From Them to Us: Power, Privilege and Responsibility in a Shrinking World

Harvard Center for International Development

The logical extension of today’s ferment in America about white privilege and male entitlement is, at the global level, about the responsibility of the United States and its citizens to the world’s poor, of all races and cultures, and especially to the world’s disempowered women in poor countries. What are the responsibilities to them of us, with privilege and power? Today on the return CID's weekly Speaker Series podcast, Growth Lab Research Assistant Ana Grisanti speaks with Nancy Birdsall about key themes in her upcoming work memoir. Nancy draws on her own life experience being born into membership of the benighted cosmopolitan elite and stumbling into work as a development economist, as a metaphor for growing awareness of the depth and costs of inequality in the world; the centrality to development of the women’s movement and women’s agency in a world of persistent patriarchy; and the challenge of global governance in a system of sovereign nations facing new risks in an interdependent, “shrinking” world. About the Speaker: Nancy Birdsall is president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a policy-oriented research institution that opened its doors in Washington, DC in October 2001. Prior to launching the center, Birdsall served for three years as senior associate and director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, Birdsall was executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, she spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as director of the Policy Research Department. Birdsall has been researching and writing on economic development issues for more than 25 years. Her most recent work focuses on the relationship between income distribution and economic growth and the role of regional public goods in development. Birdsall holds a PhD in economics from Yale University and an MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. You can learn more about Nancy's work at https://www.cgdev.org/expert/nancy-birdsall. Nancy welcomes comments directly at [e-mail]. View the transcript for this episode here: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/files/Transcripts/Transcript-%20From%20the%20U.S..pdf