Kishore Mahbubani: Would the world be a better place if Asians were ruling the world?

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Politicians aren’t too popular, and yet we keep voting them into the top offices. Would the world be a better place if it were run by scientists and engineers? As an engineer himself, having spent his career in the company of rocket scientists and Nobel laureates, Bill Nye has a firm answer to this week’s question. Nye's most recent book is Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World.

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BILL NYE

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life.

In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle’s home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live.” This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®” was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate.

While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children’s books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.”

Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries” airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye” airs on PBS stations across the country.

Bill’s latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens.” It’s about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you’ll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There’s also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It’s fun for him; he’s an engineer with an energy conservation hobby.

Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Wei: Hi Bill. My name is Wei. I'm an electronic engineer coming from China. A big fan to your show by the way. My question is hypothetically instead of politicians if the world were only run by engineers and scientists would it be a better place in your opinion? Thanks.

Bill Nye: Wei. Thank you so much for calling and thanks for being a fan of the show. You've asked a great question and categorically the world would not be a better place run by engineers. I say this all the time. I spend time with rocket scientist, a lot of time with them. From time to time I spend time with Nobel laureates. You do not want these people teaching kindergarten by way of example, they're just not qualified. When you find somebody who's interested in making deals, in compromising, in empathizing with people, in other words feeling what they're feeling and then trying to establish laws and traditions that benefit everyone, when you find someone that wants that job that to me is amazing and we need those people, those people would be politicians.

With that said, what we want are politicians who are scientifically literate, who are technically informed. Now you're in China and you have what in the U.S. people often referred to as a technocracy. You have a system of government that is run largely by engineers or scientists in what in the U.S. we would call top down fashion. People in power make decisions for everyone. And the system is workable. I mean my goodness China is this extraordinary economy and so on. But the experiment in the United States and the other Western democracies is to have representatives that work the system top down but are elected by everybody. And the idea is that this would be more fair, this would be consistent with how everybody feels. So I will say that what we want is people making decisions on behalf of all of us that are in the best interest of all of us.

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