Mirza Yawar Baig – Address the compassion deficit
AI: Summary ©
The topic of wealth is discussed as a distribution problem, and Richard was a military father and his mother were his cousin. Richard's wealth is increasing by selling what they buy, and he believes wealth is not a reflection of success or failure, but rather a reflection of the global challenges of technology and the importance of human capital in driving entrepreneurship and growth. skill education and entrepreneurship development are essential to empower people and society, and the need for a culture of entrepreneurship and growth is emphasized.
AI: Summary ©
Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala rasulillah. But
thank you very much for inviting me. And for this is the first time is actually the second time somebody says he does not need an introduction, and he actually did not introduce him he did a little bit. The other one was in Kuwait, one of my friend's daughter's children tend to have greater wisdom, more reflection on you. I know once upon a time you were also a child.
She said, Mr. yava, needs no introduction, Mr. Gray, please come call us. And I think and that was, because usually people said he needs no introduction, then they proceed to introduce the only difference. I mean, the only correction I want to make there is it's not now it's not 28 years old, 35 years, I'm a bit long in the tooth, as you can probably see, and I'm not as dumb as I look. So I'll leave that for you to decide.
In 2016, some of you may have seen this report of the World Bank, we said that 62 people had more assets than 50% of the world. So 62 people and I, whenever I quoted this figure, I used to say that a regular bus seats 65 people, so 62 people is less than a bus.
There are three more seats in that bus.
The 2017 figure, that number dropped to eight,
eight billionaires, collectively have $426 billion worth of wealth, which is equal to the collective wealth of the poorest 50%, which is 3.6 billion people in the world.
The problem of the world, therefore, is not poverty, meaning lack of wealth, or poverty, meaning lack of compassion,
we do not have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem.
History tells us that though this may sound attractive, what I'm going to say might sound attractive, which is take the wealth from the rich and give it to the poor as it sounds attractive, especially to aspiring politicians, as we see in South Africa, for example, that's exactly the rhetoric that is being shouted out most loudly.
But that's not the solution at all, because it only ends up making everybody poor.
Of course, except the politicians who do it, who ended up being extremely insanely wealthy, as we have seen in the two major experiments that happened in this context, Soviet Russia and China.
The lesson that we need to learn, however,
is from medieval Europe,
who learned his lesson after
centuries of struggle, millions of lives lost, and rivers of blood.
And the lesson was that charity does not work.
Neither has banditry by any name, which is what taking wealth from the rich and giving it to the world, actually, amongst
what works therefore, however, is entrepreneurship. What works is empowerment, what works is to create an environment in which those who have motivation can succeed.
What works is to create a society where energy is not expended in coping, but in creating innovation, in driving the bar of quality ever upwards and seeking to create even bigger markets.
I dayjob is leadership development and family business consulting as many of you know,
this is me in disguise, because it's a night program. This is my night job.
So I actually teach people how to make money.
They were very wealthy people in medieval Europe, but that wealth was in the hands of a miniscule part of the population, royalty, nobility and the church.
What the struggle of the masses produced was a middle class by enabling the erstwhile serfs to retain their earning and grow it through investment of different kinds.
Just to give you
a comparison number,
when Richard the lionhearted, King Richard, the first of England was captured by the German king who was his cousin.
And he was held to ransom Richard's mother.
Elena
she was the ransom for Richard
Richard was 100,000
marks, German marks
100,000 john McCullough do whatever sums you want, that's still not a lot of money. Even in today's terms, that 100,000 German marks in the time of Richard, the first, which is mother, Eleanor of equity raised amounted to twice the GDP of Great Britain.
So you can imagine what we are talking about when we say wealth, you're not talking about a lot of money.
It's easy to understand that the only way to increase your wealth is to increase the number of people who can afford to buy what you're selling.
I mean, apart from robbing banks, that's a different element. And that's, I think, quite popular nowadays. But I mean, I don't advocate that.
Therefore, the best way to increase wealth is increase the size of the market, the more number of people who can afford to buy what you sell. That's how wealthy you become.
Not by cornering resources, and depriving others of them so that the numbers of those who are chained by abject poverty increase, and markets shrink. Sadly, this is what we are seeing happening worldwide.
It appears that though we are supposed to learn from history, the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing.
This is not a law of nature, and neither is it inevitable.
I stated as something that we need to change in our lives, and to learn from history, to change our future. After all, that's the only use of study history.
Talking of history, let me
also mention another very significant thing which happened in 1631, the foundation of a building was late.
This building was eventually completed in 1648. In 1636, five years after the foundation of the first building, the foundation of another building was laid across the world in another country.
Today, both the buildings exist.
The first one has two occupants. Both of them are dead.
The second one has scenes, 1000s of it, enter it
and live, educated, empowered, and molded to lead the world in practically every single aspect of life and endeavor.
I talk about the Taj Mahal, and Harvard.
I don't know how many of you are aware that Harvard and third Mahela contemporary buildings.
They were started and finished in the same time. The question is, what if Georgia had sought to immortalize the memory of his wife by establishing a university instead of building a tomb?
For one thing, both she and he would have benefited from Algeria, and her name would have been more than a footnote in history.
I want to say four things to you that I want you to remember. The first one, we invest in what we consider to be important.
Number two, attitude is the root of all action. Number three, our priorities reflect vision. And number four, ideas and institutions outlast the founders.
In India, today, we have one of the youngest populations in the world, not the youngest, because if you take Africa as a whole, the average age is under 20. But in India, we are told that we have 500 million plus people who are under the age of 25. And that two thirds of the population of this country is under the age of 35.
We have 1 billion between the ages of 15 and 64.
it's customary for analysts to clap their hands and rub them with glee making the their predictions and calling India the workforce of the world. Forgetting or more likely ignoring the fact that the world we are looking at today is not a world of manual labor. It's a world of high technology, a world of artificial intelligence, the world of logarithms.
It's not one bodies that this world will use. Already reward but natural intelligence harnessed to rigorous training.
This means two things appropriate
Education
and entrepreneurship development.
appropriate education in my view consists of two critical, interlinked ingredients, values, ethics and morals. That's one ingredient
coupled with
very highly specialized skill training.
one without the other, will either leave us with good people who don't have critical skills, or highly trained scoundrels.
In this context, we have a situation in our country where taking engineering alone, we produce more engineers than all Western Europe put together.
But according to the aspiring minds national employability report, which is based on a study of more than 150,000 engineering students who graduated in 2002, or 2015, from over 650 colleges 80% of these are unemployable.
Whose fault is that?
It's common to see while driving in rural India everywhere. I'm sure many of you have noticed this, groups of young men simply standing around on street corners.
I was in Bhopal, I was invited to speak at the police headquarters in Bhopal as what they call the dg lecture lecture series. And I was addressing all DGS IDs and DHS.
And after that, I my hobbies wildlife photography. So after that I went off to Sakura National Park to spend two days or three days there trying to photographs on wildlife.
So the driver was taking me
we passed village after village after village. And we see this thing I noticed things I was noticing these boys, no girls anywhere only boys standing and all wearing jeans and T shirts and standing on street corners standing by houses. And this is like 1030 in the morning. 11 o'clock in the morning. So I asked this driver I said, you know
why they're standing here? He said, Sir, company. They have no work.
So I said, Mr. Takata, what do the parents do? Who said categorically? They do farming? So as educated
as Why don't they do farming? He's ever the school governor.
He's always told me he was a school governor. Okay, it was a mistake at lightning. So they went to school, so they don't they think farming is beneath their dignity.
So as a Catholic guy,
the value mahbub Kamata, what do they eat what the parents are?
So I said, the mahbub Naomi's occurring. When the parents are not there. What will they do? He tells miseria takodana, bodega.
He tells me this is what you have to tell me
is a policeman, I think you got tired of my question was on the highway. So he says,
Remember, here, we're not talking about engineering graduates, you're talking about school dropouts, or people who have gone to school.
But they learned nothing useful.
Having said that,
they are not only unemployed, but they are unemployable. Having said that, they are still citizens. They feel anger, and they feel anger.
Later they dream.
They want what you and I have and take for granted. And above all, the vote.
What that means, I don't need to spell out for you.
I'm sure all of you understand what I'm talking about.
Imagine it
and then multiply that by at least 100. And you will probably get near what the harsh reality is likely to be when our decades of neglect of the majority of our people comes home to roost.
That time is not far away.
Unless we decide to do something about that.
Now what is that something?
value and skill education in all schools
and entrepreneurship development with venture capital funding.
That's exactly what you've been listening to hear in this man, Judy, launch speeches.
Don't worry about creating employment and creating jobs, bad idea.
Create people who can create jobs and empower them to do so. Any society that looks up to a government to create jobs is a society that is going nowhere.
progressive society, early America, not today's America, but early America is a very good example. Progressive societies are those where people drive enterprise and open opportunities for those who are trained and interested to benefit themselves and others. We Indians are among the most enterprising, entrepreneurial people in the world. What we lack the tools, skill education, and entrepreneurship development with venture capital funding at a large enough scale to register on the map.
Today, we are gathered here at another decision point where we will individually decide to support an initiative which is less about religion and more about finance. It's less about personal wealth, though it has the potential to make those who invest in it wealthy, but it's about leveraging wealth in society. It's less about charity, but more about empowerment. I speak about entrepreneurship, which this initiative is all about. Money is the fuel. It's the lubricant that drives great ideas and enables them to manifest in society, adding value and spreading wellbeing for all who live in that society. money of course, that is used wisely. Islamic Finance, promotes shared risk, sharing
in profit, and sharing in loss to help the person get out of the loss rather than one benefiting at the expense of or the misfortune of another.
We have the example of the subprime crisis in the US that rendered 1000s of good people homeless, why bankers walked away with a rescue package, which supported their million dollar incomes and lifestyles. With no accountability for precipitating a crisis that caused so much needless suffering. We are all aware of the suffering and deaths of our farmers here in this country, thanks to money lending. I said you that growth, for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.
Islam is against all such dealings and decrees that the owners of capital, hold interest from Allah subhanho wa Taala and are answerable for it. It's not theirs to squander or speculating. It is to use for the benefit of everyone while enjoying its benefits personally. Entrepreneurship is today's idea for the salvation of the world. And interest refinance. And venture capital is the best way to make that happen. This is not about Islam, it's about people. It's about prosperity. It's about sustainable growth. It's about development. And that is what Islam is about anyway.
It's about building an economy with minimal disparities of wealth.
It's about increasing the buying power of people, so that markets expand beyond anything the world has ever seen. It is not only about becoming individually wealthy, but but about making others wealthy. That way, your own wealth will also increase.
You and I here are today at another decision point, as I said earlier, what you decide to do will leave your legacy for generations to come.
The question is, what do you want it to be? In other words, what do you want to be remembered for? Thank you very much.