On July 24, 2026, an online event was held to sign a memorandum of understanding between Garry Jacobs, President of the 被窝影视福利 of Art and Science (WAAS) and Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, founder of the Satyarthi Movement For Global Compassion.

Donato Kiniger-Passigli, Vice-President of the 被窝影视福利 of Art and Science, and President of the Global Peace Offensive Center opened and closed the proceedings. Nobel Peace Laureate, Kailash Satyarthi, he observed, spent a lifetime fighting the worst forms of labour and is now helping the 被窝影视福利 confront the worst forms of war 鈥� a single arc, held together by one formula: conciliation, mutual concessions, and above all human compassion. The Global Peace Offensive rests on incremental, reciprocal, publicized steps that reduce distrust before conditions are ripe for conflict. What it has lacked is an account of the motivation that makes anyone take that first unilateral step. The memorandum signed that day hopes to take that first step.

Kailash Satyarthi, a Nobel Peace Laureate and founder of the Satyarthi Movement, who was recently welcomed as a Fellow of the 被窝影视福利, was blunt about what compassion is not. “It’s not an emotion, a virtue, or a synonym for kindness, sympathy, or empathy,” he explained. It is, in his framing, a disruptive, dynamic and transformative force 鈥� and the world needs it more of it. His diagnosis was sharper still: “We have laws, wealth greater than at any point in history, and a working knowledge of nearly every problem and roughly how to solve it. What we have is a gap between the problem solvers and the problem sufferers, and between what is spoken and what is done.”

Garry Jacobs, President and CEO of WAAS, responded by noting that the world needs positive peace, not merely the absence of war 鈥� food, health, education, freedom, economic opportunity, social justice, safe communities, human dignity, sustainable development. “That is our program, and that is your program,” he said. “Our goals couldn’t be more closely aligned.”

Alberto Zucconi, Chair of the Board of WAAS, noted that in psychology, the variable that best predicts whether a working relationship succeeds is the working alliance, and the principal component of a working alliance is common purpose and shared value. On that evidence, he argued, the new partnership is scientifically well-founded.

Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute and WAAS Trustee, who has worked alongside Satyarthi at Nobel Peace Laureate Summits made the case for children. “The worst victims of the world’s wars and of market insensitivities are children, and undeveloped leaders are often those who were once children themselves and lacked a compassionate environment during the years that mattered. Shifting the paradigm from war and militarism to human security therefore begins with them,” said Jonathan. Of Kailash he offered this insight: “He has consistently been a voice that builds bridges where others want to build tunnels.”

WAAS Executive Director Ketan Patel, argued that compassion cannot remain the property of movements and summits: without it we will not progress as a species, which means it has to become a core human value taught to children and adults alike, in every walk of life. Former member of the Irish Parliament, Denis Naughten, highlighted the urgency in technology, suggesting that for young people entering careers in the age of artificial intelligence, compassion may be the North Star that carries them through 鈥� with consequences unfolding over decades, not daily news cycles. WAAS Secretary-General Janani Ramanathan, who is based in India, where the bulk of Kailash’s work is done, welcomed the new program and looked forward to supporting the work of colleagues already doing the important groundwork of the Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion.

WAAS Vice-President Aleksander Zidan拧ek, who is also Deputy Director of the Global Peace Offensive Center, closed the conversation with a profound insight. “Physicists,” he said, “are known for making weapons; here is an opportunity to do something good for peace. Justice for children does not arrive on its own 鈥� someone has to live for it 鈥� and the Peace Offensive begins from the same premise: peace is not a matter of waiting for the right conditions but of actively and systematically pursuing them.” He extended an invitation to visit Maribor in Slovenia, where the Global Peace Offensive is headquartered.

Other witnesses to the signing of this memorandum were Irina Bokova, former Director General of UNESCO, Amb. (ret.) Francis M. O’Donnell, a Member of the United Nations Advocacy Community, and Grant Schreiber, General Manager of the 被窝影视福利 of Art and Science.

The gap in building peace is not knowledge. It is the will to close the distance between those who can solve and those who suffer. The signing of the memorandum (below) is a first step in trying to close this gap.

What Pauling did, in essence, was teach chemistry to see. Borrowing the new language of quantum mechanics from Sommerfeld, Bohr, and Schr枚dinger, he explained why atoms hold together at all. His electronegativity scale gave chemists a number for an atom’s hunger for electrons; his valence bond theory and his 1931 papers on the nature of the chemical bond reorganized the discipline around the geometry of molecules. By 1954 the Royal Swedish Academy had awarded him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work. Along the way he had described the alpha helix coiling through proteins, identified sickle-cell anemia as the first “molecular disease,” and laid groundwork so fundamental that Francis Crick would later call him the father of molecular biology.

A lesser figure might have stopped there, content to be ranked among the greatest chemists since Lavoisier. Pauling could not. He had spent the 1940s close enough to the atomic project to understand exactly what physics had handed the generals, and in the aftermath of Hiroshima he refused the comfortable silence available to a celebrated laureate. With his wife and closest collaborator, Ava Helen, he began to speak 鈥� first to citizens’ committees, then to the world 鈥� about radioactive fallout, about strontium settling in the bones of children, about the genetic damage that open-air testing scattered indiscriminately across the planet. He marshaled data the way he marshaled molecules, and in 1958 he carried to the United Nations a petition signed by more than 9,000 scientists demanding an end to nuclear tests.

The personal cost was real. His passport was withheld. The FBI took an interest. The California Institute of Technology, uneasy with its most famous and most inconvenient professor, offered no celebration when the second prize came 鈥� in October 1963 the Nobel committee named Pauling its Peace laureate 鈥� making him the only person in history to hold two unshared Nobel Prizes. On the very day the award was announced, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty entered into force. The argument he had made with statistics had become international law.

This is the type of person and work that the 被窝影视福利 of Art and Science (WAAS) was built to attract The Academy was founded in 1960 by scientists and thinkers who had watched humanity acquire the means of its own extinction and resolved to do something about it. Einstein was called its spiritual father; J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and Joseph Rotblat were among the minds who shaped its founding concern 鈥� that science, unmoored from ethics, could become an instrument of annihilation. WAAS was conceived as an informal world association answerable to the highest scientific and moral standards, a forum where knowledge could be weighed against conscience independent of borders and prevailing orthodoxies.

Pauling belonged in that company as naturally as carbon belongs in a chain. His name sits among many of the Academy’s most distinguished Fellows, and his archive at Oregon State University preserves his WAAS certificate of membership dated 1983 鈥� a quiet document hidden among his hundreds of honors. The 被窝影视福利’s pressing question at the time was precisely the question of Pauling’s career: what does the person who understands the structure of matter owe to the people whose lives that knowledge can save or end?

He was a rare figure who answered it from both sides of his own mind. The same rigor that let him read the angles of a hydrogen bond let him read the epidemiology of fallout; the same refusal to accept received wisdom that produced valence bond theory produced, later, his stubborn and sometimes mistaken crusades over vitamin C. WAAS exists for exactly that synthesis 鈥� for the conviction that the artist, the scientist, and the moral actor are not separate citizens but one person, and that the deepest discoveries carry the heaviest obligations.

Pauling died in 1994, at age 93, leaving some 400,000 pages of work behind him. The Academy he joined still convenes around his founding premise: that understanding the world is only half the task, and that the other half 鈥� caring what becomes of it 鈥� is the part that makes a scientist whole.

India is where that idea met its largest audience.

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Numbers released in the most recent HS4A India report, for 2024鈥�25 and 2025鈥�26, show a consistent and broad application of human security to young learners. Implemented by the SpellBee International Foundation for Human Excellence (SIFHE), supported by SpellBee International, and guided by WAAS, the project has translated a global framework into a working model of teaching. Its “Classroom to Communities” (C2C) approach builds students’ fluency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing by using human security themes as the raw material for expression, anchored to a library of 60 observance-day booklets spanning environmental conservation, peace, health, human rights, and responsible citizenship.

More than 1.5 million brochures have carried the HS4A message into homes, reaching an estimated 4.5 million readers. Over 100,000 students were engaged, 28,600-plus took part in weekly fluency sessions, 1,601 submissions were formally recognized, and 218 top performers were honored for their articulation on issues of national and global importance. The program touched 1,000-plus schools across 17 states, mobilized 6,000 educators, and trained 8,600 parents 鈥� underpinned by more than 21,000 hours of design and delivery work.

What gives the India chapter its significance is the bridge it completes. Where the global campaign moved leaders, India moves learners 鈥� and through them, families and entire communities. WAAS Fellows and experts brought their disciplines directly to teachers, while a collaboration with IIM Calcutta extended capacity building to heads of institutions.

The next phase aims higher still: 1,000 schools and 100,000 engaged students within three to five years, with international expansion under discussion across Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. From a phrase coined in a 1994 UN report to a child in an Indian classroom speaking confidently about the world she wants to build 鈥� that is the distance HS4A India has begun to close.

The survey’s findings were striking in their clarity. When respondents ranked 25 priority topics on a 1-to-5 scale, education, energy development, and food supply emerged as the height of global concern. These were followed by health and medical care, population distribution, and mobilizing public participation in decision-making. The behavioral and social sciences dominated the fields of interest at 37%, suggesting that even then, experts recognized that humanity’s greatest challenges were fundamentally about people, not just technology or resources.

What’s most revealing about the 1974 priorities is what they tell us about that historical moment. The survey captured a world still reeling from the 1973 oil embargo, haunted by the specter of overpopulation (the “population bomb” fears were peaking), and awakening to environmental degradation. The emphasis on energy and food wasn’t academic鈥攖hese were existential anxieties rooted in immediate material scarcity. Education ranked first, reflecting an era-specific faith that knowledge and schooling could solve civilizational problems. Public participation in decision-making, ranked sixth, revealed a democratic idealism about including ordinary people in governance.

Yet perhaps most fascinating was what received the lowest priorities: outer space exploration and vulcanism (earthquakes) ranked near the bottom, even among earth scientists. In 1974, humanity wasn’t yet preoccupied with asteroid impacts or space colonization as survival strategies. The future seemed to belong to those who could feed themselves and power their societies here on Earth.

Fast forward to 2026, and the conversation has transformed in ways both predictable and surprising. Climate change鈥攂arely mentioned in 1974 (though ecology appeared as an “other” category added by respondents, with 119 additions focused on environment)鈥攏ow dominates global discourse. We’ve replaced anxiety about scarcity with anxiety about excess: excess carbon in the atmosphere, excess heat in our systems, excess consumption. The existential threat has shifted from “will we have enough?” to “will the planet survive what we’ve taken?”

Energy remains critical, but now the priority isn’t development and use; it’s transition and sustainability. And as of right now, with the crisis in Iran, highly political. Food supply persists as a concern, but now intertwined with climate, land use, and biodiversity. Health and medical care, always important, has been turbocharged by pandemic awareness and the recognition that biosecurity and equitable healthcare access are civilization-level concerns.

The biggest shift, however, may be in what we’ve learned about education. While still valued, we now recognize that schooling alone cannot solve our problems鈥攖hat education must be coupled with behavioral change, institutional reform, and global coordination. The 1974 optimism that knowledge translates to action has been tempered by fifty years of knowing better without doing better.

Remarkably absent from the survey is artificial intelligence and technology, which barely existed in 1974 and dominates anxious conversation today. The 1974 survey included space sciences at just 2%, yet today we debate whether AI could be our greatest existential risk or our greatest hope. This omission is humbling: we’re likely as blind to 2074’s critical concerns as the 1974 respondents were to ours.

Perhaps most sobering is the continuity in unmet needs. That 1974 emphasis on income distribution and consumption (ranked seventh) remains urgent today. Social discrimination, clarification of value norms, and control of violent coercion鈥攁ll high priorities fifty years ago鈥攕till plague us. We’ve made progress on some fronts; we’ve stalled on others; we’ve created new problems while solving old ones.

What McHale called the development of an “appreciative system” in society鈥攃ontinuous appraisal and assessment of human activities鈥攆eels more necessary than ever. Yet the survey’s greatest insight may be the very act of asking what matters, of creating forums for global consensus-building on priorities. This is itself a priority, and an ongoing mandate of the 被窝影视福利, today. The 1974 respondents from 72 countries found surprising agreement on what mattered most, transcending specialization and national interest. Whether we could generate that same consensus today, in an age of algorithmic filters and political fragmentation, remains uncertain.

The 1974 WAAS survey reminds us that priorities reflect the anxieties and hopes of their moment. We cannot return to their concerns; we cannot escape ours. But we can honor their effort to think systematically about the future and ask ourselves the same hard question they posed: what do we believe humanity most urgently needs? And then, we must actually do something about it.

The economies that most need innovation are often precisely the ones whose institutions make it hardest to invest in it. Understanding why – and what can be done – is one of the defining policy challenges of our era.

A Paradox at The Heart of Development

More than half the world’s population lives in middle-income economies – societies that have escaped extreme poverty but have not yet reached the living standards of high-income countries, and many risk never doing so. The culprit, increasingly, is not a shortage of capital or labour. It is a shortage of productivity growth: the capacity to produce more with what already exists.

Brazil is the country I know best, and it illustrates the paradox with unusual sharpness. Brazilian agriculture is a world-class performer: sustained public investment in tropical biotechnology and precision farming lifted agricultural productivity by roughly 35 index points between 2007 and 2024. Yet industrial and services productivity – the sectors that account for virtually all of Brazil’s domestic economic impulse – grew by barely a fraction of that over the same period. The result is an economy that exports innovation to global commodity markets while struggling to distribute its benefits to the majority of its citizens.

What causes this divide? And, more importantly, can deliberate policy close it?

The Monetary Double Dividend: A Finding That Surprised Us

Our research set out to quantify the macroeconomic returns to Brazil’s principal innovation policy instruments – the Lei do Bem, a long-standing tax credit program for industrial R&D, and federal public investment in knowledge infrastructure. What we found exceeded our initial expectations, not in the magnitude of the direct productivity gains, but in the way those gains compound through the monetary system.

When innovation raises total factor productivity, it reduces firms’ marginal costs and com-presses inflation. Under Brazil’s inflation-targeting regime – maintained continuously since 1999 – the central bank responds to that disinflationary signal by reducing the pol-icy interest rate. That rate reduction, in turn, stimulates private investment and amplifies the original output gain through a second channel that conventional supply-side analysis misses entirely.

We call this the monetary double dividend. The counterintuitive finding with the broadest policy relevance is that the mechanism is stronger in economies with high neutral

real interest rates. Brazil’s famously elevated real rates – long viewed as the country’s principal growth impediment – turn out to be the amplifier that converts a supply-side improvement into a substantial and persistent macroeconomic dividend. The implication is not that high interest rates are desirable. It is that, in an economy already burdened by them, supply-side innovation policy constitutes a means of unlocking monetary space that tight financial conditions have otherwise closed.

A coordinated innovation package – combining RBD tax credits) public investment) and direct innovation grants – raises GDP by over nine per cent at peak and delivers a welfare gain equivalent to a permanent 3.3 per cent increase in household consumption. These are not marginal adjustments; they are structural transformations.

Knowledge, Institutions and The Limits of Policy Instruments

I want to be candid about what our research also reveals, because intellectual honesty is what WAAS asks of its members.
The policy instruments for raising innovation exist. Brazil’s Lei do Bem has been in operation for two decades. The technical knowledge of effective R&D incentive design is broadly available. The monetary transmission mechanism is well understood. And yet the productivity gap persists.

The binding constraint, our evidence suggests, is not the toolkit. It is the institutional ecosystem within which instruments operate: the depth of university-industry linkages, the quality of intellectual property enforcement, the degree of integration into global value chains, and the absorptive capacity of firms to convert innovation inputs into sustained productivity gains. Without these foundations, R&D subsidies become transfers rather than investments, and the monetary double dividend remains theoretical.

This is precisely the kind of challenge that WAAS is uniquely equipped to address – not because it requires further econometric research, but because it requires a transdisciplinary dialogue that economics alone cannot sustain. Questions of institutional trust, educational quality, social cohesion, and the governance of knowledge are as much questions of art, philosophy, and political science as they are of macroeconomics. The disciplinary silos of academic specialization are exactly what this Academy was founded to transcend.

What I Hope to Contribute

Joining WAAS at this moment is both a privilege and a responsibility. The middle-income trap is not a Brazilian problem. It is a global challenge affecting billions of people across Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Its resolution will require exactly the kind of transdisciplinary, value-centered, and institutionally conscious thinking that this Academy has championed since its founding.
In the years ahead, I hope to contribute to WAAS’s work in three directions.

First, by bringing rigorous empirical evidence about what innovation policy actually achieves – not in theoretical models, but in the complex reality of a large emerging economy characterized by deep inequalities and layered institutions. Second, by translating that evidence into policy recommendations that are actionable for finance ministers, central bankers, and development institution leaders operating under genuine fiscal and political constraints.

And third – most ambitiously – by examining whether the monetary double dividend extends to green innovation: whether productivity gains from low-carbon technology can simultaneously raise output, reduce inflation, and accelerate decarbonization, generating a triple dividend with profound implications for sustainable development.

The challenges confronting humanity in the coming decades demand that rigorous knowledge reach decision-makers faster, more clearly, and with greater urgency than it currently does. I look forward to pursuing that goal alongside the distinguished community of Fellows and Associate Fellows of this Academy.

Underlying research. The findings discussed in this piece draw on: Oliveira, J.G.A., Andrade, J.P., Amorim, C.R., and Soares, V.A. (2025). “When High Rates Help: Innovation Policy, TFP, and the Monetary Double Dividend in Brazil.” Working paper submitted for peer review. Data and replication code are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Primary data sources: IBGE, BCB/SGS, MCTI/PINTEC, Receita Federal, SOF/STN, EPE/BEN, Penn World Tables 10.0. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the World Bank Group, its Executive Directors, or the governments they represent.