Factually! with Adam Conover - Immigration, Being an International Refugee and the Price of Freedom with Sophal Ear

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Political scientist, Occidental College professor and former Cambodian refugee, Sophal Ear, joins Adam this week to discuss his journey escaping Cambodia with his family, the price people are willing to pay to find freedom, the immigration system after WWII, and what it means when you turn people away. This episode is brought to you by Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet Podcast, The Great Courses Plus (www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/FACTUALLY), and Bombas (www.bombas.com/FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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you know, Americans have a reputation of being kind of selfish, right? Focused only on ourselves and our own country's problems, but you know, in a lot of ways, that's not quite true. Americans actually do care quite a bit about suffering outside of our borders. You know, every year, we donate about $44 billion to address poverty abroad. That's our personal charity. It's equal to the entire GDP of Uzbekistan. And by the way, that doesn't even include the aid money spent by the U.S. government directly. But, you know, donating a whole Central Asian Republic worth of charity abroad every year doesn't guarantee that we're actually going to achieve the goals of that charity. You know, helping others on a global

scale is actually a lot harder than we'd like to think, even if we're working with what we think is a revolutionary new idea. Take microlending. Microlending was a massive trend in poverty alleviation over the last few decades. The idea behind it is simple. See, since historically, poor people in the developing world did not have access to banking, the thought was that microlending could fix that by offering them loans. Hey, to lift them out of poverty, don't give them money, lend it to them. That way they can become successful, small scale entrepreneurs. Ideally, it works something like this. With a small loan,

even just a few hundred dollars, poor people might buy chickens to start a little chicken coop, right? Or an egg business or a cart to help sell firewood or a fridge to keep their surplus chicken cold and out of the smoke from their surplus firewood or a fridge to keep their surplus chicken cold and out of the smoke from their surplus firewood, right? And since they need to repay the loan, now they have an incentive to work hard enough to pay it back, which, hey, theoretically is the same hard work required to pull themselves out of poverty. The poor person wins. The person to lend them money wins. Everybody wins. You know, teaching a man to fish is better than giving him a fish or whatever, except here, instead of teaching him to fish, you're giving him a bank loan. All right,

it's a little confusing, but maybe it's the same principle, right? Well, the benefits of this were supposed to be huge. Microlending's promoters promised it would be a tool of women's empowerment and increased school attendance for poor children. Through microlending, small communities could become self-reliant and flourish. Doesn't this sound great? I mean, if you listen close, you can almost hear the inspiring music playing in the background of the PSA, right? Well, the essential cheerleader behind microlending was the economist and social entrepreneur, Dr. Mohamed Younis. In the 1980s, Younis founded the model institution for microlending around the world, Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. And he was a tireless promoter who made huge claims. He said that poverty would be eradicated by microlending

in a generation. Soon he said, he actually said this, we'd have to take our kids to poverty museums to show them how people used to suffer. Now, first of all, that sounds like a bad way to spend a Saturday. Who wants to go to the poverty museum for fun, you know? But also, that is a big claim. Yunus was literally telling people that poverty would be collecting dust in the Natural History Museum next to the woolly mammoths and the cavemen. Well, you know, people bought it. Because through the 90s to the 2000s, microlending became a macro trend.

The global rich and famous flocked to this idea. Microlending's advocates included UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, economist Jeffrey Sachs, and U2's lead singer Bono, a man who literally looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. And all this hype had an effect. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microlending, and in 2006, Eunice and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Prize. But despite this frenzied enthusiasm, there was a problem at the core of the idea. It didn't work. The billions of dollars invested in microlending did not bring the transformative results for the poor.

That were promised. A series of studies showed that on the overall, microlending didn't even increase household income. Often, people didn't even use the money from the loans to start a business. Instead, they used it to buy something they wanted or needed. You know, sometimes you don't need a refrigerator for your chicken business. You just need it for your own damn food, right? So it doesn't spoil. The study showed that access to microlending didn't increase women's empowerment. It didn't lead to more investments in children's education. And in fact, we now know that even if it doesn't actually hurt poor people,

it doesn't really help them much either. It turns out that whether you give someone fish or teach them to fish, the one thing fishless people need is fish, not, you know, debt. Microlending was an idea that seemed promising at first, but it turned out to be too good to be true. Because the truth is, helping people in developing nations is harder than we think. You know, conditions in different places might require different kinds of solutions that aren't always apparent to those of us who, you know, haven't been there or don't live there.

And when we take a hard look at the groups who wield power in the world of global development, you'll find that a lot of them aren't actually just looking out for the poor. They're also trying to further their own interests as well. It's a complex, difficult problem with no easy answers. Well, to help us understand the world of global aid and development and helping the poor overseas a little bit better, our guest today is Sopal Ear. Sopal is a professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College. He's the author of Aid Dependents in Cambodia, How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy. And he is also one of the first guests we ever had on Adam Ruins Everything.

So it's really wonderful to reunite with him and bring him back on the show. Please welcome Sopal Ear. So wait, finish your Sam Watterson story. Oh, yeah. So I think I went there once because he held an event for Refugees International, which turns out to be an organization that started when the Indochina refugee crisis happened.

And he went on their board because of The Killing Fields, in which he played Sidney Schamburg, New York Times reporter. I don't know if you ever saw the movie. But anyhow, I thought, oh, great. I saw him at LAX, and we started talking. Next thing you know, I'm on the board of Refugees International. Hey, anything can happen at LAX. I know, LAX.

Of course, he was just done telling this nice young Asian couple that he doesn't do pictures because they were asking for pictures with him. And I thought, oh, shit, I'm going to go up to him and tell him, I'd like pictures with you, Mr. Watterson. I'm a Cambodian refugee, survivor of the killing fields. And he actually was really cool about it. But even at the end, I said, can I have a picture with you? He said, no, no, better not. And then you won't believe this. There was a guy there who secretly took our picture and put it on Instagram.

So there's a picture of that very moment where he's sitting with me and I'm telling my story of my family's survival. So this is only an LAX story. There's a picture of you with Sam Waterston at a moment where he's telling you in the picture, I don't do pictures. It wasn't probably that precise moment,

but it was like, the guy was writing, oh, so Paulier tells his story of escaping the Khmer Rouge to Sam Waterston of the Killing Fields. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Like, right when I had said, you know, it's just too weird. People are watching all the time and taking secret pictures. They really are.

They really are. I had a photo taken of me and my girlfriend. I had just taken her from a root canal in Beverly Hills. We were leaving the dentist office. She had gotten dental surgery. She had novocaine. She could barely speak. We were standing outside and a paparazzi a block away took a photo of us. That photo

is now for sale on the Getty Images website for $500. You can buy a license for it right now for $500. I'm wearing my gross shorts. She's got, you know, I mean, she's got cotton wadded in her mouth. It's ridiculous. And the caption says,

Adam was taking his girlfriend. It does say that. It says, Adam Conover, seen on the streets of Beverly Hills. Oh, jeez. I haven't seen you since you were in our very first, you were one of the first experts we ever had on the show on the pilot of Adam Ruins Everything,

I believe in the February of 2015, something like that. Pretty unbelievable, yeah. Yeah, it was at that Catholic school. We shot it at a Catholic high school, yeah. I know, I know. And then it was like all, like 7 a.m. show up and I had no idea what I was in store for because I've never done these things. But it was an amazing experience to just see the beginning of this idea, this concept that you were – I mean, who knew that you'd be –

how many shows now in? We've done 64 episodes. 64, wow. But you were very patient because it was the first time we were just – now when we have experts on set, I have a whole spiel to film. Hey, it's a little bit different from other TV appearances you're going to do. There's kind of a script. We're going to get it a couple different ways.

But that was the very first time we were doing it, so we didn't know how it was going to go yet. And I'm pretty sure we also made you do your lines – 50,000 times. 50,000 times because we were – it was our director's first time directing the show this way and so we're like getting all sorts of coverage and I just remember you being uh I'll say extraordinarily patient well I just knew that I was not repeating the same thing each time

because I'm not the kind of person who just you know memorizes lines and says them flawlessly and right and then your your professional actors were continuing their part of the show. So whatever I feel, I'm like, wait, why is he talking now? It's because he's actually, or she is actually a professional and that's what they do. They continue on to the next line, regardless. Well, that's what people like about the experts on our show is that they're not quite, you know, we can tell that you're real people because actors, they've got it down. And just that little bit of uncomfortability is what makes it

credible. But tell me, you alluded to it earlier, your history as a Cambodian refugee. I only found out about this after you were on the show. Can you tell me that story a little bit? Sure. My family escaped Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. So they took power April 17th, 1975. And we got out circa January 1976. And it was my mother's cunning and determination to save her kids. Now, how old were you? I was born literally months earlier. I don't even know my real birth date.

I mean, officially, I have a birth date, but it's kind of a made-up birth date. It's sort of close to what is believed to be the actual birth date, but there are no records left. My wife, same thing. Mother-in-law, same thing. My own mother, same thing. And so among Cambodians, you'll see a lot of these weird April 4th, June 6th. My mother was June 6th. My mother-in-law is January 1st.

Are these just the dates people choose if they have one to pick? It's easy to remember. I mean, it's like, there's a no brainer. You just, it's the same number next to each other, right? But the year should be around the year that I was, or that they were born. In my case, it was either late 74 or early 75. But the story is really quite dramatic. My parents were urban dwellers who were exactly the kinds of people that the Khmer Rouge who took over Cambodia, these communist Maoist inspired guerrillas who were some of them kids really brainwashed to believe that agriculture was the only way to go. essentially empty the cities where they believed the scourge and parasite of the urban dweller feeding off of luxury goods and producing nothing were living. So my parents were, along with 2 million other Cambodians in Phnom Penh, sent to the countryside. And

that's where they were until one day the village chief, commune chief of the Khmer Rouge said, we've gotten word that Vietnamese citizens are to go back to Vietnam. The Vietnamese minister of foreign affairs has asked for them to return. And so we will allow that. And of course, what did it mean? It meant you'd have to be tested in Vietnamese to prove that you were Vietnamese. There are no documents to prove that you're Vietnamese. Is it a language test?

Language test. My father didn't speak a word of it. My mother had learned it as a kid with Vietnamese friends, going to markets and so on. And so she ends up with my dad saying, yeah, put us down on the list. We're Vietnamese. The timing of all that was pretty unbelievable. A few months later, if we had said that, we would have been killed

because the Khmer Rouge started their campaign against their Vietnamese communist brothers only months later, believing that these were the enemy too. So the timing was unbelievable in that she decided in a window of time when they were still okay with each other, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese communists, that they would send back citizens. Now, she gets tested by the Khmer Rouge cadres. She gets tested. She passes that one because it's relatively easy. They're not asking too many questions. But then she's going to be tested by the Vietnamese communist cadres.

And at that point, they're asking her about, oh, by the way, my father who didn't speak Vietnamese passes away three days into our journey. So he doesn't actually, you know, this is like a Sophie's Choice situation. He would have been tested and then wouldn't have been able to speak. And there were cases like that that my mother witnessed where husband and wife, husband doesn't speak Vietnamese because he's actually not Vietnamese. Then wife spoke Vietnamese. So she was told you can go to Vietnam, but your husband has to stay, or you can stay with him and die together, basically. So how to essentially figure out that. bittersweet situation where from malnutrition, dysentery, and everything else that Khmer Rouge had done to the people, he passes away and isn't then an issue in that what would we do if he were

actually to be tested and not pass. And so at that second test, the Vietnamese cadre bring her, you know, ask her about, you know, why was her about, why did your husband die? Because they're wondering, he must have been a big shot because if he died, somebody wanted him dead or something like that because they're still thinking rationally about how things work in Cambodia. But people die all the time because they just were not getting enough food. And so she keeps to a story. She had given all the children new names, but her Vietnamese was so bad. Before the test, she told an auntie about it and she said, oh, these are the new names. And the auntie said, but you've given all the boys' girls' names and

all the girls' boys' names. And she acts as a drill sergeant Vietnamese tutor to my mother for the next three days to help her improve her Vietnamese to the point where she does pass the exam. And we're then able to go to Vietnam, which was by then already, of course, communist. And so the next step was how do we get out of Vietnam? Well, mom was very smart. She said, upon arrival, we're not Vietnamese. We're Cambodians. So that now you could leave Vietnam because there was no interest in keeping

Vietnamese people, or rather keeping Cambodians in Vietnam per se. They wanted to keep Vietnamese people in the Vietnamese socialist paradise, right? So they had to leave via boats as the boat people. Right. I've heard, I don't know much, but I've heard about the boat people. Exactly. And that's where the whole story of Refugees International comes in, because there were all these Vietnamese boat people. So I have a friend who's a fellow young global leader of the World Economic Forum. He's from New Zealand. Well, he's a New Zealand citizen, but he's originally from Vietnam.

He actually tried to escape multiple times with his father out of communist Vietnam. Three attempts. They were always caught and sent back. Final attempt was he, they only have enough money to bribe one seat on the boat. And he, they get out there. They run out of fuel in three days, food in four and water on the fifth day. And they're just, you know, floating in the middle of the South China Sea when a cruise ship comes by.

And you think, oh, my God, they're safe. But actually the passengers on the cruise ship just take out their cameras and take pictures of them and go on their merry way. Oh, my gosh. So it takes – but there's a nice thing that happens in that the wake from the cruise ship pushes that boat into shipping lanes. Then a cargo ship comes by, does what the law of the sea requires in cases like this, rescues them. Two hours later, a storm comes by and destroys the fishing vessel.

My God. That my friend was on, Mitchell Pham. Unbelievable story. This is like the old man in the sea or something. Absolutely. Just in terms of this happens and that happens. Exactly, exactly. So many people, stories like that.

Thankfully, we actually got out of Vietnam on a plane because as Cambodian citizens, we could leave legally as long as you paid your bribes and found somebody in the West that said they were related to you. So in that case, another amazing story. If you have time for it, I'll tell you. No, please. I would love it.

And I just want to say, one of the things that highlights for me is all these stories are so skin of their teeth, and it makes you realize how many people the story didn't go well for. Oh, absolutely. For every person that ends up in our situation, God knows how many ended up dead, right? So there were 2 million dead out of a population of 6, 7 million Cambodians. So, you know.

2 million out of 6 or 7 million. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, literally, you know, it's easy to think about it as a quarter of the people ending up dead in a situation that was just untenable. Untenable. And so, you know, for us, once we got to Vietnam, we had a relative, a distant cousin in France. He didn't have the same last name. He was a university student, so poor that I'm told he literally bathed only using the tank water of his toilet.

It was just really a starving student situation. And he's passed. That's more than, you're now a college professor. That's more than like you're starving. They're just eating instant ramen. They're not bathing in the toilet water. Exactly. So it's not a normal starving student.

No, no, I guess not. My students only don't have air conditioning when it gets hot. That is the chief complaint. They have to eat cup noodles. who, I don't know, for whatever reason decides, hey, I'm going to help this Cambodian family stuck in Vietnam that needs to get to France. And Bernard opens up the Yellow Pages, finds a lady with the same last name as my mother and convinces her to sign papers saying she's related to her, to say that she'll be willing to sponsor or they're related

and therefore they can sponsor as relatives. And papers get lost in the mail, but I guess Bernal just forges her signature and ends up getting us to France in 1978. I mean, unbelievable that we get there and then we're supposed to actually go to the U.S. And you're a baby at this time. I am. You're being held by your mother in a little

blanket. Two, three years old. You know, really, really don't have any memories of that time. But my siblings were older. And, you know, it's a burden. I mean, having these kinds of memories, having these kinds of memories probably make it much more difficult for you to then cope because you have to actually, you have something to remember, suffering. And all I, you know, my mom says that, she's passed away now, but she used to say that I was like one of these Ethiopian starving babies because it was like, you know, in Cambodia, there was no breast milk. She had nothing left and just gruel that they gave with barely any grains of rice in there.

So she was able to, you know, we were very fortunate. We were able to get to Vietnam, then get to France. And then from France, we were supposed to go actually to the U.S. I still have this letter in French from the International Rescue Committee saying to my mother, we have your plane tickets. You're to appear at this office at this time to get them. And then you'll be flown to San Francisco where I had an aunt there. And she decides for whatever strange reason, I don't know, not to go. And she was tired, I think, with all the traveling. Maybe she didn't want to be with

her sister. I have no idea. But that kind of broke that relationship for a few years. And then in 1985, the aunt visits France. And things get patched up. And she says, you know, you all have to come to America. And we end up in the U.S. in 1985. Wow. And what part of the country? October of 85, land at SFO via JFK and end up in Richmond,

California. So Northern California. Grew up most of my childhood in Oakland. Okay. Yeah. And unbelievably was able to adjust to the United States. Went to Willard Junior High School, then Berkeley High School. And at 16, graduated Berkeley High School, went to UC Berkeley, and then ended up doing a bunch of other things, World Bank, Princeton Masters, PhD, and now I'm a professor. But I'm skipping through so much. If you want to hear it all, I'm happy to tell you. We've got plenty of time. It's awesome.

We do have plenty of time. It's all incredibly fascinating. I can't imagine anything I'd rather hear about. I mean, does it give you any sense of, you know, refugees are such a divisive topic now and seem to be one of the most difficult problems facing the world and with more on the way given climate change and all the disruptions that we know are coming and the refugees that we believe will be caused by those events. What perspective, if any, does it give you on that issue? Well, I mean, the first thing that I see it as is I was a refugee.

I still think of myself as a refugee. You always have the luggage packed next to your door to get out quick in case something happens. Do you really? It's metaphorical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But really, you have that mindset of like at any time things could change and you better be ready to go quick. Because, you know, refugees aren't people who decide voluntarily to move. The definition of a refugee is somebody who's forced to move because they have no other choice.

And we are now at a time in history where we have more refugees than at any time since World War II, right? So World War II created all of these refugees, Jews from Europe who needed to move from Germany and who, you know, those who had survived. And now we face a situation where we've, the production of refugees is at an all time high. And we have to realize that there was a reason why, you know, like we have a refugee convention because we understand that there's a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable people. These are people who are persecuted and who don't have any other choice. That's why they seek asylum and are labeled refugees and have certain rights, even if those rights aren't respected by a lot of countries. Like, you know, if a country says, well, we don't want any refugees.

Well, what are you going to do to stop them? I mean, you're going to embarrass them, shame them, and so on. But there are countries that literally have argued that or say that we don't want anybody who's not Christian in our country. Well, now that's very strange to base it on religion alone as who you can let in. Yeah. And it's one of those problems that sort of makes you question your country's self-definition. It's very easy when there aren't refugees to say, okay, well, here's what a citizen is, and here's who we're going to allow in and who we're not going to allow in. But then when you have millions of people at your doorstep and spilling over the threshold because the pressure of movement is so high,

you're forced to grapple with that and you're forced to say, well, do my values mean I have to take care of these people or not? Like, what are my values in that situation and am I going to live up to them, I think. Yeah. And as well, we understand the United States to be a nation that was created essentially from, I mean, aside, of course, from Native Americans who were here before everybody else, but is a nation of immigrants and refugees, people who were essentially not welcomed where they were originally. Yeah. Right.

to find a new place to worship, freedoms that they didn't have where they lived. And who essentially, I mean, if you think about it, America has that origin story that comes from people who moved. Maybe some of them were the craziest ones who were the most daring, who were willing to take ships across oceans to unknown places. But that's part of the fabric of, that's the fabric essentially of this country. And we shouldn't forget the fact that now that, you know, we're all here and settled and fine and maybe multi-generationally in that we don't realize the history of this country and the responsibility essentially of fulfilling the promises we've made to the world in terms of

accepting our share. Now, I'm not saying open the borders and let everybody in and so on. But if you think about the very few times that the US has acted in a way that is favorable to refugees, it was probably after Jimmy Carter decided that he was going to send the Seventh Fleet. So Refugees International, that organization I'm on the board of, their origin story is they had a Joan Baez and Sue Morton, the founder of Refugees International, had a candlelight vigil at the Lincoln Memorial, and they walked to the fence of the White House.

And legend has it, Jimmy Carter walks out of the White House and tells them, I cannot let your people die and instructs the 7th. It says, you know, he basically it's from there that the 7th Fleet Navy of the United States goes and then is tasked with rescuing the boat people who couldn't, who would have essentially been kept, would have been sent from place to place. There have been Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong who were there for decades, stuck there. And they're still relatively lucky, the ones who died to sharks and sinkings of those fishing boats that I talked about earlier. So really, that's the only time that the U.S. seems to have acted very honorably about refugees, even during World War II. One of the biggest stories or the most difficult examples is the St. Louis. It was a ship that had Jews that were sent to the,

you know, were looking for a place for asylum, came to the U.S., and we're told that they didn't have a, you know, they couldn't dock there. Sent to Nova Scotia, also couldn't dock there. Then returns to Germany where most of the, where many members of that passengers were killed under the Nazis, right? I've never heard that story. So, yeah, so there's a, you can get a picture of that ship. So yeah, you can get a picture of that ship. In fact, the head of Refugees International, the president, Eric Schwartz, keeps a picture of that ship as a reminder of what it means when you turn away people. Because in World War II, when people needed refuge, the United States was like,

nope, nope, nope, nope, you're not coming in. And people died as a result. And now you're seeing that across the Mediterranean where you have people who are trying to reach European shores and they're dying, Syrian boys dying on the beach, drowned to death, etc. These should be reminders of the price that people are willing to pay in order to find freedom in order to be safe. And that that we didn't, you know, America's part of our history is that we're a nation of immigrants, and that we let the refugees in and that we, you know, we're the heroes of World War Two, the hollow, you know, that Germany was committing the Holocaust, and we

rescued so many of those people, but we forget that it was a battle and a struggle at that time as well, and that people didn't, there were people who didn't want to, there were people who weren't let in, and there were other people who stood up and said, we are going to be humanitarian and save our fellow humans this way, and that that's the choice we have again today. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, I mean, obviously, it's complex. There are decisions that have to be made with respect to, you know, people who are already in the country, what to do with those who aren't documented, and whether we have a responsibility to, you know, I mean, there's going to be a lot of arguments. It's messy. It's not going to be easy. It's not easy. But if you had an immigration system, a legal system that was effective where if you're told, hey, we reviewed your asylum case, you don't have a case, then you really should leave at that point. I mean, there shouldn't be a situation where, all right, no, everybody just come and go and whatever, right? I mean, there are laws, but insofar as, you know, then we could actually give people a fair shake with respect to, you know, listening to their cases. If you expect immigration judges to listen to

a minimum number of hundreds of cases per year, they're basically factory workers at that point where they have to process all these cases. Yes, that's the situation now. I mean, we did a segment on that for Adam Ruins Everything about the incredible pressure on the immigration courts and the mass trials that they have and all of that. I'm just curious before we move on and talk about your actual work, which is part of what we prepared. We have all these notes about what we're going to discuss, but this is also fascinating and wonderful.

I'm just curious about what it was like for your mother, because you talk about yourself being lucky to adjust and that. To go from such a horrific and dangerous situation to being in the United States and making a life there must have really been something. Well, for her, it was like basically taking off from one country that she knew to go to another, adjusting. I mean, by the time she gets to France, the reason why she probably decided not to go to the U.S. was pure exhaustion. My sister was sick. There was really not a rush to like, oh, let's just, again, take another plane and go further.

I mean, look, she fell into a depression when we lived in France where she was institutionalized. I remember visiting her. It was tough. I had to live with a foster family for two years because, frankly, and as did one of my sisters because it was too difficult for my mother to take care of all the kids, especially the younger ones. And so it was hard.

But the thing that's amazing about her is that she always believed that even though she herself had a fourth grade education, she believed that all her children should have an education. She was willing to forego income in order to invest in an education. So when I went to Berkeley, for example, she was willing, you know, it was fine. Don't worry about finding work. You know, there wasn't that pressure of like,

hey, you got to go out and get money as soon as possible because we need more money. And, you know, part of it is there was a, there's a social welfare system that did help. There were Cal Grants that allowed me to go to Berkeley basically without any loans. Pell Grants, Cal Grants. I mean, living at home, of course, saved a lot of money. When I initially got rejected from Berkeley but got into UCLA out of high school, I thought, oh, my God, how am I?

I can't do this. Like the reality was at 16, I thought, oh my God, how am I, I can't do this. Like the reality was at 16, I couldn't imagine, I didn't have a driver's license. I didn't have a car. I couldn't imagine coming down to LA and going to UCLA. So I thought, oh, the only option would be I'll go to community college and transfer like my sister had. And then I'd met a guy who at a meeting of Southeast Asians at UC Berkeley who said, oh, my name's Bob. Here's my number. I work in admissions.

And I thought, okay, whatever. Yeah, I'll keep this. And when I got rejected, I remembered Bob. And I called Bob up. And he met with me. We worked on a letter of appeal together. And a few weeks later, I got a reversal decision. And then a couple of years later, I found out that Bob became the director of admissions at UC Berkeley.

Wow. So the guy knew everything about the inside. He just wasn't yet the director at that point. I mean, it's just unbelievable how fortunate I've been and how many good Samaritans along the way from the auntie in the pre-testing area at the border with Vietnam to Bob who was willing. Anything could have happened. I could have called him after being rejected, maybe not left a voicemail, not reached him. You could have missed the bus to that meeting of Southeast Asians. Absolutely. And I can't believe that it all worked out. So, so really it's, it's just,

it's luck, but also, you know, just having the, getting, trying when I could have said, you know what, I'll just go to community college. I don't want to go back into this decision or appeal it. And my mother was in that way, I believe, somebody who had hope for a better life for her kids. In fact, in the documentary that was made about our family story. Of course the documentary was made about your family story. about our family story. Of course a documentary is made about your family story. It's only a minor documentary

that was made out of Singapore. Channel News Asia did it. This is the best story I've ever, I'm riveted. I'm sitting here, again, this is not what we came to talk about, but I'm just like, every detail.

I'm happy to share. And, you know, I had done these recordings of her because I had interviewed her for the New York Times for a Lives page story, which is like on the Sunday magazine, the last page where sometimes it's typically a first person story. I know these stories. Yes, exactly. So I had dreamt of doing one where she would tell me the story of our family's escape and it wouldn't be clear of our relationship until the end of the story.

So that, hey, it's the mother, it's the son talking to the mother about their entire family's escape. Good pitch. And so we did it on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Prampe on April 17, 2005. And then the documentary filmmaker who watched my TED Talk approached me and said, hey, would you like to make a documentary? And then she had passed away six months after my TED Talk in 2009. So I said, well, mom's passed away, but I have these tapes.

And so in the places where she would have appeared, there's animation of her, of the scenes, and then her speaking, and then subtitles explaining what, translating what she says. And in it, she says at the end something to the effect of like, you may not be as powerful as others, but you are just as intellectually capable of her kids. And what she meant by that was, oh, yeah, we're not, you know, we're not, you know, highfalutin politicians or billionaires or anything like that. But we didn't end up being stupid and unable to fend for ourselves. And she was happy that we could make a life for ourselves. I mean, to go from the killing fields of Cambodia to being a professor at a college here in California is incredible.

Well, anything can happen. I'm a believer in that. Of course, I'd be remiss in saying it happens to everybody. Of course not. The myth of the model minority, I don't want to feed into that. Of course, and I don't mean that to be – I hate the – well, that's the American dream right there because it's not. That's not the life that we aspire for Americans to have or that we should expect of each other. But the story is remarkable.

And it's like interviewing only the expect of each other. Exactly. But the story is remarkable. And it's like interviewing only the winners of the lottery. Yes. If you do that, well, guess what? You'll think that playing the lottery means you'll win the lottery. Well, you do have to play the lottery, but most people lose. Yes. And that's who doesn't get interviewed. Selecting on the dependent variable, as the statisticians would say, ends up causing bias where you think, oh, look, everybody ends up with these success stories.

Well, no, most don't. It's the story of looking at the – I love this anecdote about when they would watch the plane. I forget which war this story is about or if it's even true. When they would watch the planes come back that were getting shot down and they would look at where the bullet holes were and they said, oh, well, that's, you know, those are the, those are the places the planes are getting shot. So they put more armor there, right? But then the real problem was, no, those are the planes that got shot in those places and they didn't crash.

It's all the other places that you get shot that would kill you. You know, that if you just look at the survivors, you don't really understand the true story. You'd have to go pull up the crash plane to figure out where to get shot. But they can get shot anywhere, and the most vulnerable areas would be the places to fortify. Well, let's actually talk about your work. Right after this, we'll take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more So Paul Ear.

I don't know anything. I don't know anything So Paul, let's talk about what you actually do for a living. Yeah, let's do that. So you're a professor at Occidental College, correct? I am. You study international aid, international development. I do, in a department called Diplomacy and World Affairs.

Probably the only one with that particular title, but it's basically international relations. Great. So this is a subject that I know very little about, but I've always had the curiosity in the back of my head because you hear in the news, you know, oh, you know, the politicians are debating, we give such and such an amount of aid to foreign nations.

It's a large percentage of GDP, all things considered. I mean, not enormous, but, you know, it is a fair amount. And, you know, they're debating about whether or not we should. And then we often continue, you know, I think those amounts are slashed sometimes, but we still do pay out large amounts of money. And even as someone who is like, you know, generally, I try to think of myself as a selfless person, and I want to help out those in need, I still have never quite understood like the rationale for why the American system, which, you know, often seems very self centered, would feel it's important to do that. And so what is the what is the basis for that? Diplomatically? Why? Why do we make these payments? Right? So after World War II, we realized that the international order would be

better if we were able to help the countries that we were allied with that had lost the war, or rather that we had helped to essentially come out of World War II victorious, recover, right? Because if they didn't recover, they might turn into communist countries, right? So the iron curtain was falling. And now it was you choose to either be communist with the Soviet Union or capitalist with the West. And so the rationale was, how do we ensure a world on the Western side that isn't going to fall into the clutch of communism? And the answer was to initiate programs like the Marshall Plan and others in Asia and in Latin America that would essentially send money to those countries

so that they would be able to have their economies recover so that they have enough money to buy it. It's selfish, you know, typically American goods and oftentimes cigarettes. But basically to give them the money that they would then use to then, you know, rebuild their economies and at the same time help our economy because it would create more demand for what we export, right? So we were relatively undamaged, right? I mean, except for Pearl Harbor, there was nothing, no incursion into the US. And so our productive capacity was good.

We were able to make things. And those countries needed help to rebuild their economies. And so the system that was created after World War II was essentially one where liberalism, where the market is essentially baked into the systems of these countries, where there's going to be a government intervention, but mostly based on market principles. So prices will determine where things should, you know, supply and demand ought to be. But generally, you know, they wouldn't turn into communist countries, which was our biggest fear because they were now, we were now, you know, in a Cold War.

Liberalism meaning, in this case, market economies and democracies very broadly? Right. And I wouldn't even stretch it to what we now understand liberalism to be. And certainly it wasn't liberalism in the sense of conservatives and liberals today. Yeah, no, not that. But embedded liberalism in the sense of baking in the market as a basis for how countries function so that they wouldn't simply say, oh, it's better to be completely, you know, command-driven, for example.

And you had variations. You had countries like, you know, Nordic countries that were social welfare democracies, so they believed in taxing more in order to obtain, you know, higher benefits from those tax revenues for their people. And then you had other less social welfare-driven countries. Of course, the US is the extreme other side, which would be the example of a country that still is debating the issue of health insurance for its people, whether they ought to have that or whether they should simply go to the emergency room and cost a bundle. And you know what? Everybody needs to pay for their own way. But for most countries

in Europe, I think those decisions were made long before in terms of, well, there are certain responsibilities we have. France is equality, fraternity, liberty. And so they understood that equality was more important than simply saying, hey, level the playing field. But then if you end up a loser, that's okay. So are we essentially, is this payments that are being made in order to keep these countries on the American team? Or are we paying for stability? What is the rationale here?

What effects are these amounts having? And the Marshall Plan, of course, that's the only one I heard about in school. Right. So, I mean, you know, studies of foreign aid have shown in terms of why the U.S. gives foreign aid these days, or at least in the recent past, have been totally linked to patterns of voting at the U.N. If a country votes with the United States, it gets more aid. Guess what? That's because we want them to be on our side, literally that the Team USA aspect of it. But yeah, I mean, if a country consistently opposes the US, you can probably predict they're not going to get money from the U.S. or as much money as a country

that supports the U.S. position at the U.N. I mean, you know, other aspects of aid have got to do with very fairly selfish things. The former U.S. Agency for International Development administrator, Brian Atwood, I think once testified before Congress that 84 cents of every dollar returns to the US from USAID money. Something I think one should probably not be totally proud of, given that it's like giving a dollar and saying, hey, I'm expecting 84 cents back from that dollar, because we're going to force you to fly American airlines only. We're going to force you to buy or to use consultants who are U.S. citizens, or you have to use contractors who are American companies, and that's how the money returns. I guess the only way Congress might support more foreign aid is if you could actually show that more than a dollar came back for every dollar that was spent. But this is – so, yeah, the United States would put – this money comes with conditions that they have to agree to certain terms?

Well, a lot of it, if it's bilateral, yes. The conditions would be tied to aid in terms of, okay, you have to spend the money with American contractors or American – you have to fly American. You have to do these things so that it helps the United States. Japan's the same thing. Japanese foreign aid requires that Japanese consultants be used. And so it really limits in that sense, the effectiveness of bilateral aid, right? So when two countries agree to, okay, I'm going to give you this, but then I'm going to put all these conditions on that, that's obviously more difficult to justify competitively than to say, well, we want you to competitively bid this, but you don't have to use an American company.

You can use an international bidder, for example. And that tends to happen, that's typically the rule for the World Bank, for example, the multilateral international organizations, international banks that are doing development work, they're not wedded to like, you have to do American only. No, they're not owned by the US. They have members on their board that's the United States. But in that sense, it's more, I think,

evenly spread and sensible in terms of approach. But then there's something else with the World Bank and the IMF and so on in the way they approach development or approach loans to countries. And it's the, you know, much, much ballyhooed structural adjustment programs that are required. So, you know, if a country is in a financial crisis, the IMF's approach will be you're in a financial crisis because you spent too much money. You didn't raise enough money, you didn't tax enough, and then you spent too much, so now you need to go on a financial diet.

Yeah, the austerity program. Right. We'll give you a loan, but you'll have to agree to all these conditions. And because the World Bank and the IMF are the lenders of last resort, nobody else, if you can't get money from them, nobody else will lend money to you. So you literally, you're at the very end of the line in terms of if you don't agree to this, there really isn't anybody else out there who's going to be willing to put up the money. So that's certainly something with structural adjustment, with the Washington Consensus, where these were a set of 10 policies that Washington, including the World Bank, the

IMF, wanted countries to accept whenever they took money. So they'd have to liberalize their markets and deregulate and do all these things that privatize, for example, which to some extent makes sense. But taking a cookie-cutter approach, if a country doesn't have enough regulation because it doesn't have enough state capacity to say you need to deregulate further is like, you know, doesn't make any sense. That's like, you know, you need to build up a state in order to be able to then deregulate it, if that's what you want to do. You can't just begin with the assumption that every country, you know, the problem is always the same, and the solution is always the same. But, you know,

there've been instances with the IMF where somebody was too lazy to apparently write a new document and instead just went in and searched and replaced the name of a country. And then forgot somehow to replace the name somewhere else in the document, which then led to a huge embarrassment about how the hell – This really happened? This is a story that when I worked at the World Bank, we talked about. And of course, you know, I mean, these are institutions. They work in ways that are very strange and sometimes arcane. I mean, even the culture of the World Bank and the IMF is totally different. The folks at the IMF apparently all wear the same suits and carry this leather attache that they're told that standard issue, while the bank was much more of a,

you know, anybody can speak in the meeting, because there's not this hierarchy of like, only the mission leader will be telling the government things. So it's crazy stuff, like culture of bureaucracies. Well, let's zoom out a little bit. For the average American, when they hear about this kind of aid, the way that they think about it, what are the biggest misconceptions that you think people have about it that we need to correct about what it is and why it's done? Well, so I think people think of foreign aid, some people certainly think, as a waste of money. Like, oh, it's just like an international welfare system. We're just going to subsidize the welfare queen, quote unquote, of the world. And that's really, I think that approach does a disservice. First of all, if you think about

countries that need foreign aid, what's going on is they're less developed, right? So they are not at a level of development. And of course, when I say developing, developed, less developed, et cetera, the truth is- Yeah... What do we mean by that? It's like talking about wine in terms of white and red wine. That's not an... It's not technical. There are at least 200 varieties of countries that are, you know, in the sense of, you know, more developed than others. And it's very difficult... And a lot of different ways you can measure them based on.

Exactly. It's just that we don't have 200 terms to characterize every different kind of country. You look at their per capita GDP, their gross domestic product, for example, and then from there you maybe think, oh, yeah, they reach $3,000 per person, so they're getting to middle income or something, lower middle income or something lower middle

income and there are different axes it's the sort of thing where when you travel from you know the u.s to somewhere else you're like well our houses are nicer but man they have got really nice trains here it's that's a very stupid example but there's not just one axis on which we're measuring right well i mean no way may not have as many billionaires but they probably have fewer poor people and yeah you know everybody gets education and health care. So these are choices that countries make in terms of their political economy, you know, how much government intervention they want and how much aid will play a role in their country. And of course, you know, for a lot of the developing world, the approach too often is, hey, we have the answer because we are the experts. And of course, you don't know anything unless you are local and the locals have the local knowledge and the expertise. And too often,

you know, people just forget that and ignore the locals and come in flying with their plans already pre-made. But you were saying this is not just welfare. What is it? It's not just welfare. It's really a preventive for problems down the road. So if you think about Afghanistan, for example, and how Afghanistan became the host country for al-Qaeda, if we hadn't let Afghanistan become a failed state so that, you know, the Taliban would host al-Qaeda, if more had been done earlier, maybe there would have been a base for al- that we spend to essentially clean up the mess after 9-11, obviously invade Afghanistan, attack Iraq and invade Iraq and all these things. Yeah, this place was the sandbox of the world that every other major power was coming in and kicking the castles over every couple decades.

Right, right. Yeah, where empires die is what Afghanistan often is referred to. And that's the kind of investment, I think, that makes a lot of sense when you think about what would happen if you don't spend a little bit of money now. You know, the people who understand the price of war are the military. And you won't find a general who will say, oh, it's a waste of money to spend money on the State Department. No, they want the State Department, USAID, to get more money so that they can help countries and prevent another catastrophe in which, you know, American soldiers have to pay with their lives. Because it's a matter of – so the goal is to keep these places stable rather than allowing them to

sort of fall into instability. And then that's when you need to send American soldiers. Right. I mean, of course, there are some scholars who argue that, well, sometimes if they fail too much, even Al-Qaeda won't go there because they won't have electricity and internet. So maybe we should just let them go completely the other way. But that's taking too much of a risk. That would be Somalia. That would be places where for- Doesn't seem like a good strategy.

No, it seems like a very perverted view of the world where if the man's down, kick him further so that they can't at all get up that way and strike you. The man's down. Kick him further so that they can't at all get up that way and strike you. I think we need to understand it in terms of the costs and benefits and how the U.S. You were saying earlier that we spend a lot of money on foreign aid. Actually, we don't do nearly as much as Nordic countries do. They dedicate like 0.7% of their GDP.

This is like the agreed upon target. And we are nowhere near that. How much do we? I mean, we are a fraction of that. And every time we do, it's like people freak out thinking like, oh my God, we're wasting all of our money on this stupid foreign aid that doesn't do anything. Well, when you hear President Trump talking about, oh, we need to cut aid to Central American countries because there are too many refugees or there are too many migrants coming from those countries.

By doing that, you're going to make the problem worse. Because you're further destabilizing those countries and you're stopping the only thing now that is preventing even more people from ending up on the U.S. border. preventing even more people from ending up on the U.S. border. It's very interesting, though, because it sounds like you're making the argument that our reasons for, you know, sending this aid can be totally cynical, that we're trying to, you know, save money and save American lives in the long run. And that's a good thing. But I also hear you bring in a lot of criticism of aid practices as you're bringing them up. And I know that I think there are plenty of people who would argue that like for the U.S. to treat the world as a place that it's going to try to arrange for its, you know, own safety and stability is not great. And I know

there are plenty of stories throughout global history where the U.S.'s involvement in trying to, you know, say, oh, we need to keep a place like Afghanistan stable. We need to make sure a war doesn't break out there. So we're going to send aid to this government. A lot of those stories end poorly. So- Oh, yes. No. And of course, you frequently have, I mean, you only need to look at confessions of an economic hitman to understand that, yeah, there are cases. What is Confessions of an Economic Hitman? Is it the title of something?

Or is that your forthcoming memoir? No, it's a book in which the author details essentially an entire set of circumstances by which why do countries covet oil? They send in their corporations. covered oil, they send in their corporations. And then when the leaders of those countries don't follow what the U.S. say, they send in the military to essentially take over a kind of narrative of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a pretty cynical view of things, but it's got some grains of truth with respect to the map of Iraq was apparently being cut up and U.S. oil companies were being asked, which part would you like?

Which block of Iraq would you like? And that is the kind of cynicism that, you know, is validated in the sense of like we discovered that, you know, Vice President Dick Cheney was apparently having these meetings with all executives trying to do these things. And then you have to wonder like how could this be? Well, he was the CEO of Halliburton. So, you know, there's definitely interest from, you know, companies that are in oil and energy and in this extraction in furthering their agenda in that sense.

Is it possible for American interests and humanitarian interests in this area to coincide for us to give aid to a nation, both because it's helpful for us geopolitically and in a way that actually benefits the people who need our help? Because to some degree, I'm not going to say the American government is altruistic in this department, nor do I think they need to be to do it. But as a human, I like to think I'm altruistic. And if there are people suffering somewhere and the careful application of American dollars can solve that, you know, for not too much money, you know, I'd like to do so.

Hey, I donate money to the Against Malaria Foundation because I'm told that bed nets are helpful in saving lives and increasing economic prosperity. So is there a world where those two things can dovetail or are we always talking about American interests versus what the people want? No, and look, I think that for so much of the foreign aid picture, the bed nets, the human development intervention,

the areas where it's not like, oh, we're going to build for you a stadium or a bridge or a road or a presidential palace, hint, hint, China essentially is doing these things. Yeah, there's nothing to point to, but there are people who are alive as a result. There are people who are able to get an education and who are able to, you know, fulfill more of their lives. And as a result, whether they see favorably the US

because, hey, we, you know, helped more schools to operate or we had more health clinics in countries that needed them. had more health clinics in countries that needed them. That, I think, is a huge soft power. In other words, let's not go in with the guns. Let's go in with the positive resources, human, financial, and so on, that can bring up countries that might otherwise see the U.S. as this imperial place that doesn't care about them. If you bring Voice of America or Radio Free Asia to people that otherwise have no access to news

other than from their own government, which is always, of course, has to be converted into whoever's being praised is actually evil and whoever is being criticized is actually good. You know, these are things that are valuable. Letting people determine their own fates and having agency. I mean, that's, I think, something that we ought to have more of. So yes, it's possible.

There is, but yeah, I am a critic of, you know, of the overall eight dependence picture in places. Aid dependence. Yeah. Like in Cambodia, you were going to say. Right. So tell me about that. My first book is called Aid Dependence in Cambodia, How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy.

And it's really about the case of one country that received for decades really so much foreign aid that it became a situation where for every dollar the Cambodian government spent from its budget, it received something like 94.3 cents for the period of 2000 to 2008 or so. And that's not even the worst of it. I mean, you've got countries like Liberia where it's a dollar from the budget they are spent, $7.71 in foreign aid. Yes. Yeah.

It's not the same dollar, right? So the government says that we have very little money. We're just spending this much versus donors coming in and flooding the place with their dollars. Oh, doing direct aid and spending that much. Aid projects or things that essentially represent multiples of the budget of the government and instead puts it on the donors. And then people where there's democracy or supposed to be democracy are not thinking,

they pay taxes, but then the government doesn't really want that much in tax revenue because it's more interested in the foreign aid and then the accountability mechanism of like, hey, Washington, D.C., it's taxation without representation. And my argument in those cases of over-dependent countries is no taxation means no representation. So if you're not taking money from people, then they're not going to feel like they're going to be able to ask their government to do things for them. Yeah, I'm imagining if here in the US, you know, instead of, you know, my roads, schools, airports being, you know, monitored and funded by the government, if seven out of eight of those things were actually run by the Red Cross, and, you know, China's sending humanitarian

workers to help repair the highways and everything, yeah, the government itself would atrophy because it would do less and people would expect it to do less. They're like, oh, yeah, no, the Europeans and the other people from overseas are handling that for us, but then you don't have any accountability over those people. I can't vote and put a new Red Cross leader in if I don't like where they put the highway. Right, or, you know.

My metaphor makes no sense, but, you know. And look, you know, Cambodia was talking about 70% of its roads and bridges were built by China. So do you mean out of 10 roads and bridges in Cambodia, seven of them were Chinese built? So who are you really paying homage to when you say thank you? You're saying thank you to China. And then it's built, of course, by Chinese workers who are brought in. So there's little work for Cambodians who are day laborers or willing to do that work because they bring in their teams. They work 24 hours a day in like three different shifts

and then they produce it as quickly as they can. I argue it's a win-win-win-win for China because they have a lot of money right now, right? So they've got all these trillions of dollars. And so they need to do something with them, but they're not going to give it away. They're going to make a loan for it. So then you create a loan and then you built the bridge or you built the dam or whatnot. And then you end up saying, well, you can't pay for it, so we'll do a debt equity swap. We'll take over the port, for example, that we built for you for 99 years, which is the same amount of time Hong Kong was handed over to China. And then our workers, there's not going to be a tender process

where there's going to be bidding for it because it'll be all in-house. Or if there is one, it'll only be Chinese companies. And then the workers will all come from China. So it's like, wow, great. And then there's a problem of too many men in China due to gender selection there. So if the men actually find a spouse in Cambodia, for example, it's another personal win for the Chinese who end up working in Cambodia. You know, this is the kind of dilemma that we're now looking at. I mean, the foreign aid picture has been eclipsed now by Chinese money that is in the form of the Belt Road Initiative, this trillion dollar. I've heard about this.

I don't really know. It's like on the part of the page of the New York Times, I can't quite understand. So, or, you know, I'm doing my best. I try to read it, but please tell me what the heck is the Belt and Road Initiative? Well, the Belt and Road Initiative is China's going global with a trillion dollars, essentially saying, hey, we're going to help connect everybody to China and especially those who need it most. So Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Malaysia, they're getting investments and loans from China to build roads, infrastructure, ports, and so on, to essentially commercialize those countries. So now you can export stuff more easily.

But there's also an aspect of it where it's military in nature. Why are you building a port that appears to be capable, like an airport that appears to be capable of landing a 747 when the country's main airport can't even do that. So are you expecting a Chinese naval airplane to land there? And, you know, is this going to eventually become like a secret base of military naval base of China, for example? And they want to do that. They want to circle around India because they know that the future competitor for China isn't going to be the United States.

It's going to be India. India has the population to essentially rival China eventually. And so, you know, the sooner they get essentially around India in terms of military presence, the sooner they'll have a leg up on India, you're going to be surrounded basically by our military. Wow. So this is the way that China is doing international development in order to, in a similar way, do what the US is doing to spend money in these places, tie these countries more closely to it, hopefully maybe also develop them,

but then also there's a degree to which it's self-interested? Oh, absolutely. And I think to some extent, it's almost a little too self-interested, especially the aspect of it that's loans that are not concessional in nature. It's closer to commercial loans. Of course, there's going to be some sweetener. But, you know, if I say I'm going to build for you a $2 billion stadium, and then what I built for you is a $1 billion stadium, and I loaned you $2 billion for it, what happened to the other billion dollars? Well, right. I mean, like, did you waste $2 billion, you know, an extra billion dollars on something that you didn't have to waste the money on? Or is it in fact, you know, half of it is going to go into the pockets of the officials in Cambodia, for example.

And so that's the sweetener. That's the thing that gets them to say yes, because, you know, there was recently an irrigation project that started at like $40 million, goes to like $250 million, now is being talked up for $500 million. And I have a friend who followed the entire project, drove from the beginning to the end, and he's reporting that there's really nothing going on. There's no irrigation activity. There's a ditch, and there are some motorized sort of levees of some kind, but they're all rusted up. And what, $200 million were spent for this?

This is unbelievable. And of course he's saying the money clearly went somewhere else. It didn't go into this project. Yes. I mean, any project that big is going to be a huge haven for corruption, I can only imagine. Exactly. Without the safeguards, like with the World Bank saying,

you've got to use a tender process, you've got to use procurement measures, three bids. This might be the most complex topic we've ever covered on this. I mean, it's still a young podcast, but my head is spinning trying to piece this apart. Let me ask you this, because there's plenty to look at in this topic where it's the struggle between nations and the US and China, et cetera. But I'm someone who I'm just interested in people who are suffering, not suffering, and humans doing better, right, across the world. I know there are countries that

need help, right? And they look to other nations for help, or there is some extent to which other nations can help them. What are actual ways that citizens of the U.S. or the U.S. government can help folks in need in other countries in terms of bettering the – not talking about refugees, in terms of bettering the conditions in those countries? Are there success stories that we can point to and say this is a good way to do it? Are there success stories that we can point to and say this is a good way to do it? Well, look, there's approaches where you can look at the – you can tackle the policy level, right? So you can say, hey, the U.S. government is doing it wrong. We need to advocate for better policies which would change an approach.

Or you can take the, hey, somebody needs to be fed right now, and they need to get money right away. And so that's the humanitarian direct sort of like we have to underwrite more money for an immediate situation. Those are – it's perfectly valid to feel that if you encounter a homeless person here in L.A., you feel like you want to give them money right away so that they can be better off. Or to think about it more in terms of, hey, the policy with respect to homelessness in Los Angeles needs to be changed. We need more housing, and therefore, things have got to be passed. And it's a longer, less satisfying approach. Ideally, we can do both of those at once. less satisfying approach. Ideally, we can do both of those at once.

I mean, as someone who actually cares about and shows up to events for homelessness in LA, try to focus on both approaches simultaneously, build houses and make sure people aren't dying today. Yeah, exactly. So with foreign aid, I think it's the same thing. You can support centers like the Center for Global Development that looks at better policies for foreign aid

and looks at debt traps for countries that took too much money from China and should be more careful about dipping too much into those resources so that at some point they'll end up owing so much that it's like the African proverb, if your hand is in another man's pocket, you have to walk where he walks. African proverb, if your hand is in another man's pocket, you have to walk where he walks. And so, you know, understand the consequences of that. Two, you know, unsustainable debt levels will lead you to, will lead to problems. And then there's, of course, you know, the organization I, we talked about for the, that pilot episode of-

Give directly. Give directly. Or in your case, you've decided, for example, to fight malaria with bed nets. And these are perfectly legitimate ways. I mean, look, even the ones that were poo-pooed on the show in terms of giving cattle a calf. Yes. We were making the argument that in-kind gifts are not as good as direct cash transfers, trying to make that general. If you give someone a dollar, well, they know what they need to spend on it

to make their lives better. You don't need to assume they need a chicken or a new pair of shoes. Right, right. Well, and they can always sell the calf and get money for it. So at some level, all of that is better than to simply sit on your butt

and say, I'm not going to do anything about it because it's too much of a hassle to open up my checkbook or take out my credit card and actually do something about it. to undertake because, you know, the world needs resources from private donors, from governments, from international organizations. And those resources would hopefully, you know, improve the lot of people in the developing world who have suffered, who, you know, maybe as a result of that wouldn't then consider as much. And again, it sounds very selfish, but wouldn't then need to like migrate. I mean, if you are truly interested in cutting poverty, for example, the one thing you could do if you wanted to do it immediately was if you take down all borders, people would simply move.

People from poor countries would move to rich countries and then, inequality would be reduced immediately as a result of that. And that's kind of what's been happening, except that we're now talking about having more borders and more walls, and that's the tradeoff, right? nation states on sovereignty, on the idea that you're either a citizen of this country or a citizen of multiple countries, but you cannot simply go into another country without the visa or the green card or whatever it is you need. It's funny that that is almost new since World War II, that that strictness of it, we put that system into place. Right. And immigration was always this idea of whoever was undesirable was the other, right?

So the Chinese Exclusion Act that kept Chinese men – that prevented Chinese men from reuniting with their families so that essentially they wouldn't be able to procreate was one way of keeping out Asians from the United States. One of the interesting things that happened after the San Francisco earthquake was suddenly a bunch of Chinese were born in the United States because all the records were lost. And they were able to then claim that, hey, here's my birth certificate reproduced. And it says I was born here, except that, of course, they weren't. But that made a huge difference. And as a result, they could have rights that they didn't have previously. I mean, there are stories about the one thing that,

why are there so many Chinese restaurants? Well, for a long time, the only exclusion to the Chinese Exclusion Act was if you had a business and you needed people to work there that were, you know, if you had a Chinese restaurant and you needed Chinese workers there, then you were allowed to. of America is this vacillation between accepting its past that is rooted in the idea of coming from somewhere else and in terms of excluding those who are the other, the alien other that you don't want in at this particular point in time. Are you concerned about the ways that you see the politics around these issues changing in recent years? Because they certainly have changed, not just in the United States, but globally. Well, we're entering now a phase that we seem to have forgotten why we created

the system that we created after World War II, right? Before World War I, the United Kingdom was, the British Empire was essentially the hegemon of the world. The most powerful country on earth, the sun didn't set on the British Empire. And as it declined, it entered World War I. And between World War I and World War II, the United States should have essentially understood that its responsibility was to become that hegemon, was to rise to the occasion

of helping to stabilize the world. And instead, it took another world war for the U.S. to basically wake up and realize that, wait a minute, we have a responsibility. And the responsibility- We're the most powerful country in the world now. Yeah. And it is to embed liberalism. It's to create a liberal order that would create more interdependence between countries.

The things that you now see in terms of globalization were created after World War II at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, where a conference created the World Bank, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreements on Trade and Tariffs, the GATT, which is now the World Trade Organization. Those institutions exist today because at that point, it was understood that who needed help? The first country to get a World Bank loan was France. The name of the World Bank officially is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

It was not the reconstruction and development of Africa or Asia. It was the reconstruction and development of France, of European countries that had been bombed to smithereens and needed assistance. And so as a result, of course, France and so on develop under a security umbrella that the United States essentially subsidizes. Our military helped protect these countries so that they could spend less money on their own military so that they could focus on their economies, on becoming more dependent on each other. got into the European steel and coal community, which became the European Union, this was the intention of creating so much interdependence that you wouldn't have another world war. Germany would never then decide that, you know what, screw France, I'm going to go to war with you. Because the countries could have enough agreement and enough joint security under NATO and under these other organizations that they could compete economically instead of physically with guns and swords.

I mean, you look at a map of Europe versus a map of Africa, the conclusion that some international relations experts, Africanists, have is that there are too many suspicious straight lines in a map of Africa. Every border in Europe was fought inch by inch because somebody died trying to protect that border. And in Africa, after decolonization, countries became independent without, you know, there was a creation essentially of the Belgians and the French and so on. These colonial powers.

And once you join the UN, of course, you can't get kicked out, right? I mean, once you become accredited to the UN, as a member of the UN, there's really no process by which you become de-accredited and told that, I'm sorry, you don't meet the requirements of being a nation state anymore. You can't defend, you know, you don't have a monopoly on the use of force over your borders. And so you need to go now, as in, you know, at a time when failed states like Somalia, for example, were not operating. But inside Somalia, there's a place called Somaliland that is operating perfectly fine, but it can't become a nation because it needs to have Somalia approve its, you know, becoming independent. It's like a state that's not a sovereign state under UN rules, right?

Somaliland. Yeah, yeah. But you have traffic lights there, they have their own currency. It's just that they're not recognized. And there are places around the world that are in situations where it's very odd. The rule is Somalia would have to agree to it. And if they can't agree to it, then you can't break free from it. And that's a strange world order. Things have got to change, of course. I mean, you have permanent members of the Security Council that are France, the United States, Russia, China, the UK. I mean, why? Because these were the countries that essentially emerged out of World War II.

And why not India? Why not Germany, for example? At this point, yeah, why not? and why not India? Why not Germany, for example? At this point, yeah, why not? But you said we're forgetting why we created that order because it... Because it prevented another world war, right?

So the idea was let's make sure that we don't have millions of dead people again and suffer the ultimate price in going to war with each other. Let's create stability. Let's create stability and create interdependence that will prevent, essentially. It'll make more sense to trade than not to trade. So allegedly, the banner that flew over the Bretton Woods Conference was, if goods don't

cross borders, soldiers will. This idea that, essentially essentially we went to war because we stopped trading with each other and then it became so severe as we had this beggar thy neighbor policy. So countries started to devalue their currency and competing with each other by essentially making their money worth less and less,

which then created inflation. So that what? So that it could trade more? But guess what? If both countries devalue their currencies, they've offset each other's impact. So it was time to finally re-examine all of this and create an order where the dollar was essentially the anchor currency for all of the Western world's currencies. And the dollar was pegged $35 to an ounce of gold.

world's currencies and the dollar was pegged $35 to an ounce of gold. And the dollar remains the world's reserve currency. Countries store the dollar in their vaults in order to essentially trade. And they believe that it will retain its value, even though, of course, we know lots of inflation during since then and dollar today isn't worth, won't be, you know, isn't the same thing as a dollar from 20 years ago or 40 years ago. And the United States, and we have to wrap up, but I do want to follow this thought. The United States in the last few years

has been signaling its lack of support for all those institutions that it helped create in the years after World War II, for NATO and for open trade and things like that. And all those organizations have their critics on the left and the right. But when you look at the, yeah, I've generally been aware,

hold on a second, NATO is something that keeps the world stable, right? Well, the members of NATO agree that if any one of them is attacked, the others have got to come and essentially it's mutual. War on one is war on all. Exactly. So then, you know, nobody – in theory, nobody would be foolish enough to attack a member of NATO because then they'll have everybody else that's a member of NATO go to war against them. And so that is supposed to keep things safe for the members of NATO. But of course, the argument was, you know, Russia felt like, oh, my God, everybody's

joining NATO and then we're the only ones outside. And now we feel like, you know, it's them against us, for example. I mean, you know, it depends on how one sees it. But there was, you know, that order, of course, is fraying on the edges. And economically, we're now in this America first mode, which seems to be saying, essentially, you know, mercantilism is back. This idea that, that, you know, we just care about ourselves and screw the rest of the world. Well, the entire system after World War II was about essentially America sacrificing in terms of security umbrella, in terms of dishing out money from Marshall Plan and foreign

aid and so on, in order essentially to prevent another world war from happening, to essentially stabilize the world, to be a hegemon. from happening to essentially stabilize the world to be a hegemon. And now we're pulling away from that and saying, we're saying, we have to focus on ourselves and screw the rest of the world. Well, that wasn't how the system was supposed to work. And when you start destabilizing it that way, when you start having trade wars, instead of more, you know, trade agreements where people do more trading with each other, then you end up with possible problems of, you know, a return to, you know, conflict. And that's when you'll wake up and realize,

oh my God, we were better off than, you God, we were better off trading with each other than actually going to war with each other. And I'm certainly hoping that we're not going to see that going forward. But again, it's that time where the hegemon, the United States, is kind of becoming waning. And who's going to be next? Will it be China? And who's going to be next? Will it be China? Obviously, they've self-appointed, but they're not behaving like a normal hegemon in that the norms that they are following are not the norms that we were hoping they would absorb,

which is, oh, we will support mutual security or we will support free trade and so on. They're also thinking about it in terms of, well, you know, if we want to do belt and road initiative and spend a trillion dollars and take over a bunch of ports and so on, that's what we'll do. Or if we feel that, you know, surveillance is something we want to spread around the world, not just, you know, in China or focus on the Uyghurs, for example, that's something we're willing to do. Well, these are not the values that have made, you know, the world freer. These are human rights

abuses. It seems like this is why a nuanced understanding of this issue is so important, because I hear, you hear so much about, you know, the negative effects of globalization and, you know, especially before the world's retreat from it, you know, all of the negative effects of the IMF, the criticisms of the IMF you were leveling and the World Bank and, you know, all of, you know, the US foreign policy and the conflict between NATO and Russia and all those genuine critiques. But then also you need this awareness of what those institutions have given us in terms of stability, because, you know, we certainly don't want to return to a World War I era foreign policy. But then understanding those details and how it all shakes out is so incredibly complex, as you've made clear today. Exactly.

complex as you've made clear today. Exactly. How does all this, just coming back to where we started this conversation in terms of your own personal history and your background, do you feel that gives you a different perspective on these issues than it does your average Joe, international economist, development expert walking down the street? Well, I think so. I mean, I lived on welfare through much of my childhood. When I ended up at the World Bank at age 22,

I had just gotten off of Medi-Cal, literally. So, you know, and then to get to work on international, well, what's known at the bank as social protection, which is basically international welfare programs for countries. So if you want to prevent child labor or do vocational training or do pension systems reform, it was incredible for me to be in the middle of an institution where I could provide some perspective from the standpoint of somebody

who has actually experienced it as opposed to somebody who maybe grew up between Paris and New York, going to boarding school and speaking French. I spoke French, but I didn't speak it because I'd gone to boarding school or learned it from the Lycée Francais or anything like that. I spoke French because I'd been a refugee in France, a Cambodian refugee in France, and I learned it as a result of that experience and was able to then use it in Algeria and, and, and work on Tunisia and elsewhere so that I could, I could deploy these skills that were random in the sense of like, you know, it was, it just happened that I was, I'd been in, in, in France for seven years living there that allowed me to then contribute to the work.

But yeah, I mean, to be able to provide a different perspective, one that isn't the same one that everybody else has, that's the key. That's the reason why we value diversity, right? I mean, if you have a board of directors where out of 10 questions, everybody on the board gets six right. And you think, okay, six right. So now you're going to consider a new board member. And out of 10 questions, that person gets four right. And you think, ah, you know, this person doesn't cut it.

They only got four right. Well, what if the four questions they got right are exactly the same four questions that the existing board got wrong? That's the whole reason why you want diversity. That's- What a wonderful metaphor. I never thought of that before. That's why, you know, I think we can bring something, a different perspective, something that's valuable that might prevent, you know, like herd mentality where everybody just agrees with each other and then they end up into, you know, falling into a trap or not seeing or being blindsided or not understanding that

the situation merits a different perspective. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show to give us that perspective today. Adam, it's a pleasure. It's such a huge treat. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Well, thanks again to Soapala for coming on the show. That's it for us this week on Factually.

I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our researcher, Sam Roudman, and Andrew WK for our theme song, I Don't Know Anything. You can find it on his new album. And you can find me on Twitter at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list at adamconover.net. And hey, until next time, we'll see you next week on Factually. Thanks so much for listening. I don't know anything.