Jim Yong Kim and Carolyn Miles talk to Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi: You just came back from Australia, where you were at the G-20 Finance and Central Bankers Meeting. Ebola was a big topic there. Now this would've been in your wheelhouse anyway as the head of the World Bank, but it's specifically in yours because you did a lot of work on infectious diseases and how to stop them in your days before being at the World Bank. So how do you see this crisis right now? 

Jim Yong Kim: Well, to go back to the G-20 meeting, the very specific reason I brought it up is because one of the things that the G-20 does is to try to help prepare for the major shocks, the major downside risks in a global economy. The point I made was Ebola right now looks like a major risk and a major shock for three countries [Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone]. But this could spread if we don't get on top of it. But moreover, pandemic diseases in general — we are not as prepared as we need to be to prevent those kinds of shocks. We just released a study looking at the impact of Ebola. What we found was that it almost independent of the number of cases. It's the aversion behavior, the closing of the ports, people not showing up for work.

It's that kind of behavior that has had the biggest economic impact before SARS, you know, H1N1, that it wasn't the lives lost, necessarily, which was a tragedy in those cases. It was the behavior that accompanied it that led to the economic shock.

What we need to do is, first of all, as a doctor, we've got to think about the people who are suffering. That's really important. But it's very powerful if we can say, "And not only is it just the right thing to do, to think about the people who are suffering, but if you care about the stability of the global economy, we will prepare better next time, and we'll jump on this one so it doesn't spread further." The most recent data that came out is that if we do nothing, if we don't speed up our response, 550,000 cases is possible. So the good news is that we've pulled in all of the stops. What the U.S. did was fantastic. They're going to be focused on building hospital beds and getting very high-quality care in place.

So we say whenever these things threaten like H1N1, we worry about how our response is not right. Are we getting better? Because we seem to have a similar conversation. Now you understand the intricacies and the nuances of responses to epidemics and pandemics. Are we better than we were with SARS and other similar threats?

Well, there are a lot of things that are better. We have a better possibility for fundraising. We have a better possibility for real treatments. But the thing that's not better is a coordinated global response. I think we have one now. But we need to find a way of getting everything in place so that the next time it happens — and, you know, the thing is, Ebola is a slow-moving virus. You have to have direct contact with bodily fluids. Others, like the pandemic flu or bird flu or another SARS, coronavirus — this is going to be much, much more quickly moving. I think, you know, right now, we've got to focus on the immediate response.

But we have to have a conversation, and we have to think about things like, "Why don't we have a fund that can disburse billions of dollars very quickly and then have that paid back over time by the rich countries instead of waiting each time for people to make donations or people to make pledges?" We're looking at every different kind of possibility. The other piece that we have to get in place is that these countries did not have the systems that would be able to detect and prevent the spread of these illnesses. We now have to build that in every country in the world. We'd love it if we didn't have to do it from … a monetary perspective, but from a humanitarian perspective and also from the perspective of just protecting everybody in the world, we've got to build these systems. This is good news for the poor. A lot of work, but we can do it.

We have those systems, for instance, in the United States, so in fact, the spread of a disease like this can be contained if you have the right systems?

With very simple measures. There was an Ebola case in a hospital in the United States. And they didn't know that this person had Ebola. And there was no outbreak at the time, so there was no suspicion of it. But just by using what we call universal precautions — in every hospital in the world, in the emergency rooms that are in developed countries, we assume that someone has Ebola unless proven otherwise. So we wear gloves, we avoid contact with bodily fluids, we do all the things that are required to prevent infections. That patient in the U.S. was treated, did fine, left the hospital. They did make the diagnosis of Ebola eventually. But in any first-world hospital, these things can be managed. The great news is, we can do that. And even poor villages in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. I don't think we had that aspiration early enough. But we've got it now, and we're going to make it happen.

How do you sit with a group of bankers and finance ministers and convince them when the economies of these three countries, even if they were to suffer dramatically, wouldn't make a difference to the rest of the world? When we talk about the economic impact of Ebola, what is the case for that?

We've looked at all the numbers. And just for these three countries, they've already lost over $300 million. And for three relatively small economies it's a huge burden. But again, the key is, it's not necessarily the number of cases. It's aversion behavior around it that causes a huge economic impact. Now if we don't get on top of this and actually stop the epidemic and it spreads to 15, 20 countries, spreads even beyond the borders of Africa, then we're talking about billions and billions of dollars of impact. I think the finance ministers understood that.

Let's switch to carbon pricing. This big announcement that a number of countries, 73 countries, have come together. More than a thousand companies have come together with an agreement to say, "We want to put a price on carbon." Now we all get that carbon emissions are generally bad, most of us. Some still don't. But what is the influence and the impact of deciding that we would like to put a price on it?

So first of all, governments and the private sector, for the most part, have had these conversations separately. The first thing is that they have decided to come together. And we put together a leadership counsel of the people who made this pledge. We're are going to drive forward a very tough, a very specific conversation about what can we do potentially by the committee of the parties, the COP 21, where everyone has agreed that we'll have an agreement on climate. So just the agreement to come together and talk and the positive statement — China, Russia, the European Union said we need a price on carbon. So this is different than anything we've ever had before. We've never had a group like this agree on a price on carbon. 

The reality is, the carbon in the air has a price. It has a price. It has a cost right now. We just hadn't put a price on it. And we've been ignoring it. So for example, in China 1.2 million people died last year as a result of pollution. And pollution is, of course, related to the way we put carbon in the air. And you know, if you go to some of these small island states that are at risk of disappearing from the face of the earth, they will tell you that putting carbon in the air has a very clear cost. They're going to lose their country. Also the increased frequency of extreme weather events, you know, the estimation is that in Africa, 40 percent of the arable land will be lost as early as 2030. So the costs are real. We just haven't put a price on it. You know, that's been pretty clear. The science has been clear. The economics have been clear. But we had just sort of an inability to move forward politically. We've got now the first step, and we think the next steps are going to be coming soon.

And obviously, there will be disagreement as to how you price carbon and the methodology. Some people think it should be a tax. Some people think it should be a cap and trade system. Are you agnostic as to how they do it as long as they do it?

We're agnostic about it. The point is, we've never had this conversation across the public and the private sector in a way that people are going to be watching and people are going to be holding each other accountable. This is a great change, and we'll talk more about this as time goes by because we've got COP 20 coming up in Lima [Peru] and then COP 21 in Paris. The countries have agreed now for five years in a row that we will have an agreement in Paris. And so if this is a part of it, my goodness, the great exciting thing is, if we have it, then it'll all of a sudden move market forces in a way that everyone will be thinking, "How can we grow and at the same time take carbon out of the air?" We know it's possible. The incentives are just not there. A carbon price will put the incentives in place.

Ali Velshi: One of the matters we struggle with is, recently the World Bank said that the United States is the third-most-competitive country in the world. And when we asked why the third most, they said, "Well, it's got, you know, the struggles about the budget and the deficit." But income inequality is growing here at a rate that is greater than similar developed countries. And that has got to be playing a role in food insecurity and the lives of children.

Carolyn Miles: It's making a huge impact on the lives of children. Actually, in the U.S. right now, in rural areas of the United States, which is the place where Save the Children works primarily, 1 in 4 kids are living under the poverty line. So 25 percent of our children are living under the poverty line. And nationally, it's about 1 in 5. So it's a real issue. We actually do a report every year called "State of the World's Mothers." This was our 15th year. When we started, the U.S. was in the top 10. The U.S. was about fourth. [Now] the U.S. is 31st in "State of the World's Mothers." So the 31st-best place to be a mom, bottom of the developed countries.

But in our minds, it should be in the top. I mean, I was surprised it would be fourth. I would have thought it would've been higher. What is your sense of the prescription for this in the United States?

Well, I think it's a couple of things. The growing inequality, as you said, is the biggest issue in the United States. And frankly, when it comes to kids, kids don't vote. So children's issues are not at the top of the agenda all the time. And Save the Children is trying to change that in the U.S. We're spending a lot of time advocating for children and for their ability to be educated and to have basic health care and for moms to get the health care they need. But that growing inequality, I think, is the biggest issue. If you looked at — again, back to that report "State of the World's Mothers" — if you looked at the maternal mortality rate and the child mortality rate in some of our poorest urban centers in the United States, the statistics matched Africa.

So some African countries, same exact statistics in African-Americans in poor communities here in the United States. So that gap between the … majority of kids that have everything they need in the United States and that 20 percent to 25 percent who have very, very little. 

We had a humanitarian crisis in Syria before this ISIL situation.

It's really a crisis for children. There's 3 million refugees now outside Syria. There's 5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. Half of them are children under the age of 18. It's a huge crisis for kids. Save the Children's been working, actually, for three and a half years on this issue both inside Syria and then in the five surrounding countries where refugee are fleeing. One of the biggest issues now that I'm really, really worried about is education. Because Syria essentially had 100 percent school enrollment. They are now the second-worst country in the world on school enrollment.

And these kids, really many of them, have lost hope. And they are not in school, and they haven't been for years.

Let's talk about Ebola. Again an issue of kids now who will not have parents, fear of kids going to school. What are you doing around Ebola?

We, again, have been working in the three countries of the outbreak — Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone — for many years. And so we have been doing a scaled-up program that's really about educating. The issue on Ebola, the fear is so great, and the misinformation is also so great. So working at the community level to try to get people educated about what are the symptoms, how can it be treated, you know, what do you have to do if you have a family member who's infected, all of those things. We're now moving to a whole kind of idea of community care. You have these Ebola treatment units, which are good, and we want those. But that will not be enough to stop the transmission of this disease. So moving into this emergency Ebola care units, which are in the communities, and the communities will have access, and with protection, obviously, and they will be able to be part of these units. That to us is the next piece that we really have to get up and going. So Liberia and Sierra Leone — or now with the help of the U.S. government and the British government, we're working in both of those countries to get those up and running.

And are the most successful operations private-public, or is it government-led or private-enterprise led? 

You know, I think it's a combination. You've got have the government at the table. I think private enterprise, more and more, increasingly, is bringing the scale. So the ability to actually deliver scale. So if you're a pharmaceutical company like Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline, you've got the scale. You know how to do the distribution. You know how to do the training. You know how to do all of those things at a very high level of scale. And so what companies can bring is, a lot of times, the help with the scale. But again, if you don't have the government working in conjunction and you don't have organizations at the community level, it isn't gonna happen.

I ask you this because you didn't start in the world of NGOs and these kinds of organizations. You had a very successful life in the in the private world. You had coffee shops.

I started out with a big company, American Express. And then when I lived in Asia, we started a chain of coffee shops, which is still there, called Pacific Coffee Co. And great coffee, by the way. That opportunity actually to start something basically from the beginning in an entrepreneurial way, and this was before, right before Starbucks came to Asia, I think taught me a huge amount about sometimes you just have to kind of see an opportunity and try to go for it. And I do think there's a lot of parallels between what I did then and what I do at Save the Children. And using innovation and seeing an opportunity and saying, "We gotta go for it."

These interviews have been edited and condensed.