Harbison sees some hopeful signs.

Question: What is the world's greatest challenge in the coming decade?

John Harbison: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge is going to be trying to … well, the redistribution of resource. There’ve been encouraging sign, which is that some of the richest people have decided that the flint beyond the herd of scale might be able to change some of the most horrible situations, particularly African and medical situations and so forth. That’s encouraging. I think that probably a much more radical idea of redistribution of resources is necessary. And locally right now on a graph we are going the other direction. We are certainly quite content with people at the upper scale getting much richer, and people on the bottom disappearing. There, of course, one could argue that the lack of a primary truly genuine, spiritual, religious impulse may be one of the reasons it’s so hard to settle the idea of distribution of resources.

Recorded On: 6/12/07