00:00science and technology have given us extraordinary progress but alongside it they've unleashed new
00:12crises climate catastrophe broken trust in truth growing inequality these are not problems of
00:21invention they are problems of humanity and the discipline that helps us make sense of them is
00:27the social sciences because social sciences are what humanize our choices
00:34fmt recently sat down with london school of economics president and vice chancellor larry
00:40kramer in kuala lumpur to discuss how social sciences can help navigate global challenges
00:47larry welcome to chaos pleasure to have you thank you it's good to be here well it's your second
00:51time here isn't it yeah yeah i came last year i i hope i can come at least once a year maybe twice
00:57well you know as a former lse student as an lse grad where i spent some of my fondest years
01:02it's really a privilege to be able to welcome you to my home city and i hope that you know we can
01:07have an interview which really brings forth the the time that you've had at lse and what you most
01:13enjoy about it well i'm looking forward i mean it's a you know great opportunity for me personally
01:18to get to talk to our alumni but also you know to the larger community here is really a privilege so
01:23i'm excited to do it and look forward to the conversation well we'll have a little bit of a
01:28chat about maybe a few legal issues because that's obviously what the both of us share a little bit
01:32of but also about the wider lse context is that all right yeah that would be great i love the chance
01:37to talk about law and lse
01:44larry i think lse has a very special unique position in the academic world as a university that
01:50really focuses on the social sciences you've spoken at length throughout the course of your career
01:56about the challenges that social sciences face could you expand a little bit on where we are today
02:02in terms of those challenges and what you see the next 10 20 years bringing sure so if you think about
02:08it the last four or five decades have really been you know what we would describe as stem focused right
02:14which is there's been a steady stream of scientific innovations new breakthroughs new technologies that
02:19have just transformed our lives in amazing ways they've also generated huge problems and the
02:25upsides and downsides aren't in the technologies themselves they're all completely in how we use
02:30them and how we choose to implement them and that's what the social sciences are about so the next couple
02:35of decades i think are going to have to be social science decades or we're going to really really have
02:42trouble the social sciences don't tell us how to build machines they tell us how to build societies
02:49this year for the second year running british daily the times and its sunday times good university
02:56guide named the london school of economics the number one university in the uk although it's only
03:03130 years old 130th anniversary this year only um only well in universities that can be especially
03:09in the uk you know you've got universities that are a thousand years old um it's had an incredible impact
03:15uh both in the intellectual world and in the political world the ranking measures more than
03:20prestige it looks at teaching quality student satisfaction research graduate prospects inclusion
03:29and global impact in other words not just knowledge for its own sake but knowledge that humanizes
03:36and improves society so universities have a really unique and important role in addressing this and
03:43it really has four different kinds of things first um you know we are the places where the ideas can
03:48be developed um second we're educating the next generation of leaders who are going to go out into the
03:53world and and make this work or not work for better or worse um third um we're a place um from which
04:01ideas can be promulgated out into into the society and then lastly we're incredibly good places for
04:06convening people from all different places i don't think any institution in society can play them as
04:12well as universities have in the past and can today universities are society's testing grounds where
04:19ideas are shaped challenged and shared to keep us human the challenges that we recognize you know at lse
04:27are all built around that recognition and they're really five and they're interlocking so the future
04:31of popular government is one the future of political economy doing those first two things sustainably
04:38within ecological limits that we now know we need to respect the fourth challenge relates to systemic
04:45inequalities and then lastly is thinking about how we're going to deploy the new technologies themselves
04:51democracy economy sustainability inequality technology these are not abstract problems they are human
05:01questions about fairness trust and how we live together what role can alumnus play um in in this cause
05:12in this journey so i i i mean this alumni are the foundation on which it all rests it's the beginning
05:19of your participation in what should be a live and living community that can do good in the world
05:25from kuala lumpur to new york alumni carry human insight into leadership shaping governments economies
05:32and communities well let's turn a little bit to lse in southeast asia where we are right now um we have
05:40the pleasure of welcoming you to kale i think which in which is your second trip yeah can you give us a
05:45little bit of insight or background about how southeast asian ideas concepts researchers is being
05:52really implemented in the lse framework and and how this is going to grow yeah sure so you know the one
05:59of the most unique features of lse compared to any university in the world is the breadth and depth of its
06:04international presence and that's particularly true for south and east asia so we have a large alumni
06:10community here uh we have a large contingent of students from here every year we have faculty
06:16from here and that's really where the connections take place southeast asia is more than a region
06:25it is a living example of how societies adapt humanize and innovate under pressure
06:31when i started at lse i think it was in the autumn of 2010 um and i remember i was in the first year
06:40of lse 100. do you guys still have this course which is this interdisciplinary multi-disciplinary
06:45course across the social sciences and problem solving it's a really it's an introduction to give
06:49people a sense of multi-disciplinary work and yeah so i think we were a pilot year or maybe it was the
06:54first year or something along these lines um and i found myself being you know so in a way
07:00surprisingly interested in things like anthropology um geography which i probably would never you
07:06know have gotten chance to study how important do you think um learning about other disciplines and
07:12how they interlink and problem solve um in the university experience and how is how key is it to
07:19you know young adults flourishing we used to think of education as like an l right you would go very deep
07:26in a single subject and uh in the you know the world that you're coming into today that is not an
07:32adequate education so you know i think of education it needs to be kind of like a tea
07:40lse 100 shows that real education is not just technical it is human it broadens horizons and prepares
07:48students to connect across disciplines and lives the future won't be saved by science alone it will be saved
07:56by how we humanize it and that is the work of the social sciences hanakam fmt
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