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CNN&Time

Visions 21: Questions For the New Century

Aired May 14, 2000 - 9:00 p.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ANNOUNCER: CNN & TIME.

Tonight, "Visions 21: Questions For the New Century."

"How Will We Fight?"

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SGT. JOSEPH PATTERSON (ph), U.S. ARMY: You're going to have a voice command activation in the headgear, because the tracking system is actually in the headgear, and it's going to say launch and it'll come out and actually seek a target.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Who is the Next Osama bin Laden?"

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ASHTON CARTER (ph), HARVARD UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR: I don't think we are adequately prepared for terrorists, especially terrorists who look like us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Will Service Still Stink?"

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MISS MANNERS: People are increasingly unpleasant, I am sorry to say.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Will the U.S. Still Make Anything?"

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT REICH, FMR. LABOR SECRETARY: There may be a backlash against anything that smacks of technological change.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "What Jobs Will Disappear?" (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL MOORE, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: I hope that the jobs that will disappear are all the back-breaking jobs that make life difficult.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Will There Be Any Hope For the Poor?"

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK MALLOCH BROWN, UNDP ADMINISTRATOR: In absolute numbers, the heaviest concentration of the poor is in Asia. Yet, in a sense, that's also the area with the brightest prospects.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Visions 21: America and the World."

From Atlanta, here is Jeff Greenfield and Bernard Shaw.

BERNARD SHAW, CO-HOST: Good evening, and welcome to "Visions 21: Questions For the New Century."

JEFF GREENFIELD, CO-HOST: Tonight, in this our fourth installment, a look at "America and the World." Who will dominate in the foreseeable future? Which nations will assert the most influence socially, economically, militarily? We begin with the latter.

SHAW: If your notion of war was based on those old newsreels of heavy armor and massive divisions tramping across Europe and Asia, then the recent conflict in the Balkans must have come as quite a shock.

GREENFIELD: In NATO's campaign against Yugoslavia last year, not one Allied soldier on the ground had to fight his way into Serbia. A relentless aerial barrage of Stealth bombers, laser-guided missiles, and unmanned flying marvels targeted enemy infrastructure and defenses with varying success to be sure, but a war nonetheless more akin to "Buck Rogers" than "Sergeant York."

So we wondered, on the battlefields of tomorrow, "How Will We Fight?"

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): This is how today's U.S. infantry moves into combat, with the M-1 Abrams tank. It can fire a shell as thick as your arm four miles and it can withstand a hit, the Army says, from any other tank in the world. There is just one problem. It weighs 68 tons. It is so heavy that if the U.S. had sent ground troops to fight the Serbs in Kosovo last year, many of the bridges there would have collapsed under its weight, and building new bridges would have meant putting Americans out in the open, all but guaranteeing U.S. casualties. GENERAL PAUL KERN (ph), U.S. ARMY: That's an operation that we would prefer not to have to do, because it is risky.

GREENFIELD: General Paul Kern is one of the Pentagon's top officials charged with buying equipment for the battlefields of the future. Born just after World War II, he grew up in a time when the doctrine was bigger is better. He later fought in Vietnam against a guerrilla army at the height of the Cold War.

And he now sees troops deployed not in full-scale combat, but to deliver humanitarian aid in Somalia, to protect democracy in Haiti, and to police ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia; missions unimaginable to yesterday's military.

KERN: We are in an Army that was equipped to fight the Soviets and central Europe. Today, that equipment now has to be able to support missions around the world in any type of environment.

GREENFIELD: Which is why the Army has a multibillion dollar shopping list, starting with lighter armored vehicles, quite possibly even something that runs on wheels with one fourth the weight of an Abrams tank.

(on camera): And you want a lighter vehicle, but you don't want a vulnerable vehicle.

KERN: Right.

GREENFIELD: You want a quicker vehicle, but you want something to protect your men, you want infallity (ph), but you want mobility.

KERN: Our design factors for the Cold War said, don't be penetrated, and so the primary survivability techniques were large masses of armor. Today, we're looking at it from a perspective of, don't get hit.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Infantry soldiers on the battlefields of the future will probably carry a new weapon that is actually two weapons in one. It will not only shoot standard bullets, but also small grenades. A laser will measure the distance to the target and electronically transfer that information to the grenade in the chamber. As it leaves the muzzle, the shell will measure the distance by counting the number of times it spins and then spray shrapnel over the head of an enemy hiding in a foxhole or behind a wall.

RICHARD AUDETTE (ph), ENGINEER: This is my baby and I'm really excited about it.

GREENFIELD: Richard Audette, a civilian engineer, leads the design team trying to reduce the complexity, the cost -- $24,000 per gun -- and the weight.

AUDETTE: This weapon right now weighs 18.2 pounds. Our threshold, where we have to get to is 14 pounds. Where we'd really like to go is 10 pounds. GREENFIELD: Eventually, the new rifle may be combined with an array of gadgets and accessories that the Army calls Land Warrior. A video scope will let the soldier see around corners without drawing fire himself.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is my college box, it processes all of the vocal messages, as well as being a GPS system, a global positioning system. This is my computer.

GREENFIELD: The computer will store battlefield maps and the positions of friendly and enemy troops. Using a mouse mounted near the trigger, the information will be displayed on a small screen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have my helmet-mounted display which has a detent on it, is easily pulled down. In case of emergency, I can push it out of the way, or I can retract it.

GREENFIELD: Soldiers will exchange maps, surveillance pictures, and battle plans through a private e-mail network.

KERN: And so something which may have taken 15 minutes a few years ago, if we train our soldiers to use the equipment and we make that equipment reliable and credible in the future, they would be able to do literally in seconds.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have a M-4 carbine, Forest (ph) 556, it's gas operated and air cooled.

GREENFIELD: It sounds incredible...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have ballistic laser eye protection, it's to stop fragmentary as well as laser projection, because the enemy likes to use lasers.

GREENFIELD: ... but so far, Land Warrior is repeating a pattern all too common with gee-whiz military technology. According to a congressional report, Land Warrior is 50 percent over budget and four years behind schedule.

Larry Korb, a former undersecretary of defense, worries that it won't stand up to the rigors of combat.

LAWRENCE KORB, FMR. UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE: As you get more and more removed from the battlefield, technology can play a greater role. But once you get down to it, there is a limit to how much technology you can incorporate, and I think what we found is you just overload the youngster out there when you put all these systems in there.

GREENFIELD: Quite the opposite, says the Army. Today's soldier has grown up with computers.

KERN: Our challenge is to make sure that we keep up with the culture of American youth and do what is comfortable to them, not what is comfortable to some 50-year-old general sitting in the Pentagon. GREENFIELD: But new technology does not always deliver on its promise. After last year's air war over Kosovo, an Air Force analysis reportedly found that many of what were touted as kills were nothing but bombs blasting decoys. From three miles up, pilots can't tell a real tank from a fake.

And it's not only effectiveness that raises questions about the new weaponry, sometimes the debate becomes a political issue argued with religious fervor along party lines. For example, the proposed national missile defense system intended to destroy incoming ballistic missiles while they're still in space. It's a scaled-down version of President Reagan's controversial strategic initiative, the so-called Star Wars concept.

KORB: For Republicans, it's almost like the foreign policy equivalent of abortion. That's a litmus test of loyalty to the Reagan legacy. Similarly, for Democrats, because it was Reagan's idea and it represents sort of the -- their equivalent of supply-side economics, they react to it very viscerally and it's very hard to have a reasoned debate about the issue, because of the fact that party leaders make this such a litmus test.

GREENFIELD: As the debates continue, scientists and soldiers also continue to plan for the more distant future...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me introduce the future warrior of 2025, Sergeant Joseph Patterson.

GREENFIELD: ... and build the military equivalent of concept cars.

PATTERSON: This is basically what a projected projectile will look like and it's going to be 15 millimeters in diameter, it's going to be a front-loaded -- you're going to have a -- pretty much a voice- command activation in the headgear, because the tracking system is actually in the headgear, and it's going to say launch and it will come out and actively seek a target.

GREENFIELD: But even if the minisensors and microcircuits someday lead to soldiers who look like Power Rangers...

PATTERSON: Kind of like using Windows '98, but all voice-command activated.

GREENFIELD: ... veterans like General Kern, wounded in battle three times, recognize that even with the advent of high technology, fighting in the future will bear some great similarities to the fights of the past.

KERN: The means have changed, but the actual process hasn't. A lead bullet will kill you dead in the 21st century just as it did on the beaches of Normandy.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: If we now know a little more about how we will fight in the future, then the next question becomes, who will we fight?

Coming up...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARTER: The fact that the terrorism of the 21st century is going to be transnational in character is going to challenge us to find some new way of protecting ourselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Who is the Next Osama bin Laden," when "Visions 21" CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: The newest weapons of war, high-tech systems finely tuned for the battles of the 21st century. But what if the enemy isn't a nation, but a person or small group, terrorists who target the United States and other Western countries, like those blamed for the embassy bombings in Africa two years?

"Who is the Next Osama bin Laden?"

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARTER: So the danger goes up and the vulnerability goes up at the same time...

SHAW (voice-over): From his perch at Harvard University...

CARTER: ... which tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives are lost.

SHAW: ... Ashton Carter has a rather shocking vision.

CARTER: Imagine an event in which a city goes away in the United States, not a building like the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, but an entire city.

And trying to anticipate who, when, how...

SHAW: Carter, a former assistant secretary of defense, calls it catastrophic terrorism and he thinks it is not just a classroom exercise...

CARTER: ... intervening in the incident itself.

SHAW: ... but an imminent reality for America, and he fears the consequences.

CARTER: While I fear the first event of catastrophic terrorism, which I'm afraid is in our future, I fear even more the aftermath, I fear the panic, the overreaction, the wild search for whoever did it.

SHAW: Carter says whoever is responsible, that person or group will inherit an important legacy from Osama bin Laden and his organization. Bin Laden, accused of masterminding lethal attacks on American embassies in Africa, has links to radical groups around the world.

CARTER: Bin Laden's organization is typical of what we'll probably see the 21st century in that it is multinational, transnational, number one; number two, it is bent on mass destruction.

SHAW: Carter says when the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo killed 12 people by unleashing sarin gas in a Tokyo subway five years ago it was pointing the way forward -- large-scale terrorism with increasingly sophisticated weapons.

(on camera): What will be the weapon, or weapons of choice for the terrorist of the future?

CARTER: Terrorist of the future, if he or she is bent upon mass destruction, not a political agenda, will be chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or some other means of wreaking mass destruction and mass terror.

SHAW (voice-over): Others believe the threat will come from the more traditional tools of terrorists.

AMB. MICHAEL SHEEHAN, STATE DEPT. OFFICE OF COUNTERTERRORISM: I think right now, today, and within the next immediate future, our primary concern remains the improvised car bomb, or simply the Kalishnikov rifle.

SHAW: Ambassador Michael Sheehan runs the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism.

SHEEHAN: Weapons of mass destruction have a certain appeal to some terrorist groups, the psychological shock of being able to use one would be important, but it's -- and that's the bad news. The good news, it's not easy to assemble these types of weapons and to use them effectively as demonstrated in 1995 by the sarin gas attack of Aum Shinrikyo, but that attack was much less successful than they had hoped to. It's not that easy to do.

You'll note that victim is being moved out now. Apparently, had some problem with breathing.

SHAW: Sheehan says despite terrorists apparent difficulty using weapons of mass destruction, the United States government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars preparing for chemical and biological attacks from terrorists. Now, the new perceived threat is from cyberterrorism, that a terrorist with a laptop could cause all sorts of damage, much in the way that hackers earlier this year were able to shut down e-commerce sites.

SHEEHAN: It should be a wake-up call to anyone who's out there who may be discounting this threat, because that did cause millions of dollars of damage to those companies and showed a vulnerability with a very low sophistication attack.

SHAW: And then there was the ILOVEYOU virus which shut down or fouled up computer systems around the world earlier this month.

BRUCE HOFFMAN (ph), RAND INSTITUTE: In the cyberterrorism realm, I think it's astonishing that terrorists have thus far taken advantage of this opportunity as infrequently as they have.

SHAW: Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Institute says that terrorists are staying away from causing havoc on the Internet, because it just doesn't help them achieve their goals.

HOFFMAN: For them to really ply their trade and fear and intimidation, it takes basically blood on the street and broken masonry and shattered glass to get those images across. That in their view, engaging attacks through cyberspace is of limited utility for themselves.

SHAW: Besides, says Hoffman, the Internet is proving increasingly useful to those fighting governments.

HOFFMAN: Hezbollah, for example, has five different Web sites. There is not a terrorist or insurgent group out there in the world today that doesn't maintain a Web site.

SHAW: But Hoffman is wary of predicting the future of terrorism. He was one of those who worried about an escalation after Tokyo and Oklahoma City. Now, he says terrorist attacks, especially against Americans, are on the decline.

HOFFMAN: Certainly, our ability to respond to terrorists has increased and improved exponentially since that era and I think a large share of that credit has to be with the fact that terrorism is taken far more seriously now than it was then, but I think this is exactly the point. We have to keep the threat in perspective and not become our own worst enemies, or not let the terrorists' mere threats intimidate and instill fear in us and thus by our own reactions do the terrorists' work for them.

SHAW: That said, who might be the next Osama bin Laden, a person symbolizing the terrorist threat? There are some in U.S. intelligence who believe that in the short term, one of bin Laden's top lieutenants, Iman Nazawari (ph), his top adviser, or Mohammed Utef (ph), his military commander, would step in and take over as his successor. And while many terrorism experts say they can't answer the who, they can answer the where and it is in the region where bin Laden is already based: South Asia.

HOFFMAN: It's difficult to say, although I think given the upheaval, the foment that one sees now in the Indian subcontinent in South Asia, that there are indications that might replace the Middle East, let's say, as being the crucible of terrorism in the future.

SHAW: Michael Sheehan believes bin Laden will leave another important legacy.

(on camera): How will terrorists organize themselves in the future, will it be along the lines of the bin Laden model? SHEEHAN: I think that model is probably the way it will be in the future, a loose -- much more loosely knit affiliations opposed to a tightly wired organizational structure.

SHAW (voice-over): Experts say terrorists are applying the lessons of the '90s, they are globalizing, decentralizing, and that will make it tougher in the future to keep up with them.

CARTER: The fact that the terrorism of the 21st century is going to be transnational in character is going to challenge us to find some new way of protecting ourselves and also protecting civil liberties. It won't work anymore to try to divide the world, or divide terrorists into foreign and domestic. They're going to be a mixture.

SHAW: Which brings us back to Ashton Carter's vision of catastrophic terrorism in the 21st century.

CARTER: But the prospect that war-like danger will originate not in other countries...

SHAW: While it could from overseas, Carter says don't forget the lesson of Oklahoma City: that the threat also comes from within.

CARTER: I don't think we are adequately prepared for terrorists, especially terrorists who look like us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: The threat of terrorism is a concern, yes, but it is not something most of us worry about every day.

Coming up, war may be hell, but bad manners are the worst -- the decline of customer service.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MISS MANNERS: People are increasingly unpleasant, I am sorry to say, and when people complain about customer service it's usually from the point of view of the customer and the service people have equally horrendous tales about how rude customers are.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Will Service Still Stink," as "Visions 21" CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: The customer is always right, service with a smile -- noble intentions, but are they ever really found on planet Earth? For that matter, do we have any right to such service? In a society where we are all told that we are equal, why should we expect one person to wait on another and to be friendly doing it? And yet, that is what we demand. The idea that we've been setting ourselves up for a fall, from Miss Manners herself, and the answer to this question, "Will Service Still Stink?" (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MISS MANNERS: People are increasingly unpleasant, I am sorry to say. This is an inherent problem in a egalitarian society. People do not want to be in a subservient position. The thoughts of the last decade or two about how to improve service have been going in the wrong direction.

First of all, there is that hold over from the past, the customer is always right. What a challenge that is. Who wants to be in a job where you're always wrong? And then there is that other awful one called friendly service, where people get chatty and what not. The opposite of bad service is good service, it's not friendly service.

We are increasingly serving ourselves, because we are tired of waiting. If you know what you want and you can get it through the Internet, or pick it out in the store, or call somebody and order it. What customers want is simple, cheerful efficiency. They don't need a friend and they don't need an enemy who's annoyed when they come in with their terrible demands.

I hope that it will be realized that it is not a disgrace to serve others. In fact, it is our highest calling, serving other people, and our top leaders are called public servants. If we could get over the embarrassment connected with the idea of helping others, perhaps we could realize that it is a dignified way to make a living.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Next, service may continue its downward spiral in the future, but Americans will still make a pretty good product, or will they?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFF MISHKIN, CEO, WORKSMAN TRADING: In the past 10 years, the market in the United States has been very much taken over by products being manufactured in Taiwan and now in mainland China.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Will the U.S. Still Make Anything," when "Visions 21" CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Welcome back to "Visions 21: Questions For the New Century."

As recently as the 1980s, futurists were predicting a time when American manufacturing would all but disappear. Industry, it was believed, would be the domain of nations such as Japan and China. True, many consumer products are made overseas, but does that mean manufacturing in America is becoming a thing of the past? In the future, "Will the U.S. Still Make Anything?"

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW (voice-over): In 1898, Worksman Trading started manufacturing bicycles in New York City. In the 1930s, their big break, a young company called Good Humor placed an order for delivery bikes. Today, Worksman still makes heavy bikes the old-fashioned way, by hand. Company president Jeff Mishkin says competition is tough.

MISHKIN: In the past 10 years, the market in the United States has been very much taken over by products being manufactured in Taiwan and now in mainland China.

SHAW: Not just bicycles, it seems everything these days is made somewhere else. If it's not China, it's Mexico, or Japan. In this new century, you have to wonder, "Will the U.S. Still Make Anything?"

RICHARD MORLEY, CO-AUTHOR, "THE TECHNOLOGY MACHINE": Yes, it must.

SHAW: Richard Morley, inventor, author, and management guru.

MORLEY: But the manufacturer of it will be from the people we call robots. Manufacturing in the future will be dispersed, small, and at the source of consumption of the products.

SHAW: Morley looks into his crystal ball from his barn in the middle of rural New Hampshire.

MORLEY: So the Internet lets me live here and work anywhere in the world.

SHAW: Morley and co-author Patricia Moody wrote the book, "The Technology Machine: How Manufacturing Will Work in the Year 2020."

MORLEY: We named it that because all my economic friends tell me that wealth can only be created by technology. The stock market does not create wealth, it moves it around. Apparently, the only way you can create wealth is through the raw deployment of fundamental technology, Boeing, computers, software, movies, theme parks -- all of those are high-tech. That's where the money is, that's where the employment is, and that's where the standard of living is.

SHAW: Patricia Moody is Morley's co-author. She says technology will allow everything to be produced right on the spot where the demand exists.

PATRICIA MOODY, CO-AUTHOR, "THE TECHNOLOGY MACHINE": We'll bring back textiles and things that are connected to textiles like textile machinery. We used to be huge in that. We'll bring back shoes, you know, personal stuff. Appliances that are now shifting to Mexico and other places will become things that we need locally, so there will be production in Mexico, there will be production in Brazil, but there will also be production in the United States.

SHAW: Patricia Moody's ancestor, Paul Moody, was a founder of America's Industrial Revolution. He and Francis Cabot Lowell created the first power loom in Waltham, Massachusetts, using the power of the Charles River. Nowadays, there is just a museum in Waltham. Today, the authors says, there are new mill towns and now the source of power is people with technological training.

(on camera): What will these new mill towns be about, how are they related to the traditional New England mill town?

MORLEY: Well, let me name some mill towns you don't think of mill towns: Silicon Valley -- Silicon Valley is a mill town. It happens to be software and silicon, but it's a mill town. It's a town that has a particular expertise that exists nowhere else in the world. So we can expect to see banking -- Chicago and New York, those are mill towns. We expect Hollywood -- how about that? -- that's a mill town.

SHAW (voice-over): Another mill town is Route 128, a high-tech corridor right near the old New England mill towns. Former labor secretary Robert Reich says big tech companies are here because brainpower is here.

REICH: These industries, these new manufacturing companies are knowledge intensive, they depend on creativity, they depend on problem identification and solutions. It is all about people. It's not about things.

SHAW: Mitch Tyson is an MIT grad and CEO of PRI Automation, located along the corridor. PRI produces robotic software and hardware that makes semiconductor chips. In the last 10 years, he has seen chip production and other high-tech manufacturing return to the U.S. from Asia.

MITCH TYSON, PRES. & CEO, PRI AUTOMATION: Americans can rise to a challenge and I think in the 1980s, our manufacturing prowess was challenged by the Japanese. I think American companies got together in consortium to develop better manufacturing techniques, to focus on quality. The whole quality movement really took off in the 1980s. And I think Americans have proven that they can be innovative and highly efficient in their manufacturing and play a major role in the global economy.

SHAW: Tyson's company builds custom-made chip factories that are sold all over the world. He says the U.S. leads the way in using technology to customize products.

TYSON: I think there is a system right now for clothing, right, you can go in, have your measurements taken and pick your fabric, and the clothing is made for you. That is a completely different manufacturing challenge than making low-cost clothes with low-cost labor. I think it's a blending of technology and communications and information processing as well as manufacturing techniques, and I think it's going to create whole new frontiers in manufacturing.

SHAW: As with all frontiers, there is danger. There will be winners in manufacturing, but, say Morley and Moody, the losers will find themselves in a "Mad Max" world.

MOODY: "Mad Max" to me was the vision I had of the companies and maybe even the people around them that are just struggling to get by, struggling to make payroll, struggling just to turn out a product, and you know, I had the image of all the bad things I've ever seen in manufacturing magnified exponential to the Nth degree, seems like places where people aren't safe, people are working under bad conditions. Things that you see in certain Third World manufacturing sites now could exist in certain parts of the United States now, too.

SHAW: Robert Reich warns of a two-tier society: high-tech winners and low-tech losers who are not competing in the global economy.

REICH: There may be a backlash against anything that smacks of technological change, because people fear that technology may take away their jobs. So long as the economy is good, most people are content. But we have not repealed the business cycle, what goes up eventually comes down, and when this expansion is over, well, hold on to your hat.

SHAW: And what about Worksman Trading, winner or loser? Although their product may look old fashioned and out of date, management has gone on the Net, and they say they're winning orders from Russia, South America, and even China, a long way from Queens, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: Localized production, robot workers -- economists predict by the middle of this century a mere 3 percent of the American work force will be directly involved in manufacturing. It was 22 percent just a decade ago. So, "What Other Jobs Will Disappear?"

Coming up, the lighter side of future employment with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MOORE: Well, I hope the day traders are not around. I hope the stock exchange isn't around. I hope that the World Bank isn't around.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: As "Visions 21" CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Technology is moving so quickly that it is difficult to predict exactly which jobs will define our economy by, say, the middle of this century. We do, however, know which jobs won't, and that's something of much concern to filmmaker Michael Moore, who's acclaimed 1989 documentary "Roger & Me" skewered General Motors and then- chairman Roger Smith for massive layoffs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "ROGER & ME")

MOORE: Mr. Smith, we just came down from Flynt where we filmed a family being evicted from their home the day before Christmas Eve, a family that used to work in the factory. Would you be willing to come up with us and see what the situation is like in Flynt so that people...

ROGER SMITH, CHMN., GENERAL MOTORS: Well, I've been to Flynt and I'm sorry for the people, but I don't know anything about it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHAW: Since then, Moore has continued to rail against what he sees as corporate greed and downsizing in an era of record profits. So we asked Moore, in the future, "What Jobs Will Disappear?"

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MOORE: Well, I hope the day traders are not around. I hope the stock exchange isn't around. I hope that the companies that are scarfing all this money from the Pentagon with these huge contracts, our tax money, when we're at complete peace in the world, I hope they're not around.

You know, when the 20th century began, in the beginning of the 20th century, General Motors, Ford, these companies were founded and they provided the backbone for the economy of the 20th century. But now the 21st century is here and the computers, the Internet, the dot.com world, that's where it's at.

You go into any business, any job today, it doesn't matter what kind of job it is, and if somebody has computer at their desk, I swear to God, nine times out of 10 if you look over there, they're checking to see how their stocks are doing that particular hour. I mean, what is that doing to the overall productivity of this country?

The -- it used to be that you were rewarded with a lot of money if you invented something, or if you worked really hard. These days what we're teaching people is that the best way to make money, the best way to get rich is off your money -- make money off your money and don't work too hard. Sweat, hard work, those values out the door.

I think 10 years from now you're going to have a situation that's going to look pretty much like Bolivia in this country. In other words, the top third are going to be doing quite well and the bottom two thirds are going to be struggling to survive.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Next, the Internet, e-commerce, global economy. We know who's in, but who's being left out?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: And it's one of the extraordinary facts of history that there has never been a famine in a democratic country that goes through elections regularly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: "Will There Be Any Hope For the Poor," when CNN & TIME "Visions 21" continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: What kind of jobs will we have? What kind of fighting machinery will we buy with hundreds of billions of dollars? For much of the world, such questions are beyond comprehension. Their energies are devoted to simple survival, where is the next scrap of food coming from? Who will be the next in my family to die of hunger or disease or violence? Lurking beneath the larger debate over globalization is a growing sense on all sides that something seriously wrong is going on among those who have the least.

And so our final question, "Will There Be Any Hope For the Poor?"

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These children look to you for help.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Nearly half a century ago, post-war Americans glimpsed a hungry child, a European, or Asian, or African, accompanied by a plea for help.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't disappoint them.

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GREENFIELD: In the 1980s, a famine in Ethiopia came alive on television and spawned a global rock 'n' roll show to save the starving masses. Today, it is Somalia, or the Sudan, and the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, with its lethal brew of war, famine, disease, genocide.

Today, in the midst of the greatest plenty the world has ever seen, a fifth of the Earth, more than a billion people survive or try to on less than a dollar a day. Is there any hope that their lives can really change, or are they doomed to an existence described more than two centuries ago by Thomas Hobbs, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"?

We know one thing with certainty, poverty is not inevitable. Once poor countries like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea have been, by global standards, prosperous for years, with high-tech industries and a growing middle class. Both China and India report rapid economic growth, part of an Asian pattern that gives the head of the United Nations Development Program cause for optimism.

BROWN: In absolute numbers, the heaviest concentration of the poor is in Asia. Yet, in a sense, that's also the area with the brightest prospects, because large parts of Asia have had tremendous success through policies which have really sought to redistribute that growth toward the poorest segments of their societies.

GREENFIELD: By contrast, look at Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1990, the region as a whole has suffered from a devastating AIDS epidemic, as well as negative economic growth, and that drop does not even begin to measure the reason for official pessimism.

BROWN: The dimmest areas are, I'm sorry to say, in Africa, where you've seen in many economies actual fallback. Some of them have really seen no real economic growth over where they were 20 or 30 years ago. There's a real prospect more, not less poverty unless we get the policies right quickly.

GREENFIELD: Why? In part it is nature's fault. Tropical and desert climates breed disease such as malaria and sleeping sickness that drastically shrink life expectancy, a powerful source of impoverishment. In part it is a consequence of human failure from the colonial powers that left behind a largely uneducated population to corrupt and incompetent governments, from massive external debt to the genocidal ethnic conflicts that wiped out any semblance of economic confidence. And in part it is due to a vicious circle, where today's poverty fused with a lack of elemental resources leads inexorably to more poverty.

BROWN: The problem, if we're not careful, could get a lot worse with the next billion extra people that will be born between now and the end of the second decade of this new century. In other words, by 2020 more than a third of that next extra people will be kids in Africa, and therefore the pressure on the educational resources will grow.

GREENFIELD: And even these assessments may not fully answer whether there is hope for the poor. What, after all, do we mean by poverty? Common sense tells us what it means: hunger, disease, lack of shelter.

SEN: I think I probably am considered as something of a maverick.

GREENFIELD: But this man says it means something more. Harvard professor Amartya Sen won the Nobel prize in economics two years ago in part by suggesting that people without basic democratic liberties are also poor.

(on camera): I am from, let's say, an emirate where there is an enormous amount of money, everybody has a nice house, everybody has transportation, they have health care, but there are no elections, there is no freedom, women are essentially treated as chattels. Are they poor?

SEN: Yes, there is poverty of the -- human life is impoverished in that kind of context. Their freedoms are impoverished. Their opportunity to live as a free human being is reduced and that's what you're looking at in poverty of which economic poverty is only one part.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): But Sen doesn't stop there. He says democracy does more than make people feel good about themselves. It is, he says, a powerful protection against some of the worst afflictions to hit the poor, like famine.

SEN: One of the extraordinary facts of history that there has never been a famine in a democratic country which goes through elections regularly. Democracy provides the kind of incentive that the ruling groups need in order to get on and do something quickly and effectively.

GREENFIELD: In this sense, Professor Sen argues, the more that liberty takes hold in the developing world, the more hope there is for the poor. But not everyone is so hopeful.

ROBERT KAPLAN, "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY": We are entering a bifurcated world, a zone of the planet that's getting richer and more luxurious, where life is getting better and better, you know, longer life spans, and a zone of the planet where things are getting worse and worse.

GREENFIELD: Journalist Robert Kaplan has covered many of the world's poorest and most violent nations while writing for "The Atlantic Monthly." In his book, "Becoming Anarchy," he paints a grim picture of hundreds of millions of the world's poor caught in a rapidly descending spiral, and he argues, in many regions, democracy may have little or nothing to do with the people's well-being.

KAPLAN: I had malaria in northern Uganda and having experienced what Africans go through on a daily level, I can tell you that Sub- Saharan Africans would gladly put up with a Li Quon Ui (ph), or a one- party Chinese autocracy, if it means liberating them even partially from the kind of underdevelopment that leads to malaria.

GREENFIELD: What the poor need most, says Kaplan, is an atmosphere where institutions that nurture growth can take root, and democracy may not provide that atmosphere.

KAPLAN: The first prerequisite is order and stability of a minimal kind and once you have some sort of orderly or stable society, then you have the luxury to concentrate on civil liberties.

SEN: I think that's certainly true that you need a variety of institutions, but it's not a question of saying until you have them, don't have democracy. But to not have simultaneous development of these things, these institutions have to develop together, because if you had only one developing market economy now, democracy may be some time -- long, long time from now.

GREENFIELD: If there is reason to be optimistic, it may be that those who have looked longest and hardest at the fight of the poor do find reason for hope.

KAPLAN: Tunisia has gotten its birth rate down dramatically, less through supplying birth control than through teaching rural women how to read. The real revolution in Tunisia has been increasing literacy of women throughout the countryside. So if we're talking about, how do we have less poverty in the world? Teach rural women how to read.

GREENFIELD: Sen points to tiny loans by Asian banks, to women in particular, for reducing child mortality and for lowering birth rates in parts of Asia.

SEN: Bangladesh's fertility rate has come down from being close to six to being close to three in the course of less than two decades. It's just a dramatic fall in fertility.

GREENFIELD (on camera): When we say, is there hope for the poor, having spent as long as you have looking at different aspects of this argument, do you look at the world today and do you think, well, we have a chance to make things much better, or do you despair?

SEN: No, I don't despair. I think -- you know, I think ultimately what we succeed in doing is dependent on what we understand as being necessary to be done. Poverty can be removed if and only if when we understand what poverty consists in, the fact that it's not just low income, that it's lack of freedom, that freedoms of different kinds, economic, political, social, inter-relate with each other.

I have reason to think looking around, looking at public discussion, that we are moving in the direction of greater awareness of these interconnections and in that I see a lot of hope.

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GREENFIELD: Social safety nets, inherent rights, a political voice -- should it really surprise us that the building blocks of democracy seem to favor both rich and poor.

SHAW: But for all the talk of political theory, military might, and technological revolutions, in the end, what does any of it mean for those living where life is harshest?

GREENFIELD: In fact, making room for everyone in the new global economy may be the greatest challenge of the 21st century.

I'm Jeff Greenfield.

SHAW: And I'm Bernard Shaw.

That's this edition of "Visions 21."

And on this very special day, happy Mother's Day.

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