32:20know, in ninth grade which math things should you know, in twelfth grade which math things
32:23should you know. And you might be surprised to learn how poor
32:30those – I’ll call those standards, but to be clear, it’s not curriculum. It’s
32:33not a textbook. It’s not a way of teaching. It’s just
32:37writing down should you know this part of algebra? Should you know trigonometric functions?
32:42Should you know – be able to recognize a graph of this type?
32:46And doing that very well is hard because there are certain dependencies: if you teach it
32:52in the wrong order; if you try and teach too much at once, too much too early, which the
32:57U.S. was doing a lot of that, it can be very, very poor.
33:01And if you compare – we have 50 of these things and there was quite a bit of divergence.
33:07Some states had trigonometry, some didn’t. Some had pie charts, some didn’t. So, ironically,
33:16what had happened was the textbook companies had gone in and told the committees that make
33:21these things up that they should add things over time. And so we had math textbooks over
33:26double the size of any of the Asian countries. And we had the ordering in almost every one
33:33of our 50 – which is strange. You think if you had 50, one of them would randomly
33:37be really, really well ordered. (Laughter.) Some were more ambitious than others.
33:43So, for example, being high; that is, having the twelfth grade expectation be high, there
33:50were a few like Massachusetts that were quite good in that respect. And so when kids from
33:55Massachusetts take international tests or the SAT, anything, they do better, better
34:03than the rest of the country. And so often, when you see those country rankings, they’ll
34:06take Massachusetts and show you where it would be if it was a separate country. And it’s
34:10way past the U.S., that now is virtually at the bottom of any of the well-off countries,
34:17with the Asian countries totally dominating the top six slots now. Finland had a brief
34:22time where they were up high, and now they’re not even the European leader anymore.
34:29So a bunch of governors said, hey, you know, why are we buying these expensive textbooks?
34:36Why are they getting so thick? You know, are standards high enough or quality enough? And
34:40I think it was the National Governors Association that said we ought to get together on this.
34:48A bunch of teachers met with a bunch of experts, and so in reading and writing and math, these
34:54knowledge levels were written down. And at some point 46 states had adopted that curriculum,
35:02a variety of competitive curriculum, now that small companies can get into it because it’s
35:07not just doing a book for Florida, and so the sort of barrier to entry that was created
35:13by the large firms there goes away. The idea that you – those committees rig it so you
35:18can’t use the old textbooks, you know, that idea will go away because in math, this can
35:25have real durability. Changing your math standards is not like some
35:28new form of math that’s being invented. And there has been in a sense a national expectation.
35:37When you take the SAT test, it has trigonometry on it, so if you’re in a state that doesn’t
35:42have that, you’re going to get a low score. And they use a certain notation in the way
35:48they do math and certain states were different than that, so you’re screwed. If you move
35:53from state to state – MR. BROOKS: In the vernacular.
35:56MR. GATES: – you experience discontinuity because of this. And it’s made it very hard
36:01to compare things. And this is an era where we have things like Khan Academy that are
36:06trying to be a national resource and yet they – you sit down, it will tell you, are you
36:12up to the sixth grade level? Are you up to the ninth grade level? Are you ready to graduate
36:16from high school? And so this Common Core was put together.
36:23If somebody – and states will decide this thing. Nobody is suggesting that the federal
36:29government will, even in this area, which is not curriculum, dictate these things. States
36:35can opt in. They can opt out. As they do that, they should look at this
36:39status quo, which is poor. They should look and find something that’s high achievement,
36:47that’s got quality. And if they can find something that’s that, if they have two
36:52they’re comparing, they ought to probably pick something in common, because to some
36:57degree, this is an area where if you do have commonality – it’s like an electrical
37:02plug – you get more free market competition. Scale is good for free market competition.
37:09Individual state regulatory capture is not good for competition.
37:14And so this thing, in terms of driving innovation, you’d think that sort of pro- capitalistic
37:21market-driven people would be in favor of it, but, you know, somehow, it’s gotten
37:30to be controversial. And, you know, states will decide. Whatever they want to decide
37:38is fine. But, at the end of the day, it does affect the quality of your teaching, does
37:43affect when your kids go to take what are national-level tests, whether they are going
37:49to do well or not do well. MR. BROOKS: Speaking of competition, let’s
37:52go to competition outside of the United States and the extent to which it helps people who
37:56are poor. And I want to turn to Paul Wolfowitz now.
38:00PAUL WOLFOWITZ: Thanks very much for coming. It’s terrific to have you here. I have a
38:07quick comment and then the question. The question is about trade. But the comment is about this
38:11issue of waste in foreign aid. The amazing work that you’re doing in the
38:15foundation, that the U.S. government is doing with PEPFAR, other things demonstrate that
38:19there are lots of ways to spend foreign aid that are the opposite of wasteful; they’re
38:24accountable, they’re measurable; they make a huge difference in people’s lives. But
38:27I would submit that there is a lot of waste. And I’ll give you just an example. If you
38:32give $100 million to a government that is so tyrannical that you really have no idea
38:36what’s happened to that money, by your numbers, that’s $100 million that could have saved
38:4150,000 lives. And I think you’ll have a stronger case for foreign aid if you go after
38:47the things that are wasteful as well as the things that are good.
38:49But here’s my question. In talking about foreign aid, you correctly say, we spend less
38:55than 1 percent. We could afford to spend more. In fact, we spend more in agricultural subsidies.
39:00Well, the agricultural subsidies aren’t just a waste of money. They are making it
39:04harder for poor countries to export the very products that their competitive natural advantages
39:11would lead them to, which is in agriculture. I wonder what you think about our agricultural
39:16subsidy systems and what its impact is on the poor countries that you visit in terms
39:20of their trade opportunities. MR. GATES: Well, we certainly distorted the
39:26market in agriculture prices. There are some cases where it’s fairly extreme, like sugar.
39:34And there are some cases where it’s more modest, like the big – the big cereal crops.
39:39In Africa – there’s a few things like cotton, horticulture, where you can make a
39:48clear case that the sort of dumping out of the rich countries because of strange subsidies
39:56actually is affecting their income. They’re not yet as competitive in the big-value crops
40:03as they need to be. So we have a lot of work to do in Africa.
40:06Africa right now can barely feed itself. So the huge rise in productivity – it’s called
40:12the green revolution, that was more than a factor of two increase in Asian cereal crops
40:18– that never happened in Africa because it has a unique ecosystem, so even maize and
40:23wheat in Africa are very low productivity. That’s very fixable, both with conventional
40:28breeding and with GMO-type breeding to give much, much better seeds.
40:34And so the effect of trade barriers once we fix African agriculture, the impact of trade
40:40barriers, then the numbers will get very, very large. And, you know, it’s just too
40:46bad that both Europe and the U.S. sort of – and Japan – compete to distort those
40:52markets. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any change in that.
40:57Now it’s called mispriced insurance instead of price supports, but it’s still money.
41:02And, as you say, it reduces some level of efficiency in terms of who should be providing
41:11which products. MR. BROOKS: One of the most striking statistics
41:16that I’ve seen as an economist comes from a Catalan economist, his name is Xavier Sala-i-Martin
41:21at Columbia University, who notes that since you and I were kids, the percentage of the
41:27world’s population living on $1 a day or less has declined by 80 percent.
41:30It’s just amazing. This question is related to that and it comes from our economist Michael
41:36Strain, who says that the spread of free enterprise has dramatically reduced the share of the
41:41world living on $1 a day or less, this standard that we’ve had since we were kids. Is that
41:47the right standard? You’re looking at 2035 to wipe out at least average poverty across
41:53all but maybe 10 countries in the world. What should the standard be? What kind of measurements
41:57are you using, and how should we be thinking about it to update those measures?
42:00MR. GATES: Well, any single measure isn’t going to capture what needs to go on. The
42:08extreme poverty line now s $1.25 a day, and the poverty line is $2 a day. And you can
42:14certainly argue that they should be a bit higher than that. Also the way that GDP is
42:21measured in poor countries is extremely random – not random. It’s inaccurate. The errors
42:28bars are gigantic. There’s a book by Jerven called “Poor
42:32Numbers” that just talks about – you kn