Two cases from the transcript carry the claim. Housing in America: the lion’s share of the blocker is that “people who own land in an area have power over that area and they have all kinds of reasons to try and prevent new housing from being built there.” Tuberculosis: “we’ve known how to prevent almost all of those deaths for decades. So that problem can’t be intelligence because we have the know-how.”
The unifying pattern, in Green’s words: “the people who need the help, who need the resource, don’t have power over the resources.” That is a will-and-power problem, not an information problem. Better diagnostics, better antibiotics, better permitting AI — all helpful at the margins, none of them touch the binding constraint.
This generalizes well as a lens. Before asking what intelligence would help here?, ask which constraint is actually binding — knowledge, will, or power? Most of the world’s largest standing problems have stable, well-understood solutions blocked by one of the latter two.
Sermon-relevant: this is the political-economic version of “they will know we are Christians by our love” — the gap between knowing and doing is structural, not informational. A church that can articulate justice but cannot incarnate it is in the same shape as a society that knows how to end TB but won’t. Compare 2026-04-12-faithfulness-demonstrated-by-fruitfulness-not-doctrine.