relationship between |
| 1:45.2 | the individual and the collective, whether it be the community, the nation state, or indeed |
| 1:51.1 | the wider world. What do you think the COVID pandemic has revealed to us about the limitations |
| 1:58.9 | of, for example, the nation state? Well, I think the COVID pandemic has |
| 2:04.8 | revealed fault lines in our social contract. And that was revealed by who suffered the most, |
| 2:11.1 | the poor, those in precarious work, women, ethnic minorities. And in many ways, those fault lines were there all along, but COVID |
| 2:20.7 | has just made it more apparent. But COVID has also shown us what the state can do when it focuses |
... |
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