Nicholas kristof. Kristof joins the times as a reporter in 1984, has been assistant managing editors in since 2001 has been a columnist. Hes written frequently on the challenges faced by the developing world, including islands, notably and therefore, on poverty, health, with womens issues have last been a topic of his previous book, coauthored with his wife, entitled half the sky, turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. The couples latest book is the topic of todays top, a path appears transforming lives, creating opportunity has been described as a primer on finding innovative and effective ways to give back. It goes beyond urging people to give of their time and money to help others and offers great advice on how to do so responsibly and includes reporting from the United States and abroad on actual people and organizations actually addressing problems for Early Childhood education to trafficking to malnutrition to homelessness and others. A path appears has been described by former president clinton as an inspiring round up of the many sample in effect ways in which we can lend our heart and talent to grow hope and opportunity both at home and around the lobe. About meteorology and now they are afraid we were going to books backpacking but the title actually comes from a saying by the chinese writer that hope is like a pass in the countryside at first there is nothing and then because he will walk this way again and again, a path appears. We wrote it i guess for the two basic reasons. One is people kept coming up to us and saying i want to do something. What can i do. And we wanted to address that. It seems like so many people want to do something to find a greater sense of fulfillment and model behavior for their kids just to make a difference in the world and the corruption and inefficiency and whether one person can make a difference. We think that one has to acknowledge that helping people is harder than it looks and that indeed charity indeed charities need to definitely raise their game. That absolutely there are still ways one can have a profound impact whether you choose to do that abroad or at home. People often ask how i managed to cover genocide, sex trafficking, and emerged cheerful and optimistic. As a backpacking in wall street many years ago. They were middleaged folks that have gone blind from river blindness and and to take a child out of school to lead them around. And in particular it used to be common here in the u. S. And it is an exceptionally painful way to lose your site. We met one woman who said that its like the pain of childbirth day in and day out, year in and year out and because she was unable to look after her children and several of them have died presumably of malnutrition because she couldnt support them. And so it isnt just blindness. It goes just so much beyond that. And we watched this little nurse do a 40dollar operation that gave her site back. Its a very quick procedure and afterwards one of the staff said can i help you little and she said get out of may way. And in that case it was through the national. I think we are also getting a better handle on the kind of interventions that do make a difference. One of the things we emphasize in the past is that it has been an emerging and robust evidencebased both at home and abroad about what works. Whether you are talking about washington or tanzania the best escalator is probably education and conversely for the kids that most need it whether tanzania or washington is often broken, but if you look at the most costeffective way to get one more child in school, does anybody know what it is . If you do it through bricks and mortar it costs to get one more child into school and if you do with my School Uniform is crazy for countries to show required a School Uniforms to people that are in dire poverty but many countries do. So you can get markets in poverty to subsidize School Uniforms. Using that approach it costs about 100 to get one more in school. If you do that do it through to the warming than its about 3. 50. And we dont think about the warming because our kids dont have intestinal parasite. Many kids in the developing world to do. They will have a tough time concentrating on school and they miss school as a result. We d. Worm our pets and when you have an intervention its so cheap it is kind of crazy that we dont do more of this. It actually strikes us how there are so many ways one can have an impact if one is willing not even through a formal intervention, but simply by taking risks, by showing a little more empathy. It strikes me that in this country there is an empathy gap. One of our favorite stories thats as close as it comes we write about an africanamerican from arkansas and he grew up in the 1950s in a whirl area and he was kind of a troublemaker, very smart but in high school he was increasingly mouthing off and he got caught shoplifting, he made the librarian who was a saintly teacher at the segregated school she made her cry and then one day hes skipping school, skipping class and goes to the Library Novel that has a cover of women in a risque dress by 1957 standards which probably means today incredibly welldressed standards. So he looks at it and he thinks this looks kind of interesting and he thinks about checking it out but he is a tough kid and it would be embarrassing to check out a book from the library so he steals it, he puts it in his jacket and walks out and he reads it at home and its a great book created with the pace mind. He returns a week later and sees that there is another book so he steals that one, too too mac and then eventually returns that one and this time he notices another that he hadnt seen before, steals that and this happens four times and if this turns him on to reading. He graduates two other novels and becomes a reader and as a transformational impact on him. He becomes better suited and he goes to college, he ends up going to law school, becomes one of the first africanamerican lawyers and becomes the leader in the civil rights movement, prosecutor and the judge said he becomes a great hero of his school and at one of them he confesses you should know it was more books that transformed my life and made this possible but i also store them and she had a confession of her own. She said when he stole the first book she saw been and she was ready to confront him she was angry why are you stealing it from from you can check it out but she also had a flash of insight. Here is heres a tough teenage boy who doesnt want to be seen doing something so soft as checking out a book so she let him than the weekend she drove 70 miles to memphis on her own time, went to used bookstores. The first two didnt have anything but the last one did, bought another novel and put it back on the shelf in the hopes that this tough kid that made her cry might like the first one and want another one and then she was so thrilled when he stole the second book, too mac. Shed repeated that four times and it had an incredible impact on his wife and then life and then that was echoed by so many that he has helped over the years and its kind of a reminder that sometimes we truly can reach out if we are willing to take a risk on people but some things dont work out it can sometimes have a really profound impact. The second reason was to give people the sense that they can make a difference in one way or another and the other reason we broke it had to do with the debate about inequality and theres been a lot of focus on economic and wealth inequality. I think this is one of the paramount issues that we face. The numbers as you know are struggling to beat each life of the wealthiest people on the planet own more than the bottom half. Here in the u. S. The top 1 substantially more than the bottom 90 and the blackandwhite wealth gap in the country to average assets or et times that and that is greater than the blackandwhite wealth gap in apartheid south africa. So we have a problem with e. Quality and yet i think we focus on the metrics of economics and income and wealth and the place where that gap is so much greater is an opportunity and in my reporting there are kids that are more likely to go to prison than they are to college and there are frankly the idea for the book was in our mind we were dealing with it right here at home we were running around the world to write about global issues and im from a place in little oregon that has been far apart by bluecollar jobs leaving and family breakdowns and our nextdoor neighbors every summer we would go out there and our kids neighbors were the same age. There was a girl whose mom was a teenage mom and our daughters friend jessica was in prison for attempted murder and a deal gone wrong. She was a handful and was very smart. It was frustrating to see this girl who we had known all our life was one of my daughters best friends just clearly headed for prison or pregnancy and you didnt know what was going to come first. That led us into these opportunity gaps in this country and i think that into the interventions have been spent less successful as they often come too late. It was a thousand days after conception and if you missed the window it isnt as it entirely closes but theres much less resilient than we tend to think. And you see in some ways it is things that have been early. Those kids at the birth of a huge instrument. And a 20 of kids are born with drugs in their system. There is a huge deficit in the community is for the kids and let me explain that. As some of the research that comes from a biologist canadian who was looking at he was working with rats. They were always fussing over the babies and there were others that were just like you were on your own. He wondered what the longterm consequences would be if these different ones. So he took the adult rat from the attentive moms and compared them he and he found that they were muscle confident, they were healthier to me and then he thought well maybe this is hereditary. And so he shuffled them at birth so that the biological offspring went to the wall is a fair moms and what mattered was sent her a pity that whether you were raised by. Then he figured out the pathway. And its that when rats were babies are stressed, then they produce cortisol stress hormone commanded a useful thing to have any crisis but when there is a constant stress, we were constantly dazed which comes from not being let it changes the physical architecture and means it is more impulse control, it is smaller and less symmetrical. With human studies as well. If you give a bb and shot in a bassinet, the cortisol levels spike and its easy to test because it isnt so life is so there are a that there are a lot of studies about what produces cortisol. The cortisol rises but only modestly and that seems to be life again has this impact that there are disadvantaged kids in stressful environments but when there is a lot of contact that reduces. One set of studies found at age three and a half the maternal attachment is a better predictor of High School Graduation rates and iq. So this notion of attentive parenting i think is crucial and i mentioned that the deficit of words. It turns out by each for the professionals will have heard of 30 million more words than a child on welfare for 30 million. They started speaking at the same time, thats because they have more resources and also have a very engaged parenting style, they are like look at that window. What do you see there and this kind of thing. So that means that they even have a rich vocabulary and has farreaching effects long before the kids reach school and this is a sort of awkward issue having to do with parenting thats. The lesson some people call is that its too bad there is nothing we can do about it. I want to push back because the evidence is overwhelming that by and large parents want the best for their children whatever the circumstance is and they are coaching interventions that make a germanic difference and the pioneer was a social psychologist who was trained to figure out back in the 60s how to help some of these kids and he would initially start with fouryearolds and and then he realized even at age four, some of these kids already are traumatized, that he used, and i really have to start earlier so we started a program of the Nurse Family Partnership that begins with pregnancy until age two and its things like that trying to get moms to drink by starting pregnancy, dont do drugs. Talk to them after the birth about Birth Control options. Talk to your child more and it has a dramatic effect. When i first saw the randomized controlled trials so you have confidence i first found the results they were almost too good i thought. How could this be. But even though it is at age two to to the kids in the program or 78 fewer cases of child abuse and at age 15 they are half as likely to be arrested. A study by the corporation found that for the most disadvantaged kids, every dollar invested in the program saves 5. 70 in state spending leader on. So you know, you have a program here that has about as robust evidence as you can possibly imagine and yet because the funding shortage only reaches about two to 3 of the kids in the country and the u. S. And we can do better than that. There are a couple of hangups people have sometimes that i encounter. I think one is that it has to do with a kind of empathy gap and i think that there are a lot of successful people. Whenever i write about the distributors they say its hopeless and that if you try to help people than they will just spend the money on drugs or alcohol or whatever. But if they just work hard, that will solve the problems of its their with their fault. So blaming the poor for being poor. Somewhere there is an awkward element of truth in a selfdestructive behaviors are real. And it is true that one reason for pathologies of poverty is not just low income, that it is there are some of these selfdestructive behaviors that i think that successful people are often far too willing to point fingers rather than offer a helping hand. Princeton university did a brain scan where she had people look at images and found that they are processed not as if they were people but if they were things and the truth is that one reason for these selfdestructive behaviors is that people are in the making behaviors that make roof with themselves. Another is that there is pretty good evidence that when you are under great Financial Stress that robs you of the cognitive capacity. A harvard economist did some fascinating studies in india looking at cortisol levels in distress and cognitive capacities before and after the harvest because before the harvest there is no money and people are stressed. After the harvest for a while they are in good shape. Indeed it turns out that after coming your capacity improves by the 13 iq points and so i think there is some evidence that one of the ways there is a poverty trap is the sense of hopelessness that people just feel overwhelmed, that nothing is going to make a difference and that at that point that its not because of the nature itself because there is a new School Uniform or some micro finance program. Part of it is the sense that there is a different route. Heres the basic question of why should i care. We wanted to address but because people start up getting engaged and they initially think this is the right thing to do and its a burden and a sacrifice that i will buckle down and do it and. Its to help other people but they have an almost perfect record of helping ourselves. Its absolutely true and there has long been evidence of this from the comparative studies. There was a harvard study that again the people in the 1930s tried to compare the two Different Things and it turned out that kind of engaging into social behavior was more important than the cholesterol levels and one study on to seniors and looking at mortality data found that if you joined a church or a religious organization your risk dropped 29 and if you exercise several times it was 30 . If you volunteered for two or more commands were mortality dropped 44 . If you volunteered with a religious Running Organization you were in mortal. We have brain scans to back this up and at the university of oregon, they have scanners picked up two computer screens so they measured the Pleasure Centers of the brain and they look at what happens when you both receive money into the Pleasure Centers are things that light up when you eat nice food causing ice things about you when you have sex and they also will wake up when somebody gives you 20. They also light up when you give money to a good cause so we participated in experiments in this contraption if we get donations and we have clickers and they ask the wanted want to get two extra organizations, so one of the most held until her international which i mentioned about the district and so we would donate to these and so indeed for everybody the Pleasure Centers light up and about half of americans or the Research Subjects they light up as much or more than you gave as when you get, so i think there is a important way in which i will leave you with the kind of story about any one reason why its a subconscious level maybe im engaged in this house we write about it in the book. And i told partly because i think that one of our mistakes is that we think you can only make a difference if you solve a problem and in fact i profoundly believe we can solve problems in their entirety that we can make a difference for individuals. He was a reward to the refugee camp was in the Campaign Yugoslavia after world war ii. Yugoslavia at that point was executing some of the refugees and letting others lead to the west to please both sides and a french diplomat wrote in a very and whats going on with him and that was enough to get my dad released going to the west. He went to italy and france and was cleaning hotel rooms, didnt know what to do and there was a young woman from the Marshall Plan in portland oregon. She told her parents that he was catholic and there was a church in portland, they took a risk on him, they never met him but they sponsored his way to the u. S. And his first purchase he didnt speak english there was the sunday New York Times which somehow is prosthetic. [laughter] and that ultimately is why im here and at some level it may have to do with why. I would love to take questions for as long as we can. [applause] my name is joanna and im with the center. We work on productive right specifically on helping to ensure access to girls. They wrote a powerful wall street journal blog calling the carpet of the media, ngos, the donor governments for not giving this issue more attention. I am curious on your thoughts about her view and also the story that doesnt get any coverage if you have any plans to write about it. Whether it is in serious, iraq or anywhere else, we dont know to what extent it was historically an issue but certainly in about a 3cent conflicts, it has become a weapon of war, and in a lot of places that your regular soldiers are reluctant to find each other because others are armed, so it is much more fruitful and profitable to be a predator on civilians and rape women, kill men. One of the things we dont appreciate is that Sexual Violence is not is often about more than sex if you will. This to me is about a scholar at stanford that but many women were involved in many of the rapes in library and elsewhere either end victims back or holding them down and it turned out what was going on there is if you were a warlord then one of your challenges is how to keep your soldiers in their unit because they have an ak47 and you dont want them to run away. That could be raping Young Children but do something beyond the pales. If they are vilified and they regarded themselves as horrible people and i dont know, it is certainly a factor with many other groups in terms of whether this has been covered in the case of isis, isis has been so brutal to so many different groups and people in different ways the most horrendous violation violation as they slaughtered a lot of people and. They kidnapped the numbers of women and are holding them and marry them off but i wouldnt want to say that is worse than just slaughtering all of the young deputy men. But there is a kind of hierarchy thats worse for the women and the men. I think it is appalling in every case. Where i do think we should write about more in particular is on the remedy aside into the notion of an empowering women so that when dealing with isis were young and db2 yemen we rely on the military and the drone toolbox. I believe that is a useful one and especially in the short term it can do things others cant and indeed our airstrikes saved many members of the military toolbox is not as we would hope. We could see that indiana in the yemen and afghanistan and in the long run it is a more effective one. There is a comparison that used to be a part of the 1971 and when bangladesh became independent, it had nothing going for it but it educated its kids and girls and today there are more girls in high school then there are boys. But all of those educated corals went into the Industry Base and they went into that huge impact and as a result it is far less extremism and the kicker was when bangladesh then pakistan where the literacy is only 3 . Yemen is a mess. The country next to it was even more backward. So today nobody hears about it and that is partly because when you educate girls and bring them into the labor force from you bring their faces into the community and there is one aspect that is enormously powerful witches that educated corals have fewer children so you dont have this population that is the most destabilizing the country can have, the population of especially boys aged 15 to 29 is a huge correlated for instability and violence. So i wish that right now we wouldnt just be figuring out how to drop bombs although we may need to do that but also there is are the 3 million refugees in the camps. We can do these things. Nigeria, other places where extremism will be a longterm problem for the cost of deploying one soldier for a year you can find about 20 schools. So that is something that we need to think about more and invest in more. Feel free to line up behind the microphone. We are both from the oregon and we can speak to growing up in the areas to have our friends stay behind and have babies of their own. Part of that as weve been able to travel with volunteers and so one of the things i was hoping that he would speak to is the kind of developing important opportunity to volunteer abroad and ive also heard they are not always effective programs but can you speak to just how helping and doing that is beneficial to people that go to the areas they go to that part of the effort. Sometimes at work and sometimes it doesnt but it always has profound effects and it always strikes me that for example i think it is hard to find a more cosmopolitan state in america than utah. Its been hugely beneficial for the utah economy. Some of the companies that operate it is because more missionaries are going abroad learning languages and they have a rich sense of that culture. I saw john is going to be speaking soon and he has excellent chinese from his mormon missionary days and i wish that colleges when they send their acceptance letters would say okay youre in but think about working for a year and people often think that its going to be expensive. If you do it for the formal program it will be that we must defend websites where you dont have to pay. You can teach either legally or illegally. My middle son managed to earn a substantial profit on his deck here in china by setting himself up as an adviser to Chinese Students to attend graduate school in the u. S. Even though he had never stepped foot on a college campus. He realized there were these bangs and beijing and they would play poker when they were way too drunk and he cleaned up so it can be done and i really encourage people to do that. The last thing some of the projects involved as leader of one thing wanting the developing world has a lot of this labor. So if you can bring a scale that is often more useful and that can be teaching. I want to congratulate you for bringing more visibility to the movement. Anything thats been done to date. Its a Great Program and im connected to the parents of preschool youngsters for three to fiveyearolds in the works with educators in the neighborhood on math and reading skills and i think that one of the things that is unknown is that these programs come and there are about 12 of them they need the guidelines and are paid for in part by the Affordable Care act. Why is this an unknown mystery because all the reasons you laid out are so compelling i think across the bipartisan sphere of americans that all we hear about are the bad things that are not even in the law. It seems to me such a crucial intervention and i know one reason they dont get more is that it isnt quite so sexy and its hard to immediately if you are working with a 1yearold or 3yearold you dont immediately see an obvious turnaround to tell a story that i do think that there is some hope of reaching a building consensus where there is a hope of building consensus across political lines. You may recall that universal pre k. But he was sitting there looking at the whole speech and when he applauded obama its when he talked about providing opportunities for people. I think that we talk about the inequality which often doesnt get traction on the right opportunity i think is a better word and there is genuine concern on the right that there is a profound problem in the u. S. With a lack of opportunity when a child in britain, down cabby logo and when economic mobility is greater than it was in the u. S. , then it is a problem and i saw the poll which 97 of americans agreed that there should be greater opportunity at the starting line for americans 97 percent dont agree that the earth is round if we can agree on broadening the opportunity it seems to me that there is some hope and faith in some of the pioneers in Early Childhood education but this is one of Hillary Clintons longtime issues and i remember how Climate Change was a bipartisan issue until it became associated with the democrats and then the bipartisanship disappeared and im a little bit afraid that as we move closer to the period that it becomes an issue more associated with her and that makes it harder for the republicans to support in this strange world of america. Im hopeful that there may be some chance. My name is christine and i am with the rest of the Freedom Foundation working to end child slavery and ive been a longtime fan longtime fan of yours and appreciated your article in the state. My question is related to the faithbased initiative weve been working with religious leaders because we see the many communities we wouldnt otherwise be able to reach and i know one of those that you write about expressly doesnt work with organizations that work in the faithbased entities. So i feel like youve written fairly about the International Justice missions in the world but i just would love to hear your thoughts on the role of the faithbased as well as what you think are opportunities to bridge the gap. Thats a good question we have a chapter about that in the book. One of the things that is frustrating you get secular and religious groups that do great work on an issue but because the polarization in the country and its more likely to be on the right or the left they dont cooperate adequately on issues they agree on and when the stakes are so crucial and its frustrating some of the conservative groups have made some tremendous mistakes especially one of the things i was most frustrating that was most frustrating for me was the opposition of condoms. That was a tragic mistake that it also has to be said that so many of those people out there in the field working to address what some of those workers including plenty of catholic nuns and priests who were in the handing out condoms and it is interesting that in the paper to the bishops. So it is a complicated world out there and they have done an awful lot to that of a dont get credit for especially in the countries like haiti where so much of it is indeed from the faithbased institutions and the other thing that secular world can learn from i didnt know much about the mega churches until we worked on this book and they take getting back not as a burden or sacrifice but as a joyous occasion which one engages in a Community Betterment program of its Domestic Work abroad and that it finds a field that is fun and rebooting and i think that too often we do things either individually rather than in groups and we feel that this has to be a sacrifice and i think that there is Something Wonderful about groups of people getting together and expressly finding joy. And the foundation does great work and you are stars in the documentary that is coming up. My name is rich foster and im retiring as a program director. My wife got me to join the church. Specifically i want to talk about what youre reporting and travels have seen in terms of addressing the muslim cities not just in that city and i dont want it to have that connotation because i know it goes far beyond just i grew up in a project in the 60s and there were programs that helped many people move on. What are you seeing these days from what i can tell it is more like the folks in the present study that you mentioned banned the teacher that kept getting stuck to the booster. What are you seeing that folks can do on the scale beyond writing a book for somebody where you can make inroads in dealing with education that so many of the kids have to get beyond drugs and abuse. I see this in my own community in oregon. Its a bluecollar area. Industries used to be timber. Biggest employers are the factories but they closed down the steel now. It used to be that if you graduated from high school or even if you dropped out you could get union decent jobs, manage to get by. You have a stable marriage, Stay Together and you do okay and that kind of fell apart for my classmates and many of them were not able to find a decent job, the ended up in trouble with the law into their busy mass incarceration disaster where we quintupled imprisonment since the 1970s, had the effect of breaking up families and they made these men often unemployable. One of the things conservatives have been right about is the disabled family for children. I think that one of the things theyve been absolutely wrong on is the mass incarceration so in the march unemployment, the child abuse, kids not having their dads at home or it always seems to me that we have a yearning for silver bullets but there are a lot of Little Things that move the needle somewhat. But its not since the 1920s we have reduced the rate of 95 through a million different interventions. We have better bumpers, crash testing, graduated licenses for young drivers, seatbelts, airbags, and none of these was transformative collectively they have been completely transformed in the same way that i think one crucial intervention is helping teenage girls who dont want to get pregnant cannot get pregnant and therefore pretty rigorous experience. Right now in colorado it shows if you give kids longacting reversible contraceptive they are much less likely to get pregnant and less likely to have a baby they can to tear out a fully into will make them drop out of high school as well. Thats not going to solve all the problems. Its going to help in the margins. Then beginning in pregnancy and early in childhood again, there are a bunch of these kinds of programs. Then universal pre k. The u. S. Is one of the few countries in the world that spends less on average for disadvantaged, educating the disadvantaged than educating a wealthy child. Almost every other country in the world at the disadvantaged kids more. Here in the u. S. It is the opposite. You know, then through moving away from the mass incarceration models and working on drug rehab programs there are some job Training Programs that have very good records. None of these are going to solve the problem. I think they can to some degree reduce it and make it more manageable. We have better evidence than we have ever had before and it just pains me that one of the programs we talk about in the book is reach out and read for 20 you can sponsor a child in the literacy program, pediatricians essentially prescribed reading to a low income parents and give out a book to the child at each visit. It costs 20 a year to sponsor a child and it has a dramatic impact on how often those kids are red on their vocabularies and the readiness to attend the school and get two thirds of the kids in the country that would benefit from it dont get it because there isnt enough resources for 20 a child. So its complicated. We are not going to solve it but we can do a better job of mitigating the problem. And its fairly easy to build a school somewhere. Its harder to make sure that teachers are showing up, the kids are actually learning something. The big absentee. I problem is not students not showing up, its teachers not showing up. I cant tell you how many times ive randomly dropped into a school in the developing world and the kids are there and maybe a third of the teachers are. Because they get paid whether or not they show up. So, i think we have to also look at metrics of quality, but i think have to be creative how we improve education so its not just building schools but also things like deworming or providing bicycles to girls. Often substantially increases attendance. For high schools, maybe providing a dorm if its too far from their home. Giving them help during menstruation seems to improve attendance for girls because there nor sanitary products available. So, i think there are a lot of ways one can kind of move the needle and i and there are also ways nutrition, especially early in life, has a dramatic affect on ability of kids to do well in school. One of the fascinating things were learning is that nutrition, even in utero, special ily the first few years, has a dramatic effect on cognitive capacity. One of the studies we talked about in the book, which blew me away, it looked at children who were conceived in the first month of ramadan, when their moms were probably unaware they were even pregnant and were fasting, just in the daytime, this isnt famine or anything but just in the daytime theyre fasting, and many years later those children were more likely to have cognitive disabilities, and its a correlation, but its a fairly convincing study from data in two different countries, and theres so many kids in so many countries where theyre not getting early nutrition. Breastfeeding, 600,000 kid worldwide lives could be saved every year if there were optimal breastfeeding, and this just seems like such a basic, ageold intervention. One can give moms help, supporting them with it, and yet we dont do that. And that leaves these kids with these i think that we absolutely need to do more with education, but we need to think of it more broadly to also incorporate quality and also think of other ways in which the pipeline to education becomes much richer. Please join me in thanking our guest. Thank you. Next, booktv speck speaks with gary segura about his book lan teen know