LET’S RETURN AGAIN TO THE SIMPLE QUESTION WITH WHICH I started the book: Why doesn’t the world work?

The Good Country Equation states that the behavior of countries is the first part of the problem, and I have showed how, with initiatives like the Good Country Index and the Global Vote, we can start encouraging citizens to show their governments that they want to live in a Good Country and begin to solve this part of the equation.

The projects and policies which I have encouraged governments to adopt over the past twenty years, some of which I have described in earlier chapters, are also part of the solution. I will continue to encourage more and more governments to adopt such policies in the future. I hope other policy advisers, think tanks, universities, and consultancies will help in doing the same. Demonstrating to leaders that it is entirely possible to serve the needs of one’s own people and one’s own territory while doing no harm—or actually doing good—to other people and other places is a powerful mechanism for achieving that essential change in the culture of governance. The Dual Mandate doesn’t obstruct effective policy making: it stimulates it.

A key component of the Good Country Equation is the discovery that nothing improves a country’s prosperity more than a powerful and positive national image, and nothing improves a country’s image more than working internationally and contributing to the international community, tackling the “grand challenges” in partnership with other nations and organizations. This is important, as it means we no longer have to rely on the goodwill, conscience, or charitable instincts of governments to do the right thing for the world. We can build on their basic commitment to do the right thing for their own people.

And I’m sure that the “national standing” argument cannot be the only mechanism for showing governments that working for the international as well as the national good is in their direct interest. I hope that experts in other domains will be able to find other rational self-interest arguments that lead to the logic of cooperation and collaboration: not just between countries, but also between cities, regions, corporations, religions, and other groups and organizations around the world.

The Good Country Equation states that it is also the behavior of people which prevents the world working, and in the following section I will explore this proposition in more detail. I’ll also outline a project I’m working on—the Good Generation—which could deliver real progress in this area.

The conclusion of the Natural Cosmopolitans study—that at least 10 percent of the world’s population is likely to identify particularly strongly with the values of the Good Country philosophy—is certainly thought-provoking.

But look at the findings the other way round, and it has to be admitted that 10 percent is a pretty small minority. The finding that 90 percent of the world’s population doesn’t feel this way is the fact one should probably focus on first if one is to take this challenge seriously.

If we want humanity to change the way it behaves, it’s surely not about selling a message to the minority of people who already accept that message and asking them to change a few tiny things in their lives: it’s about deeply educating the majority to see the world more clearly, to live differently, so that the values and principles that drive their behavior are the right ones from the very start.

The list of challenges facing humankind today, as I have said, is long and bewildering, and even the idea of trying to sort them into some kind of priority, let alone fixing them, seems daunting. Back in 2015, the United Nations provided a valuable service in devising the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of targets for progress against the most serious challenges by 2030.²⁸ These, at least, have helped to clarify what needs doing, and provide structure and encouragement to the governments and institutions already working on these challenges. So far, the SDGs are not on target to meet their deadline.

But if we take a step back, three simple facts emerge. First, every one of these problems is a shared problem, a problem that doesn’t respect borders, a problem that demonstrably cannot be solved by individuals, corporations, governments, or multilateral institutions on their own.

The second fact is that all of them have been caused by human beings, and if people are the problem, then people are likely to be the solution.

The third fact is that very few of these problems are capable of being resolved in less than a generation. Most of them have matured slowly over generations of ordinarily careless or selfish behavior, and their impact gradually compounded through the repetition and amplification of common errors: rampant capitalism, runaway globalization, unsustainable growth, inadequate custodianship of the earth’s resources, a pathological tendency to pursue competition at the expense of cooperation and collaboration, gaps in the rule of law, and so forth.

Our search for fixes to these problems is all too often calibrated to the wrong timescales. Nothing works harder against the correction of long-term problems than the impatience of elected politicians and voters. In consequence, most politicians ignore such problems because they can’t be fixed within their term of office, or because they lie outside the remit of domestic policy, or both. The more ambitious ones try to impose short-term interventions which often make things worse.

A while ago, I was looking at the websites of a variety of NGOs and activist organizations, and I began to notice how many of them used a similar formula: “. . . and we must leave the world in a better state for our children.” And I found myself thinking that it’s the height of arrogance to imagine you can take an issue like climate change or poverty, migration or corruption—structural problems that have taken the omissions and commissions of billions of people over centuries to create—and fix them before you check out.

It occurred to me that what the sentence should read is “. . . and we must leave our children in a better state to fix the world.”

We need to admit that we ourselves, the adults that live and work and run the institutions and governments in the planet today, are powerless to fix things on our own. We need the help of our children and their children’s children.

It was clear to me that this was the moment to bring back the Global Learning Trust, which I’d originally developed for the insurance company Generali four years earlier. As it wouldn’t be a trust, and I wanted to emphasize its thematic connection with the Good Country, I decided to rename it the Good Generation. In every other important respect, the project remained unaltered.

The Good Generation would be a first-aid kit for the world, a set of educational principles, virtues, or values that target every global challenge at its root: the way we bring up our children. Metaphorically speaking, these are educational “vaccines,” which for example might include reducing prejudice and intolerance by teaching children cultural anthropology at a young age (I know this one works because I tried it on my own children); reducing unemployment by teaching entrepreneurship and creativity; reducing economic chaos by teaching behavioral economics; reducing pollution and combat climate change by teaching oceanography or meteorology; and reducing disease by teaching epidemiology and hygiene.

In my experience, it’s usually better not to try to teach children about the global challenges in too obvious or direct a way. Teaching “global citizenship” or “tolerance” or “environmentally friendly behavior” often doesn’t seem to captivate children, and if they’re not captivated, they’re not learning. It’s much better if they’re learning intrinsically useful and fascinating subjects, which help turn them into better global citizens as a desirable side effect. The lessons are doing them good without their realizing it, like fluoride in tapwater. By encouraging them to feel a scientific pride in their understanding of the issues, we make it impossible for them to feel, and behave, from a position of ignorance (which is what most damaging behaviors depend upon).

Of course it isn’t for me to decide which values or virtues will be at the heart of the Good Generation. We’ll do this by crowdsourcing a set of basic values for the next generation through a massive global online discussion.

Then we’ll establish a global, cross-cultural compact on the values, virtues, qualities, and knowledge which the next generations of global citizens need in order to run toward the global issues that threaten humanity, instead of running away from them, as so many of us do today.

If anybody doubts that all this is possible, given what a sensitive topic the education of children is, and given all the cultural and religious differences that divide our societies, they should remember that we’ve done this kind of thing before. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are two of the finest achievements of humanity and perfect examples of how entirely possible it is, when it’s really necessary, for most people on earth to agree on a set of common principles.

If we only have the patience to work for just one generation, systematically and together, with courage and imagination, on building the attitudes and behaviors and knowledge that underpin the solutions to these gigantic problems, we can defeat them all.

It’s an article of faith in our modern, democratic, technology-driven world that in order to tackle major problems we need to mobilize large groups of ordinary people. We’ve lost faith in elites, and that’s hardly surprising. The only people most of us trust now—at least in the developed world—are people just like ourselves, and so when the problems are very big, clearly we need a very big group of ordinary people so that their impact is magnified. Or so runs conventional wisdom: more followers, more campaigners, more protesters, more marchers, more signatures, more noise, more protest, more anger, more momentum.

But does it really work? Do these big crowds of people generate more heat or light? These days, I find myself wondering whether we’re already reaching the end of the (brief) age of enthusiastic mass activism. We have already lived through a short period in which it was relatively common to get millions of mainly young people to sign up to activist sites, NGOs, and charities, but the signs are that many people now feel so let down by such organizations and efforts, they’re no longer so willing to try new ones. The shocking recent improprieties of several charities—organizations which I suspect few people distinguish in their minds from campaigning groups and activist organizations—have certainly helped to temper people’s enthusiasm for supporting organizations that purport to save the world or save humanity. The promises have been so grandiose and the tangible results so meager, it’s not surprising that people are increasingly reluctant to commit.

And it’s not just online: the biggest marches in the world, most of the time, demonstrably don’t sway policy makers.

Oddly, the growth of apathy seems to be in direct proportion to the growing seriousness of the issues. Or perhaps this isn’t odd at all, just a sign of incipient paralysis created by a mixture of panic and resignation. There’s equally no question that we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by sheer numbers in these contexts, an inherently worthless currency. Followers are easy enough to attract if you have good enough marketing and enough money to spend on it, but getting proper and consistent active engagement from them is quite another matter.

During the last century, countless movements of citizens have aimed to tackle various challenges individually: some successfully, most less so. But we are running out of time, and citizen movements achieve change slowly if they achieve it at all.

Perhaps what we really need today is a movement of nations.

The League of Nations, at its inception, was a small group of nations sharing a common commitment to prevent further conflicts, a common set of values, and a common feeling of urgency. It was very consciously a minority of countries: a challenger movement, if you like, setting itself up against what then felt like the mainstream. The notion prevailed, the values became widespread, more countries joined—and fast-forward to today, when the United Nations contains in its membership pretty much every country on earth. As a consequence, it has become a victim of its own success, the exact opposite of a movement. Parts of it run the risk of becoming an obstruction. By representing the interests of all nations, it all too effectively crystallizes their differences.

And this is why we must make a new start, alongside the existing structures, with more “coalitions of the willing.” But let me stress that this isn’t about replacing the existing multilateral system. As I’ve previously mentioned, the international forum provided by the UN for a more unified planet is a valuable thing, and we wouldn’t want to do without it; it just isn’t the solution any longer to our main issues.

I’m starting to work with a range of countries that share a common belief in multilateralism and the principles of the Good Country. This is a wide mix of countries, large and small, rich and poor, north and south, east and west. At the moment, it’s all entirely informal, and rather than spend time writing manifestos or declarations, we’re simply getting on with things: working on a range of new, world-friendly Dual Mandate projects and policies, both big and small, which could be simultaneously executed by the whole group.

Some are big, ambitious, global projects like the Good Generation; others are significantly more modest, but if implemented simultaneously by several countries, they could have real impact and achieve real leadership. What I sometimes call entrepreneurial multilateralism (a phrase that’s almost as hard to type as it is to pronounce) is necessarily made up of big and small, cheap and expensive, ambitious and modest, short-term and long-term projects. The three-way agreement among New Zealand, Scotland, and Iceland I mentioned in chapter 13—which adopts more progressive measurements of social well-being in all three countries simultaneously—is an excellent early example of entrepreneurial multilateralism.

A key point about entrepreneurial multilateralism is that these are ad hoc groupings of countries, cities, regions, and other international actors, coalescing around a shared need, opportunity, or ambition. Their membership may well overlap; unless and until a single clearly dominant grouping begins to emerge quite spontaneously, there should be no need to aspire toward creating a formal, permanent body.

An example of a more modest Good Country initiative is one I call the boomerang rule, in which a country (or, preferably, a group of countries) simply declares that every policy, law, or project passed by its parliament must in future be screened for international as well as domestic impact.

The minimum requirement of the boomerang rule is that no initiative is passed unless it is assessed as doing no harm to people or the environment anywhere outside the country in question. Whether it’s increasing nurses’ pay or building a new concert hall, limiting pesticide use or lowering the voting age, joining NATO or hosting the Olympics, the direct consequences of each policy on people around the world, and on the rest of the planet, must be assessed using a simple, standard model. Any negative international impact above a certain threshold means that the policy must be revised or rejected.

Laws and policies that succeed in doing good both domestically and internationally will be actively encouraged, and the aim is that over time, more and more policies should achieve this goal. Active cooperation and collaboration with countries, cities, and organizations in other parts of the world, in all policy areas, will be very helpful in generating more courageous and imaginative boomerang policies and ensuring that they are as widely adopted as possible. The hope is that such policies will be treated as freeware and will be adapted and adopted worldwide.

I’m also hoping that one of these countries will be the first to appoint a new kind of foreign minister: one whose job is no longer to keep foreigners at bay, but rather to throw open the windows of all policy and all government activity, and to welcome in as many new influences as possible to enrich, refresh, and deepen the process of governance. This naturally leads to thoughts for a new kind of diplomatic service that would support this new conception of “international policy” (as opposed to “foreign policy”).

I should emphasize that, by making such suggestions, I’m not arguing for countries to replace “interest-based” foreign policy with “values-based” foreign policy: survey after survey has confirmed that in most countries, only a minority of the population would ever support such an approach (at least at this stage in human development). What I’m arguing for is a broader and better-informed definition of the national interest, one that factors in the real, tangible benefits—both short- and long-term—of a more cooperative and collaborative culture of governance.

Something a little more challenging, but equally interesting, would be for one or more countries to absorb the principle of the Global Vote and accept some small percentage of the votes in their general election to come from people outside their own borders: perhaps a randomized panel of around two hundred individuals from all the other countries on the planet. I’m sure this would present all kinds of constitutional difficulties, so sacred is the idea that citizenship and democratic rights are indivisible, but what a gesture of interdependence it would be for the right kind of country!

A more ambitious Dual Mandate policy involves converting the excellent but underused navies of several countries (the chances of a seaborne invasion of their territory being close to zero) into an ecological defense force. Most modern nations occupy their armed forces during peacetime with a collection of exercises, civil duties, emergency relief, and odd jobs which may or may not correspond with their abilities, vocation, and desires. My suggestion is to convert these navies into forces whose specialty is environmental protection—climate change and pollution being the closest thing to war that most countries face these days. Since a navy’s native element is water, this expertise ties in neatly with an environmental mandate: preserving clean, abundant water sources; avoiding and mitigating floods and mudslides; enhancing the capability of the population, industry, and agriculture to manage unpredictable rainfall; and so on.

I’m also gathering broader support for an initiative I originally developed with the Mexican government: the Climate Change Communications Forum, or 3CF. This is an initiative designed to create a global consensus, and a center of expertise, on how to engage the world’s population more fully and productively in the discussions and actions on climate change. In my keynote launching the initiative at the COP-16 Climate Summit in 2012, I spoke about how we were all in our different ways “trying to do diplomacy with global public opinion, the last remaining superpower on earth.”

Such a forum is needed because the political and scientific components of the climate change field already have highly developed structures, forums, bodies, and networks for effective and efficient international coordination. Yet there is virtually no coordination or coherence in the way that the all-important aspect of climate change communication is discussed, carried out, monitored, or developed by individual countries, cities, and other international actors. The task is huge: according to research from Yale University presented at the 3CF launch in Cancún, 40 percent of the world’s population had still not heard of climate change.²⁹

Society’s response to the emergency of climate change still looks so much like an ant heap that somebody has prodded with a stick—a huge amount of unconnected and panicky activity, people rushing around in all directions, and achieving too little, too slowly. We do not lack willing or skilled foot soldiers; we lack generals.

As I have discovered, an individual policy conducted by an individual government, no matter how courageous and imaginative it is, seldom makes a lasting impact on the culture of governance more broadly, or indeed on public perceptions. If, however, a group of very different countries on all the inhabited continents were to implement the same policies simultaneously, and if those policies were sufficiently simple, inspiring, and effective both domestically and internationally, then there’s a good chance the culture of governance would start to shift.

I believe that our seven hundred million natural cosmopolitans, and the vastly larger number of people beyond the core group who may not fit this exact character type but still sincerely desire a peaceful and prosperous future for all humanity, would see that something was changing and would begin to feel a glimmer of hope. They would start to see that there are countries out there both willing and able to serve the interests of our species and our home planet as well as their own interests.

Eventually, I feel sure, the arguments will become overwhelming, and that long-awaited change in the culture of governance worldwide, from fundamentally competitive to fundamentally collaborative, will become an unavoidable reality.

This, I believe, is the way the world changes: not with a single project, but with many; not by citizen power overnight, but by the patient nurturing of the next generations of citizens; not by countries alone, but by groups of countries, companies, and other institutions and individuals; not with conventional bureaucratic solutions, but with courageous and inspiring projects; not led by the great powers alone, but by the emerging and middle powers too; not with an unwieldy consensus of the majority of nation-states, but through the dynamic examples of smaller groups of nations, soon imitated by the rest.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been helpful in several ways, even though the human cost has been so great. It has awoken us to a stronger sense of global community than we have felt for generations: simply seeing all the peoples of the world responding in their different ways yet suffering as one, day after day, has brought us to a higher awareness of our connectedness, our differences and our similarities, our shared vulnerability.

It has proved to us that we have been far more successful at globalizing our problems than globalizing our solutions. The globalization of transport and business enabled the pandemic to happen; the globalization of communications, scientific research, institutions, and supply chains enabled us to tackle it.

It has revealed the fragility of human society by confronting us with the actual possibility of global catastrophe, and this had been a vital missing ingredient in the fight against climate change and nuclear proliferation. Now, and for a little while until we forget it again, we can all believe that humanity has no special right or dispensation to survive. We need to hang on to that thought.

It has reminded us why the United Nations family exists and why the multilateral system is indispensable; it has also highlighted its weaknesses.

With a handful of exceptions, it has been our politicians who have failed the pandemic test. We have witnessed, day by day, their inability to think more globally or in the longer term, to plan ahead or learn from the past, to work together with other countries rather than squabble and blame, to innovate rather than simply react, to suspend even temporarily their party-political calculations, to act like adults rather than children.

The pandemic has shown that not even a grave global crisis will bring out the best in our leaders: indeed, it seems to bring out the worst in many of them. Very clearly, the absence of wise national leadership is a problem we cannot resolve in the short term; we must therefore work around it.

Enlightened self-interest has long been the missing part of the equation, the real reason why countries so seldom do the right thing. Unless we can combine our individual and collective goals, it’s never certain whether the spirit of collaboration or the spirit of competition will rule the day. The truth is that we need to keep both of those instincts happy and fulfilled, just as we need to satisfy all the appetites in our societies, if we want to be sure that our behavior stays within reasonable and productive boundaries.

It’s in the interest of humanity to raise new generations of citizens who will run toward the grand challenges instead of running away from them. It’s in the interest of nations to engage more imaginatively and more productively both with the international community and with their own populations, thus securing the future for all of us.

Using this simple equation I believe that we can move forward again: more inclusively, more sustainably, more thoughtfully, more intelligently, and with more well-founded hope than we have felt, I think, for several generations.