Name: 【TED】Arthur Brooks: A conservative's plea: Let's work together (A conservative's plea: Let's work together | Arthur Brooks)
Uploaded: 2016-09-19T00:16:38.000Z
Duration: 14 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

tolerant, progressive places in the United States,

And I grew up with a family of great Seattlites.

My mother was an artist, my father was a college professor,

and I am truly grateful for my upbringing,

because I always felt completely comfortable designing my life

I took a route that was not exactly what my parents had in mind.

When I was 19, I dropped out of college --

dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs.

And I went on the road as a professional French horn player,

I played chamber music all over the United States and Europe,

with a great jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird.

I wound up as a member of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in Spain.

And you know, my parents never complained.

They supported me all the way through it.

They used to tell their neighbors and friends,

There was, however, one awkward conversation about my lifestyle

and I was visiting my parents for Christmas,

and I was cooking dinner with my mother, and we were alone in the kitchen.

And so I said, "Mom, what's on your mind?"

And she said, "Your dad and I are really worried about you."

And I said, "What?" I mean, what could it be, at this point?

And she said, "I want you to be completely honest with me:

I wasn't really political, I was just a French horn player.

and they had detected it, and it was causing some confusion.

You see, I had become an enthusiast for capitalism,

It stems from a lifelong interest of mine

See, when I was a kid growing up in Seattle,

I remember the first time I saw real poverty.

We were a lower middle class family, but that's of course not real poverty.

The first time I saw poverty, and poverty's face,

was when I was six or seven years old, early 1970s.

And it was like a lot of you, kind of a prosaic example, kind of trite.

It was a picture in the National Geographic Magazine

and there were flies on his face and a distended belly.

And he wasn't going to make it, and I knew that, and I was helpless.

not exactly that picture, one just like it.

It introduced the West to grinding poverty around the world.

Well, that vision kind of haunted me as I grew up and I went to school

And I wondered, what happened to that kid?

Or to people just like him all over the world?

And so I started to study, even though I wasn't in college,

what happened to the world's poorest people?

Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better? What?

And I found the answer, and it changed my life,

most Americans believe that poverty has gotten worse

since we were children, since they saw that vision.

If you ask Americans, "Has poverty gotten worse or better around the world?",

70 percent will say that hunger has gotten worse since the early 1970s.

Here's the epiphany that I had that changed my thinking.

living on a dollar a day or less, obviously adjusted for inflation,

There's been an 80 percent decline in the world's worst poverty

It's the greatest antipoverty achievement in the history of mankind,

So when I learned this, I asked, what did that? What made it possible?

Because if you don't know why, you can't do it again.

and get the next two billion people out of poverty,

because that's what we're talking about: since I was a kid,