Transcription
Please take your seats. Harvard Kennedy School graduates, family, and friends, welcome to Class Day 2026. It is my great pleasure to introduce to you today one of the most influential leaders in journalism, an HKS alumna, Zanny Minton Beddoes, class of 1992, who serves as editor-in-chief of The Economist.
[cheering]
For those like me who have consumed The Economist for decades, you probably know a few things about it. The iconic red box logo, the absence of bylines, the clever and pun-prone captions. But perhaps more than anything, one of the things that has long distinguished The Economist is an intellectual perspective that is reflected in its articles. An ethos that Zanny not only inherited, but has actively championed and deepened.
At The Economist, debate in the newsroom is not merely tolerated. It is expected. Writers and editors challenge one another, and the substance and framing of story ideas are tested, contested, and improved. The process can be intense, but the conviction behind it is simple. Rigorous debate sharpens thinking, and sharper thinking produces better analysis. That idea should sound familiar to all of us here at HKS. We aspire to create classrooms and a community where ideas are strengthened by debate, rather than protected from it. In many ways, the editorial culture Zanny has cultivated reflects the very best of what universities should model. Intellectual honesty, curiosity, and the confidence to engage seriously with opposing views. And in an era when so much of our media diet rewards speed, certainty, or even outrage, The Economist's commitment to deep analysis feels both rarer than ever and increasingly important.
Zanny herself brings a remarkable background to that mission. Educated at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, Zanny first found her way to HKS in 1989 as an MPA student. In the heady days after the fall of the Soviet Union, upon graduation, she departed for Central Europe and worked with then Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and at the International Monetary Fund, focusing on the post-communist transition. Building on that experience, she joined the staff of The Economist in 1994 as an emerging markets correspondent and steadily rose through the organization, serving in roles that included US economics editor, economics editor, and business affairs editor, before becoming editor-in-chief in 2015. Under her leadership, The Economist, a magazine that predates the American Civil War by two decades, has continued to evolve while remaining unmistakably itself: globally minded, analytically rigorous, skeptical of easy answers, and committed to explaining to its readers a rapidly changing world.
One of Zanny's particularly notable innovations has been The Insider, The Economist's video and podcast series. What makes The Insider so compelling is that it deliberately pulls back the curtain on how journalists and editors come to their stories. Through The Insider, viewers don't see polished conclusions. They see the debates and disagreements that lead to them. The guests that Zanny brings into these conversations reflect both the breadth of her reach and her commitment to engaging across political and ideological divides. Her recent interviews have included Christine Lagarde, Dario Amodei, Tucker Carlson, Rahm Emanuel, and Jamie Dimon. Whether one agrees with these figures or not, the interviews reflect something essential about Zanny's approach: a belief that journalism's responsibility is not to insulate audiences from difficult voices, but to interrogate power directly, rigorously, and in public.
To the graduates in this audience, during your time at HKS, we have pushed to prepare you not merely to hold opinions, but to test them. Not merely to consume information, but to interrogate it. And not merely to observe the world, but to engage with it seriously and responsibly. Today's class speaker exemplifies those values in practice every day. HKS class of 2026, please join me in welcoming the editor-in-chief of The Economist and one of our own, Zanny Minton Beddoes.
Thank you. Thank you, Dean Weinstein. Harvard Kennedy School class of 2026, congratulations.
[cheering]
My my fellow MPAs, MPPs, mid-career MPAs, MPAIDs,
[cheering]
and those incredible individuals among you getting your PhDs. To all of you from more than 100 countries, you've done it.
[applause]
You've done it. All all those course credits, those hours in study groups on the forum stairs, which are exactly the same as they were when I was here. Those long nights at your computer, they're behind you. What an achievement. You should really be so proud. And I am so proud and so honored to be here to share this wonderful moment with you. Particularly since this is my first Harvard graduation. Yep, you heard that right. 34 years ago, I should have been sitting where you are. But to my parents' great disappointment, I wasn't there. Dean Weinstein, don't worry. I fulfilled my credits. But because I'd taken a semester off during my studies, I finished halfway through the year. So by the time commencement came around, I was in Ukraine, too absorbed in my work to come back. I regretted that decision the moment I saw the disappointment on my parents' faces. And all the more so now when I see what I missed. Graduation really is an important milestone. Not just for you, but for all the family and friends who supported you along the way. HKS family and friends, this is your day, too. And so, can we have a round of applause for all of you?
[applause and cheering]
Parents, parents, caregivers, family friends, this really is your day, too. And to my parents, who are still going strong, and who will watch this, Mama and Papa, I hope this sort of makes up for things, albeit 34 years late. An explanation, though not an excuse, is that the early 1990s was an intoxicating time for a public policy graduate. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the beginning of a transformation which rippled across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It was a moment of vast change when the wheels of history moved slightly faster. And it was a moment that shaped my life. And the reason that it did so were almost entirely due to the Kennedy School.
There were parallels between the early 1990s and today. Today's world is also changing at a dizzying pace. Now, as then, we're seeing dramatic shifts in geopolitics and economic policy. But today, there is an even more head-spinning dimension. As you all know very well, we are in the early stages of the AI era. Quite possibly the biggest technological revolution in history. So, your careers, therefore, begin at a greater moment of upheaval than mine did. But there are echoes. And so in the hope that it might be relevant for you, I wanted to reflect a bit on my experience. And I'll start with my time in Eastern Europe and what that taught me about public policy. And then offer you a few thoughts on how to affect change based on gosh, what is now three decades of watching public events up close. And in a nutshell, my message to you is simple. Periods of dramatic upheaval can feel overwhelming. Don't be overwhelmed. It is precisely at times like this that individuals can have outsized impact. The key, I really believe, is to be open-minded, to seek out those with whom you disagree, to make peace with your own insecurities, and to look forward with optimism. Oh, and a Kennedy School experience will be invaluable. Mine certainly was.
I arrived at the Kennedy School in September 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall fell. I was gripped by the news. My mother is German, born in what is now Poland, and I spent part of my childhood in Germany. The events there felt very close. So when a friend of mine told me that Jeffrey Sachs, then a professor in the economics department, was recruiting a group of graduate students to spend the summer helping Leszek Balcerowicz, the newly installed finance minister of Poland's first post-communist government, I knew I wanted to be part of that group. So I went to see Professor Sachs in his office hours in the Littauer building in the economics department, and I made the case for why he should take me along. I knew that agriculture was important in Poland. So, I told him I grew up on a farm. I also told him that I spoke German and Russian, and I suggested that Polish was somewhere in between the two. Now, those of you from Poland, please forgive that gross linguistic slur; it was. But, it convinced Professor Sachs, and he invited me to join the group.
And we interns, we worked in a cramped office on the second floor of the Soviet-style finance ministry. We wrote memos, we built spreadsheets. And my Kennedy School classes really were invaluable. I knew how to write a policy memo. Summary recommendations at the top. I could do data analysis. I even knew the basics of agricultural economics. Thank you, Professor Peter Timmer. But, most of all, my association with HKS brought me confidence and credibility. I remember vividly going to a meeting at the agriculture ministry to present Professor Sachs's plan for getting rid of farm tariffs. I was 23. The colleague who was with me was a few years older, not very many. And we arrived and we found a dozen ministry officials sitting on the other side of the table. They were at least twice our age, and they'd spent decades working in the communist regime. As we sat down, the most senior of them looked across the table and said to me, "What are your credentials?" There was a moment's silence. I really felt like an impostor. But, then I said, "I'm at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard." They still looked skeptical, but it was enough for the conversation to start.
That summer in Poland shaped both my convictions and my career. It instilled in me a firm belief in the values of classical English liberalism: limited government, open markets, and free speech. I really saw firsthand that socialism didn't work, that incentives matter, and that bold change can bring big results. Economic reform for me there in Poland was not just equations in a textbook. I saw the impact of freeing prices and freeing the exchange rate every day as I walked to work. Every day I walked past the old state store. Its shelves were either empty or filled with row upon row of the same kind of thing, like tinned fish that nobody wanted to buy. And outside, on the pavement, or the sidewalk as some of you insist on calling it, was an informal bazaar. Dozens of stalls set up by enterprising folk who had driven in their Polski Fiat cars to Berlin and bought bananas, chocolates, women's lingerie, all the kinds of things that people actually wanted to buy. Free markets, I saw, really did bring people freedom.
But I also learned that dramatic change is disconcerting. I learned up close how it meets resistance from entrenched interests, including officials at the ministries where I worked. And I saw fear when I visited state farms in Ukraine. Workers worried that their livelihoods were gone. It was really an important lesson because whatever the benefits, for many people, rapid progress is very scary. And by this time, I knew that I wanted to work on economic policy. So I went to the IMF, home to the high priests of macroeconomic reform. And I spent a couple of years there, first working on West Africa, and then on Central Asia, before realizing that I wasn't really cut out for a large bureaucracy. I preferred writing to building models, and so I left for The Economist, where I've been now for three decades. First writing about emerging economies, then a long spell in Washington D.C. trying to make sense of America's economy, and then back to London in this job.
Leading The Economist has has genuinely been a huge privilege. The newspaper, because that's what we still like to call it, was founded in 1843, as Dean Weinstein said, to champion the values that I cherish: free societies and free markets. And I'm surrounded by a group of amazingly talented people committed to those values and to helping our subscribers make sense of the world. And from this perch, I've been lucky enough to have a ringside seat at several decades of world events. Now, this era that my career has spanned is now viewed with considerable skepticism. It's the globalist era, where free market excess meant elites did well and workers were hurt. It was the era of naivety about China and American hubris as the world's sole superpower. Now, some of those criticisms I disagree with. I still believe in free trade and free markets and fiscal discipline, however unfashionable they now are. But some of those critiques really are spot-on. Too many of us in the 1990s and 2000s spent too little time thinking about how to help people who had lost out from globalization. We were geopolitically naive, especially about China. We really thought economic freedom would propel political freedom. And too many people equated good policy with preserving the status quo. Unfortunately, in the real world of public policy, you don't get to redo the course. So, the best we can do is learn lessons from our mistakes and look forward. And that is your challenge.
You face a world shaped by my generation's successes and by our failures. The pendulum has shifted sharply. In economics, as you know, industrial policy and government intervention are on the rise. The geopolitical quake has been even bigger. And much of it has happened while you have been here at the Kennedy School. You've seen America become more focused on hard power projection and a transactional foreign policy. There are deep fissures in the transatlantic relationship. Large parts of the rules-based international order are on life support. But dramatic as these changes are, they really are likely to be dwarfed by the transformations AI is bringing. The potential clearly is huge. We really could live a lot longer in a world of far greater abundance. We could have the tools to deal with the toughest problems, from cancer to climate change. But AI also brings significant dangers. And it could well cause disruption on a scale that will make the globalization shock seem trifling. You are the people who will determine which way things go. You will build that new world. You know that; it's why you're here. But whatever your plans and ambitions, let me urge you to think even bigger and more boldly. You've got a lot to do, partly because of where my generation fell short. You need to build a new international order. We need a new setup with new norms and rejuvenated or even new international institutions. You need to find ways for the two superpowers, America and China, to work together, not least to tackle global-scale challenges and avoid AI disaster. And you need to reimagine the social contract in your societies for an AI world. Who knows whether AI will disrupt jobs at the pace that some of the tech leaders suggest? But you need to be prepared just in case. New kinds of tax and redistribution, new ways of thinking about education, new kinds of regulatory structures to harness the benefits and minimize the risks. And you have all the training and tools you need to do this. You've done the coursework. You've learned from some of the brightest minds in the world, your professors here at Harvard. Now it's a question of things done. Being the people who make change happen.
So how do you do that? Well, with considerable humility, as I stand here amongst so many distinguished practitioners of public service, let me offer you four very personal suggestions. Consider them the musings of an observer, the editor's notes, if you will, in the margins of your career.
Number one. Seek out the individuals who will make a difference. Government is about processes and institutions. But change is created by individuals who make it happen. And it's often a very small number. Jeff Bezos famously talks about the two-pizza rule for meetings. Never have more people in the room that can be fed from two pizzas. I think there's a similar one-office rule for bold reform in government. In Poland, the shock therapy program was led by a handful of people around the finance minister. In the financial crisis, it was a small team at the Treasury and the Fed. Government will always have the charlatans, the venal types, the men with oddly fancy watches and shiny suits who are in it for themselves. It will also always have the timekeepers, the people who prize stability and safety. But there are also always remarkable individuals. Seek them out and make sure you are in the same room as them.
Number two, be curious and take risks. I would say this as a journalist, but ask questions. Demand explanations for why things are the way they are. Often institutions are poorly run because no one has thought to change things. Similarly, take risks. If you have an opportunity, grab it. I've only ever regretted things I haven't done, like not coming to my graduation ceremony. But I've done plenty of things that were unpleasant. Eating a sheep's eye at a formal dinner in Kyrgyzstan comes to mind. I've done some things that were unnerving, like interviewing a leader of Hamas in Doha three days after October 7th. And I've done a few things that were probably unwise, visiting an underground field hospital on the Ukrainian front line. But I've never regretted doing them. What's more, I've learned that curiosity really does lead to better analysis. I had a much better understanding of America's housing market crash after spending time in Cleveland in a neighborhood full of boarded-up foreclosed homes. And I've got a much better understanding of the complexities of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians after numerous trips there in the past few years, spending time with people from all sides.
Number three, engage with people with whom you disagree. I have often learned most from people with quite different worldviews from my own. The Chinese scholars, for instance, who tell me about American decline on trips to Beijing. The Gulf minister who challenges my view of the liberal world order. When I first went to Washington, I was regularly invited to dinners at which both Republican and Democratic congressmen were present. That seems much rarer now. In our polarized world, people tend to retreat into their own bubbles. And I really think that's a problem. You won't get progress from talking to like-minded people in an echo chamber. That's why I make a point of doing interviews with people from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Tucker Carlson, however controversial that turns out to be. And for you, as the leaders of tomorrow, engaging with those you disagree with is even more important.
Number four, always, always consider the glass half full. Make peace with your insecurities and look forward. I know that sounds trite, but it's probably the most important thing I've learned. You are all ambitious, otherwise you wouldn't be here. And I suspect you are all driven by insecurities and a desire to prove yourselves. I certainly am. I still suffer from impostor syndrome. I write about economics, but I'm not a real economist. I don't have a PhD. I make my living in journalism, but I'm actually not a particularly good writer. Early in my career, this insecurity took the form of a generalized angst that I was falling short relative to everyone else. But over time, I've learned to make peace with those insecurities. I've learned that you don't need to be good at everything to be a good leader. What matters is that you look forward with optimism. No one is inspired by a pessimist. What matters is you have an idea of where you want to go, because you can't bring people with you if you don't know yourself. And what matters is that you are honest about your own strengths and weaknesses. If you know what you are and are not good at, you can surround yourself with people who have the strengths to make up for your weaknesses. I've made sure that my deputies are all brilliant writers.
So, those are my suggestions. Seek out outstanding individuals. Be curious. Engage with those you disagree with. Make peace with your insecurities, and always look forward. Now, in the hallowed grounds of the Kennedy School, I'm aware that my list sounds more like relationship advice than the soaring rhetoric of public service. But in the end, public service is about people. Your impact will depend on your vision and your ambition, but it will also depend on your ability to bring others with you. And if you look forward with optimism, if you lay out a vision of a better future, you can each, each of you, make a difference. Class of 2026, congratulations. It is your world now. Go make it better. Thank you.
[cheering]
Zanny, those were beautiful remarks. Thank you for sharing them with us and being with us on this special day. Now, I imagine and hope that your HKS diploma is already hanging proudly on the wall of your office back in London. But given that you weren't able to walk across this stage in 1992, we at HKS wanted to give you a bit of that experience today. So, please join me up here.
[cheering]
[cheering]
By the powers vested in me by the president and fellows of Harvard College, I hereby declare you, Zanny, that you have officially graduated from the Kennedy School. Let's get that picture for your mom and dad.
[cheering]
[applause]
Thank you, everyone, for joining us at Class Day. We'll be heading out the gate there for the reception, and we look forward to celebrating your commencement tomorrow. Thank you.
Hey.