Episode 22: Mathew Roberts - Where the Money Flows

What if you could see exactly where the world’s money goes—in real time? From Swiss bank accounts to mobile money in Sierra Leone, and from colonial resource extraction to modern "resource nationalism," this episode pulls back the curtain on the hidden flows that shape global inequality.

Host Hugo sits down with Matthew Roberts, Head of Geography at the International School of Geneva (and Hugo’s alma mater). Matthew shares a provocative dream map: a real-time, interactive visualization of global capital, resource wealth, and historical injustices. They discuss how AI is changing the classroom, the "geography of hope" needed to fight student eco-anxiety, and why a pen, paper, and clipboard are still the most vital tools in fieldwork. Plus, Matthew introduces the work of Social Income—proving that just 1% of your income can create a direct line of solidarity across continents.

LINKS:

Social Income

Mathew's Linkedin

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to 15 Minute Maps, where I ask my guests to let their minds roam free and come up with a new idea for their dream map. The first known maps of the world were created thousands of years ago, just of flat discs surrounded by water, and today we are mapping the furthest reaches of the known universe. In between lie a myriad of mapping possibilities. What if we could do away with resource limitations? Think beyond the conventions of time, space, and political boundaries. What kind of new maps could we dream up? My guest today is Matthew Roberts, head of geography at My Alma Mata, the International School of Geneva. Matthew moved to Switzerland in 2010 and has worked at many of the most prestigious institutions in the region, from the International School to EPFL. I'm here today at the Iqualant campus in Fune to chat with Matthew. Matthew, thank you so much for having me today in the wonderful music recording studio. Probably the best situation I've ever recorded. I'm glad to hear it. Thanks for the uh thanks for the opportunity, Hugo. Well, I've been wanting to do an episode that was focused on education or with a teacher at least for a long time because it's a very unique position that you find yourself in at the kind of you need to be teaching geography as it develops, but then you also need to be teaching it to young people who have never been experienced with this kind of thing before. And I was wondering last season I interviewed Mars Sheikh, who is a startup founder of A Geospatial, and his whole thing is creating an agentic AI geospatial tool.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

And I know it's a bit of a hot button topic, but how has AI impacted the teaching of geography? Because you've obviously been all the way through from when it didn't exist to now. How has it evolved? How has it changed and what is the impact that it's having?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Yeah, well, I mean, AI, when it initially, when open AI initially came in, we saw, as teachers in general, not just for geography, huge time-saving applications, ways to use AI to create uh comprehension questions from texts, uh, adapt text for students of different reading levels. And I think that has been something very similar to all areas of industry, in a way, a kind of outsourcing of certain tasks that were time-consuming that could be replaced by technology and by machines. Any time-saving gains for teachers are always seen as uh something that can help them to do their job better. But I think the conversation in general in education now is coming back to, and in society uh more largely, is um where should we not be using AI? I think this discussion is coming back, and I think it's a very important one for the ethics of uh how AI is used in education in general. And I think that's something very healthy as well, to see you know how much do we delegate to machines in um in education, which is fundamentally a very social and human uh industry, if you like. But in terms of geography, I think it can be quite a good companion for teaching ideas. I remember last year in teaching uh resource nationalism in Greenland, something we've been teaching in IB geography for a number of years, with climate change giving uh access to different resources in Greenland. Just being at a bit of a block one day and just asking AI the question, how would you teach this? You know, and it came up with ideas of uh structuring a debate around different stakeholders' access to resources in Greenland. And so I think in some cases it can be, you know, a companion, uh, a mentor or something to inspire you in your in your work. And if that gives you good ideas and helps you to extend your your teaching, uh all the better.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Just before chatting, we were talking about you had gone out into the field and you were collecting data manually by hand. And I think people would be surprised, especially in the humanitarian world, how quite vitally important a pen and paper is to being able to go out into the field and just collect data like that. So I'm glad to hear that it's still a core part of curriculums and what I loved doing when I was here at the International School, going out and collecting data with a pen and paper. And what were they called? Quadrats, doing bio surveys using quadrats. That was great. And of course, clipboards. Well, how are you gonna write properly if you don't have a clipboard? Fundamental equipment. Fundamental equipment, pen, paper, and clipboard. I'm gonna add that to any presentation I do in the future about data collection in the field. Well, look, Matthew, uh, if you're ready, I'm gonna count you in and you have 15 minutes to describe your dream map. In three, two, one, over to you.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Okay, well, when you first posed this question to me, it was uh very um very difficult to come up with with an idea because there are so many aspects of uh maps that I that I love. Um they've always been an integral part of my my life and my upbringing from exploring nature, mountain biking, and so on. And so there are lots of very small uh ways that um I thought I could approach this. But um after some consideration, I think my ideal map would be something linked to showing the location and transfer of the world's wealth, either through capital, uh flows, um, resource wealth. Because I think we're living in a society that is becoming more and more disparate economically, and I think and I believe fundamentally that this is really the underlying uh issue of the problems we see in the world today, both on a global scale, the distance between the uh richest and poorest nations, but also what we're seeing within nations as well, the extreme wealth of the world's uh richest people and this accumulation of uh of wealth to the detriment of those who don't have it. And that's sort of positioned within a longer theoretical framework of capitalism and so on, but we don't need to get into all of that. But uh the ability to see where capital is is flowing. In fact, I was teaching just this morning in high-level uh geography. Uh, we look at globalization and how the world is connected and interdependent on different types of uh flows. We look at capital flows, foreign direct investment, and how the global capitalist system has worked around ways to make those flows less visible. And that's really a uh a characteristic of this uh of this global system, which many would argue has become is becoming more and more unfair. So I think a tool which would enable us to see in real time the flow of uh wealth, capital, goods, um, between nations uh would be very interesting. Where are the hidden flows of money going to? This might be a sensitive topic uh in Switzerland. Um but um I think fundamentally more transparency on the flows of capital and wealth would help us to understand the injustices and unfairness that is inherent in the in the global model. And I think a part of that would be some kind of slider option on my map, a little bit Swiss topple style, to look at historic um historic movements of wealth, capital and goods. Because the system today exists because of um historic exchanges, historic uh injustices, let's say the colonial uh period, that has given an economic advantage within the world. So I think it would be interesting to look at where uh those transfers have occurred between which states. It's a subject which um nation states don't wish to address for fear of reparations um from historic uh injustices and so on. But I really do fundamentally believe that until we um address these, discuss them, and become more transparent on them, that um we won't be able to move forward in a more fair, peaceful, and just society until until that is realized. But I think it also opens the door to a lot of other um opportunities. I volunteer for an organization, Social Income, which is uh universal basic income um organization which aims to um facilitate the flows of um income, of of wealth, from those who have more than they need, i.e., you and I, who live in high-income countries, to those who do live in extreme poverty. And I think we can frame this in a really positive way. The future uh what we've seen in the past is a reduction in extreme poverty globally. And I think a world without extreme poverty is within our grasp, uh, which is something very, very positive for humanity. But I think we do need more transparency around uh around those flows in order to be able to right the historic wrongs and to make a fairer world. So things like aid flows and uh money transfers, donations people are making to organizations, uh to people directly. So if this map could also potentially highlight the potential of uh where global flows of money could uh how that could change positively um income levels around the world. This is going into territory of perhaps maps that may not be totally possible.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Um well that's the point of putting forward your dream map, is that it might not be possible, but it's something that you wish to see. Now, it it's funny because there's so there's a lot of topics, and I do love this idea, and I also love the self-awareness that you're bringing to this, that Switzerland is one of the most wealthy countries in the world, and it has profited off oodles of um capitalist flows and uh and believe it or not, colonial flows, um, in order to be in the situation that it is in today. Now, it's interesting that you also mentioned that the flows aren't necessarily quote unquote negative. It's nice to see that you would also like to map the flows of which countries are actually giving a good amount of money. So you could almost see a positive and a negative flow within this kind of global wealth uh movement map, which I think is a great idea. But you said right at the start in your introduction that you teach resource nationalism. That idea is it's not a term that I've actually come across, but it seems like a first step towards educating people on this whole process. Could you tell me how do you teach resource nationalism in um in a high school geography context?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Yeah, it's um it's something that has come up, of course, throughout history. If we look at what's happening in Iran um at the moment, the events that are happening in Iran, when oil was discovered, the first nations to offer their services were uh the British and then the Americans, who had the technology to get the oil out of the ground and profited from it greatly. It was when Iran began to wonder where the profits from this oil were going, the expatriation of the profits that were made, that questions are asked about um the fairness of who is benefiting from those resources. We talked before about the disparity globally and the resource curse that many low-income countries have. If we take Sierra Leone as an example, a country I visited um last year and for which this organization seeks to support people in Sierra Leone, they have masses of diamonds. Um and that resource wealth leaves their country. If we could map and see where those diamonds are going to, how the value of those diamonds increases over that uh value chain, I think it would be uh really insightful to see how we could address those those differences. But resource nationalism, coming back to your question, was really about um nation states, countries taking back control of their resource wealth and having a fair um a fair uh benefit from them economically, which hasn't always been the case historically. So we teach that by showing uh different examples of states that have taken back control of uh resource extraction from the use of companies from other countries who bring in their technology, which is of course very useful and very important, but comes with the downside of um a margin that is lost on the profits of those resources. So resource nationalism, really the idea that the state takes control and that those profits are um not leaving the country but being uh reinvested back into uh back into the country itself.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

On a different podcast that I also produce, my co-host said, When we were growing up, it felt like we were told and we felt like we were the arbiters of our own destiny that we could grow up and we'd be the decision makers. And that in his conversations with kind of Gen Z young people today, that isn't necessarily the feeling. The feeling is that it's their world. It's the it's the billionaire oligarch's world that they are now growing up in. How could students at your school that you teach start to take back that feeling or start to take back that ability to affect change in a world that is not being built for them?

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Well, it's something very much aligned with the mission of uh International School Geneva. It's uh it's the mission statement that's on every classroom in our in our in our school. And I think what you alluded to there, or what you explained, is this feeling of somehow being dispossessed of the world in which we live. And I think there is a feeling of that even among the non-young people in society, the changes that are taking place, and this feeling of um yeah, dispossession. And I think it's important to reframe uh the discussion around the future and around the positives for the future. It's something very integral to the teaching of geography because when we began uh teaching, well, when I when I began teaching geography in the sort of early 2000s and when I was a student of geography, it was really the beginning of awareness of the environmental movement. It was a geography teacher's role to ring the alarm bells and remind us that it's time to take action. And I think with the acceleration of all of the global problems and challenges, let's say, that have happened over the last um 50 years in a period of hyper-globalization, there's this risk of um sort of fatigue in young people. And I felt that in my geography teaching, uh, raising awareness of global issues and problems. But within a context of hyper-saturated information of everything that's going on in the world, it can be um anxiety-inducing. We talk about eco-anxiety and so on. And I explain this because it's becoming increasingly important and increasingly discussed in geography education that um we also need to teach the geography of hope. We need to frame these discussions around climate change, around economic disparity with the stories of hope. Because there are stories of hope out there, and it's important for us not to lose sight of that different world that we could have.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Matthew, it's really nice to know that students are in your hands and in the hands of this school. But uh you have one minute left. Do you have any final thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 16:41

The organization that I volunteer for, Social Income, based in based in Zurich, a Swiss NGO, invites people to give 1% of their income to people in need who live in extreme poverty. This idea came from uh from a basic idea of re-addressing um injustices, economic injustices. And just from a few um people initially donating some of their income, I think you'd agree neither of us would miss one percent of our income. Um today we've got to a point where nearly 300 people in Sierra Leone receive a monthly income of$30 for three years, no strings attached, um, via mobile money. So this money comes from Switzerland to a Sierra Leonean bank account and is transferred with no middle person directly to people living in extreme poverty. So I would be fascinated to see the journey of this sum of money that travels each month from the pockets of Swiss people via the banking, global banking system, and then via 4G networks, 5G networks in uh in Sierra Leone, to the very villages, to the people, where they get that money, um, and how that is then spent within the community, because we can see that that does make a really positive difference. The the evidence on universal basic income is is um is very compelling. Um, it's an old idea that was championed by the US initially, ironically. Um and I think if we can see where that money goes, how it's being spent, I think we might be more open to um sharing the wealth that we have. And I think that is something that can be very beautiful in why data is so important, because it helps to dispel myths, it helps us to see the positive, and to bring it back to your question on how students could take ownership. I think this kind of data and this kind of movement about solidarity to really show students that a small change can make a really big difference.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

And your time is up. Thank you so much for sharing your map with me today. Uh, we kind of bounced around loads of different topics, but I feel like that's uh reflective of the actual map itself. Um if people want to get in contact with you, if people have are currently working on this project or would like to, I don't know, build something together, what's the best way to get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_01 19:36

You can find me on LinkedIn, Matthew Roberts. Um I think that would be the best way.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Perfect. And what's the organization that you uh volunteer with? Social Income. Social Income. So I'll make sure to have a link to that to their website as well in the description of this episode. Thank you so much for joining me today. And well, actually, no. Thank you so much for uh having me today because I came uh I came here to the studio. It's been a pleasure, Hugo. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to 15 Minute Maps presented by me, Hugo Powell. This was a Powell Media production. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast on whichever platform you're using to listen to it. And I do encourage you to share it with any of your friends and colleagues who may find this topic interesting. And on that note, if you or anyone that you know may have an interesting idea for their dream map, please don't hesitate to get in contact with me on LinkedIn. Join me again next time where I'll be speaking to David De Rida, Senior Research Fellow at the University Hospital of Geneva, specialist in precision public health and spatial data science.