Dr. Jim Yong Kim

Ivy League institution. But when President Obama nominated Kim to lead the World Bank in twelve, he took on the role with great zeal, calling the Bank one of the most critical institutions fighting poverty and providing assistance to developing countries in the world. Kim won the election to become President of the World Bank in April of twelve, and he was re elected to the role in September of twenty six. He recently sat down with Carlisle Group co

founder David Rubinstein. They spoke on David Rubinstein's Bloomberg television program Peer to Peer Conversations. He became the president of Dartmouth I think in two thousand nine. Here there for a couple of years, and you're a trained as a medical doctor, and as a social anthropologist, you have no finance background. Um, all of a sudden, somebody says, would you like to be the president of the World Bank? What would make you think that would be a job

you would be qualified for? And why would you want to leave the academic setting that you've spent much of your life in. Well, it was a it's a question that a lot of people in the financial world asked as well when I was nominated. But you know, we had always known, in all of my years working in development, that the World Bank was the most important institution for people who wanted to help poor countries develop. And so, UM, I came to the interview with President Obama and he

was asking me exactly the same question. He literally said to me, why should I nominate you and not a macar economist? And so that this is when I when I made the pitch, probably the most important pitch I've made in my life. I said, well, you know, um, the first question I asked him was have you read your mother's PhD dissertation? And he looked at me and he said, well, yeah, I have. And I said, well,

you know, I'm an anthropologist like her. And so I said to him, you know, I haven't been in the finance world, but I've been on the ground doing development work for most of my adult life. I'll be able to tell you how it's working on the ground. And he just looked at me and he said, okay, I get that. So was he surprised you actually read his mother's PhD thesis? He was, he was, And he later we were together in a more informal setting and he said, you know, Jim, that was one of the best ploys

to get a job I've ever seen. All right, so did you feel intimidated for this job when you didn't have those kind of backgrounds? Are not? Well? I certainly

felt humbled about about it. And and uh, you know, we have people here in the audience, many of them taught me a lot about how the World Bank works, and so um, I I felt like, well, you know, learning finance and learning macroeconomics is going to be a huge challenge for me, But for the previous presidents coming in learning development must have been an even bigger challenge for them. And so I felt like I knew about what development was like, what working in developing countries was like.

And then I really worked hard to learn the other the other things that I needed to learn when I got here. When you show up at a meeting or something and you tell people you're the president World Bank to they their eyes kind of open wider or their jaws drop. It's a pretty good title. But it depends on where you are, right. So when I in in Washington, if you do that, they'll say, well, do you guys

have a branch in Alexandria? Right? Uh? And do you have a T M S. I mean so, so some places you're extremely well known, right in other places you're not known at all. But when you're, let's playing golf, and you're a very good golfer, you're like five handicap as I understand it, very good golfer. I'll ask you about that later. Do people give you punch more than they used to when your president World Bank? Or that

doesn't happen, not at all, not at all. You know, they have the mistaken impression that that I have access to cash myself, and so they're trying to get that from me. Let's talk about your background. Why did your parents come to the United States. Your father was a dentist and your mother was professor philosophy, My father was

a refugee from North Korea. Escaped from from North Korea to South Korea at the age of nineteen, and so he went into the army as a dentist, and because he had worked so hard on his English, he became a translator from many of the army dentists and became good friends with him, and so they gave him a

scholarship to come to the United States. My mother was the top student in the top high school in Korea, because they ranked everybody literally in Korea in terms of your high school ranking, and so she got a scholarship and she she came to Tennessee by herself. And at the time, this was in the early nineteen fifties, they're probably three or four hundred Koreans and all of the United States. And so she and my father were introduced

to each other through friends. They met in New York City and they actually got married in New York City. And like like all of the Koreans, they the idea was that they would learn in the United States and they would go back to serve their country. And so they went back, but but inescapably, you know, they saw how people live in the United States. And so their own aspirations for themselves and their children went up. But did they have It was a hard to get a

visa to come over to live here permanently. Then, so so they My father was a fully trained dentist and was a professor, but when he came back, he had to complete the last two years of dental school again. So we were in Dallas and he was a uh, he was a dental student. At the same time, I think we're working as a nurse in a hospital to make enough money. And then um, we went he finished

his dental education at Baylor Dental School in Dallas. And then for some reason that we're still trying to figure out, we moved to Iowa. That we grew up in Iowa at the time, you did not speak English. So when I came at the age of five, I didn't speak a word of English. So a move to Musketine, Iowa. Then in high school, Um, this is what I couldn't understand. How did you manage to be the quarterback of the football team, the point guard on the basketball team, class

president as well. And um also Valiatorian was that like hard to do where well, well, you know, before you get too impressed with that. Our football team had the longest losing streak in the nation at the town, fifty six defeats in a row, and I very proudly say I kept that streak going UH during recruited to play

at the University of Iowa. No, did you feel discrimination because you were Korean or Asian or there wasn't describing you know, there was one town that I went to play basketball in where um, there were two African American UH teammates in me and the people were literally screaming at us racial epitets. You know, I can I can't repeat them on television, but they were screaming at us, and they threw things at us and even spit at us as we were coming out to play. So I've

had that experience. And as a quarterback, you're looking across and they're looking in your eyes, and you know, every racial slury you could imagine was was thrown at me. So I grew up with I grew up with it, and it's a it it. I think it taught me a lot. It made me understand what that part of the world UH can be like, at least you know,

years ago. Okay, so you're in Iowa. You do off very well in high school, and you go to Brown and you apply to and I guess get in the hardest medical school to probably get in Harvard Medical School. So were you surprised you got in and was that your first choice? Um? Well, I was really surprised to get in, And in fact, it was not my first choice because I actually I was trying to convince my father that I was not going to go to medical school, but I was going to go and study political science

and philosophy. I came home from Brown one summer and he asked me, so what are you going to study? And I said, well, Dad, you know, I think I'm going to study political science and philosophy, and I think I'm gonna get into politicy. Tis right. He literally pulled

the car over to the side of the road. We're coming back from the airport tinittle Town, and he said, hey, um, when you finish your internship and residency, you can study anything you want, right right, And so for him, and he used to talk like that, he said, look, you know and and for him, of course, it was very clear who we were in this country. We were in Ioway. He said, you're you're you're a chinaman. He used to

say this to me, You're a chinaman. You think people are gonna pay you to hear your ideas about political science and philosophy? Get a skill. And I turned out that it was really great advice. I mean, there's so many things that I've learned and have happened because I had this notion that I needed to contribute something concrete in order to to make it in the world. And then you decided to go into another program where you get a PhD and anthropology. Now did your parents say, look,

a medical school degree is all you need. Why do you need a PhD? As well? Well? This was the great compromise, and my my father felt that as long as I was in medical school, uh, that it's okay to loosen up a little bit. So you get your degrees and you meet in Harvard Medical School. Um, Paul Farmer and the two of you, with a few others started something called Partners in Health. Can you describe what

that is? Paul and I began talking. You know, gosh, it was ur We began talking about if you have what we call these ridiculously elaborate educations, that's what Paul called it. What's the nature of your responsibility to the rest of the world. And so we thought and thought and and we tried to keep asking the questions. So, if we have these kinds of backgrounds, what's the nature

of our responsibility to the world. And we came to the conclusion that our responsibility was to to commit to the poorest, most uh, most marginalized, most outcast people and then do everything we can to provide them the best possible healthcare, education, social protection, and that we would that we weren't gonna win. We weren't gonna have some sort of victorious story because at the time that we started this, there was very little money available in terms of global

health or education. We thought, but you know, we're gonna continue to to write about and talk about the situation of these very poor people, and we're going to do that for the rest of our lives without any hope of being on the winning side. We were. We chose at that time. We said we're going to stay and we're gonna We're gonna We're gonna work and continue to work on the losing side. You ran Partner's Tale for a number of years. UH. It was focused initially on

Haiti later in Peru. And while when you were in Peru you once led a protest against the World Bank. In fact, you had said the World Bank should be maybe shut down. Yes, um, do you have any regrets about that? I just want everyone here to know I'm very glad we lost that argument and we did. At

that time. What we were arguing was that the World Bank Group was too focused on GDP growth of and that the kinds of investments that were it was making was not focused enough on things like health and education, and that this was this was an argument that was that was going on in development economics. You were an expert initially on tuberculosis. I had been working on drug resistant tuberculosis and had done a lot of work on trying to um just get the global health community to

change its perspective on it. And then when I went to it to UH to the health organization was the

same thing. I mean, there were the the the overwhelming consensus, like nine percent of all the HIV physicians in the world, we're saying impossible to treat HIV in developing countries, and there were twenty five million people in Africa who were living with HIV, and and the Global Health community was about to issue a death sentence on all million people living with HIV in Africa, and so that's that was

what I did. So you're you leave the World Health Organization after a couple of years heading their HIV program. You then go to Harvard Medical School and tea there, and then somebody calls you and says, would you like to be president of Dartmouth. Why didn't you decide to do that? Uh, it's a great question, and sometimes I wonder myself why. And I said to them, you know, my work from my entire life has been focusing on

the lives of the poorest. And I said, I don't think I can do this because it feels to me like you're asking me to turn my back on the poor. And um, somebody on the the the committee was, uh, you know in a in a in was it really a brilliant recruitment technique? Said no, no, no, we're not asking you to turn your back on the poor. We're asking you to turn the faces of Dartmouth students to the poor. So I thought, wow, that sounds great, right,

sounds great. But it turns out that's not actually the job of being president of a university, which David, you know very well. So one of the things you focused on with your president Dartmouth was trying to reduce the enormous alcohol consumption that undergraduates have. Um, I think you know for hundreds of years university president to try to do that with very little success. How did you find your effort? Um, let's see. Uh. You know, what we

tried at Dartmouth was, Uh. The was bring what I had learned in medicine, and what I had learned in medicine is that the things we do should be evidence based. So I looked around and I said, there are things that we can do, and things we tackled were drinking, but also sexual assault. We did a major effort on sexual assault, and we tried to ask the question, so, what has worked in reducing harm from drinking and what

has worked in reducing sexual assault? And so um, we uh, we brought thirty universities together, including including your alma mater, Duke, and we over a period of two years, we had to meet on a regular basis and share insights on programs that had been effective. And so I think I think we reduced harm from alcohol consumption. But um, it's

very hard to reduce consumption overall. When you came into the World Bank, it was the resistance like an organ transplant, resistance to somebody who didn't have the same background that others had had. Well, So I think, you know, to to be fair, I think, um, the resistance is not was not just to me. There's there's resistance here to the way the place is governed as a whole. So you have people here ten fifty years who have just deep knowledge, and every few years someone new comes in

and they're supposed to run the institution. So I think there's someone put it to me this way that you know, World Bank Group staff have always been skeptical about the way the place is governed from the perspective of the presidency. But uh, you know, when I came in, I tried to honestly look at how the place was functioning and and and where it could go, what it could be,

And I brought in great people. Ala Molalley, the former CEO of Ford Allen came and spent u quite a bit of time with us looking at the overall structure. And I asked Alan, so what would you do if you saw an organization like this? And you know, I brought in a lot of people, and you know what they said was, Wow, this is an incredibly complex institution. And so there were a whole bunch of things that

needed to be done. And I, you know, having done change processes before, I knew it was going to be painful. But I just felt like, you know, it's my it's my moral responsibility to just give it my best shot to set up the institution so that it could it could function as effectively as it possibly could. Let's talk about the World Bank, right, So we have nine member countries and we were founded actually before the end of

World War Two. They wanted to stabilize currency exchange rates after the war, but they also wanted an organization that would help to rebuild Europe. But then, of course the Marshall Plan came soon after that, and we expanded where does it actually get its money? Where does that money come? You have? How much money do you have? You know, we have a total portfolio almost four hundred billion dollars. That means you know, loans, equity investments that we that

we have right now. And so the the great um uh innovation of the World Bank was that countries gave us capital so that there's paid in capital. We have a very very good UM credit rating, so we are credit rating is triple A, but it's probably one of the strongest triple as in the world. What we've been able to do is whatever equity we have, we use it to go to the capital markets and then borrow at a very low rate and pass that on to

to our client countries. What's the difference between the World Bank and the and the International Monetary Fund the i m F. What the IMF does is comes in in a situation where countries are in trouble, gives them a short term infusion that is paid back in a relatively short period of time, and it's really cash related to policy changes. We actually do things like help countries build roads.

We provide specific loans for roads. We on the private sector side, we give loans directly to private sector companies who are working in in poor countries. We have another part of the organization that literally invented political risk insurance. There's a much broader range of things that we do with the World Bank, But of course we're much smaller than than the IMF, so you focus on developing markets. But now the developing markets have so much capital coming

in from private equity firm sovereign wealth funds. Is there a real need for the World Bank anymore. I don't think that they necessarily need our capital, um, but they certainly need our advice, and they certainly need the capital

in the form that we can provide it. So for a middle income country, if we can provide them a twenty five or thirty year loan at you know, two and a half or three percent, there are not many middle income countries who are going to be able to go to the capital markets themselves and get a loan. And they also are not going to be able to get one where we come in and say, okay, we're gonna give you this loan, whether it's for a particular project or for uh, you know, we give it right

to the government budget. But then uh, the government has to make policy changes. Uh. There are very few organizations that will come to them and say we're not going to charge you, we're not gonna try to get the afterwork. We're coming in and we're gonna give you the benefit of our experience and the experience of our client countries

all over the world. We're gonna give you ten experiences in the world and how this problem that you're trying to solve was solved, and we're going to bring the people who actually know those cases and uh, you know, as part of the loan, we're going to provide that to you for free. Not a lot of countries can do that. But also you know, um, there are some countries that are getting you access to to private equity in capital, but the vast majority of low and low

middle income countries are not getting that. And so what we're now trying to do is to use the financing we have to help those countries become much more attractive for the flow of private capital. So after you leave the World Bank, whenever you leave, what would you like to do? Well, you know, I've in in um in trying to look at the evidence for um uh you know, for development, what what do we need to do? Certain

things are very striking to me. One is that if indeed everyone in the world eight billion people have access to broadband, then the experience that my parents had of coming to the United Sis saying wow, this is what the world could look like. Everyone will have that on smartphones. As more people get online, their aspirations grow. So there's absolutely no way we're going to meet the aspirations of all eight billion people without massive new investments coming from

the private sector. And so you know, if I were to do anything after this, I would somehow work on that problem. Now, did your parents live to see you become the president of the World Bank? Not my father, but my mother. My father passed away early when he was fifty seven, but my mother has and she must be pretty proud. I've been proud to see you to be president the World Bank. Yeah, yeah, And and then and soon after, you know, soon after I was named,

she learned what the World Bank was. So so I don't play golf because I don't think i'd be very good at it. You're obviously a very good golfer. Why don't you have time to learn golf? So I grew up in uh In, Iowa, and we lived right near the local golf course, and I played it competitively all through high school. So you've played with President Obama and you've played with President Trump. Yes, I have who's better? Uh ge? So you know, um, let me let me

just put it this way. So President Obama started late in life, right, and so for someone who started late in life, he's very very good. President Trump has been playing for most of his life, and he is extremely good. He's an extremely good golfer. He he can hit all the shots. So it's a it's a it's it's um uh, it's there are two different kinds of golfers. Completely that all right, that's a very diplomatic answer. Now, what would you say is the greatest pleasure of your professional life?

For me, I think the thing that I'm most grateful for is that I have been able to learn new things throughout every stage of my professional career. Uh. And so as long as you stay open to it, I think that's the key. And if I would to give advice to anyone, I mean, you know, what we now know is that the jobs of the future will require that people are ready to continue to learn throughout their lives.

On the old days, the advice was plastics, but now plastics. Yeah, if you ever want to get into private equity when you leave the World Bank, let me know what you did say that that the highest human calling is private equity. Is I have to tell you that people who are willing to put risk capital into developing countries, Right, that's the key, that's going to be the key and unfortunately

there's not enough of it right now. And so if you know, making economies work for for everybody, this is essentially what I say now to everybody here at the World Bank Group. Our job is to make the global market system work for everybody and the planet, and whether you like it or not, whether you like it or not,

it really we really have to do that. There's no there's gonna be no way to buffer yourself from two billion people living in Africa by fifty who are going to have aspirations that are every bit as high as Europeans as Americans, and and so we have no choice but to make this system work for everybody. Dr Kim, thank you very much for what you've done for the World Bank. Thank you David