FW: more on vaccine and Peace

This is what Bill wrote.

Will send you comments re Pinker shortly.

B

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 11:51 PM
To: Boris Nikolic
Subject: RE: more on vaccine and Peace

I will call him tomorrow sometime. I am headed to Omaha in the morning.

I could call him before I leave like at 8am my time or after I get to Omaha.

The key point is that stability comes from having food and health.

Health drives the move towards reducing population and raising the capabilities of the population which reduce the chance of conflict a lot.

Also I think Nobel didn't favor peace just because it was peace — I think he favored it because it improved human lives.

When a child dies of malaria that is not peace for the family involved.

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So the human condition is improved as we save lives through health and we reduce the population growth so we can feed, educate and provide jobs.

Stephen Pinker's book (which I review at length on Gatesnotes) is very relevant in this respect. Likewise Diamond's book Collapse when he talked about Rwanda and the conflict there.

The worst places for the Rwandan conflict were actually areas that were almost all Hutu but the land area and the agriculture productivity along with the population growth didn't give people enough to eat.

Whenever you have lots of young men — particularly without health and education -- the more you have conflict.

Nobel would be disappointed with World War I and II however he would be pleased with what has happened since then to the human condition.

Less deaths from disease and less deaths from violence led by the improvement in health and the ability to feed people with the population growth down and agricultural productivity up.

When we have these developments we get countries who are very unlikely to go to war with each other as Pinker describes.

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