1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:01,050 Good day, everyone. 2 00:00:01,050 --> 00:00:11,190 Thank you for joining this chat and conversation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs as we launch his new book, The Ages of Globalisation. 3 00:00:11,190 --> 00:00:21,750 Delighted so many of you have joined from around the world. It really is one of the silver linings of this digital online that we are able to do this. 4 00:00:21,750 --> 00:00:30,670 And we're very sorry. Jeff isn't with us in Oxford. Joining us from New York, but delighted so many of you have been able to do so as well. 5 00:00:30,670 --> 00:00:36,510 I'm in Golden. I'm a professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University, 6 00:00:36,510 --> 00:00:43,170 and I was the founding director of the Oxford Martin School and now run a couple of programmes within the school. 7 00:00:43,170 --> 00:00:51,660 Jeff, as many of you know, is university professor and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. 8 00:00:51,660 --> 00:00:57,060 He directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. 9 00:00:57,060 --> 00:01:01,140 And in addition to his many, many accolades, 10 00:01:01,140 --> 00:01:13,500 he has been engaged and really is a model to me of what an academic can do in terms of combining thought leadership with action leadership. 11 00:01:13,500 --> 00:01:18,210 Jeffrey has been at the forefront of thinking on development, 12 00:01:18,210 --> 00:01:23,400 but he's also been at the forefront of doing and making sure that actions get 13 00:01:23,400 --> 00:01:28,440 translated into words with a very deep commitment to development over many, 14 00:01:28,440 --> 00:01:33,930 many years. I first met him when he was a professor at Harvard University where he received his B.A. 15 00:01:33,930 --> 00:01:42,750 M.A. MPH Ph.D. He subsequently moved to Columbia in 2002 to run the Earth Institute. 16 00:01:42,750 --> 00:01:46,740 He's the director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. 17 00:01:46,740 --> 00:01:50,250 The Commission of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development. 18 00:01:50,250 --> 00:02:01,080 He's been an adviser to three secretary generals of the U.N. and serves as the SD Giese advocate on development. 19 00:02:01,080 --> 00:02:07,410 He is someone who has worked in many, many places and thought very deeply about many issues. 20 00:02:07,410 --> 00:02:18,510 But I didn't think that he had a five thousand year sweep of our understanding of globalisation until I read his magisterial new book, 21 00:02:18,510 --> 00:02:24,540 The Ages of Globalisation. Jeff, congratulations. It's a huge sweep through history. 22 00:02:24,540 --> 00:02:28,800 It's helped me understand globalisation better. 23 00:02:28,800 --> 00:02:35,880 As a professor who's worked on it for many, many years and given me all sorts of new insights. 24 00:02:35,880 --> 00:02:44,080 Let's begin this conversation by perhaps you just giving a 10 minutes introduction for those that haven't been fortunate enough to read the book, 25 00:02:44,080 --> 00:02:48,180 get to the book and what you'll see below on this webcast. 26 00:02:48,180 --> 00:02:53,400 You can click on that and order Jeff's book while he's speaking. There you go. 27 00:02:53,400 --> 00:02:58,230 Thank you very much, Ian. Thanks to everybody for joining in. 28 00:02:58,230 --> 00:03:10,290 This book was born at Oxford. It was the first day delivered as a series of lectures at the School of Geography and Environment. 29 00:03:10,290 --> 00:03:21,450 And I want to thank especially Gordon Clark, who the wonderful leader, a faculty leader of that school for so many years. 30 00:03:21,450 --> 00:03:27,360 A great friend and was my host for those lectures at Oxford in twenty seventeen. 31 00:03:27,360 --> 00:03:34,680 And those lectures gave me the chance to put on a paper and in a coherent way, I hope, 32 00:03:34,680 --> 00:03:41,640 by themes that have been running through my head for the last thirty five years. 33 00:03:41,640 --> 00:03:48,480 I began advising governments in nineteen eighty five, starting in Bolivia, 34 00:03:48,480 --> 00:03:58,500 and Bolivia was notable not only for its macroeconomic imbalances with the hyperinflation that had reached tens of thousands percent per year, 35 00:03:58,500 --> 00:04:09,360 but also for a landlocked country in the high Altiplano of the Andean region, at least the capital city, La Paz. 36 00:04:09,360 --> 00:04:17,370 And it forced me really for the first time to think about the geography and development teams so basic. 37 00:04:17,370 --> 00:04:28,680 But I went to a Portuguese programme, an undergraduate, thinking that countries were basically listed by alphabetical order. 38 00:04:28,680 --> 00:04:35,760 I didn't think about countries that on maps like the wonderful book of maps that Professor Golden has just produced. 39 00:04:35,760 --> 00:04:41,250 I thought about countries as having national economies with national income accounts. 40 00:04:41,250 --> 00:04:46,650 But when you're up at 12000 or 14000 feet above sea level, you do think about geography. 41 00:04:46,650 --> 00:04:49,950 When you're in a landlocked country, you think about geography. 42 00:04:49,950 --> 00:04:59,930 When I began working in Poland a few years later, the post communist transition, that long flat plane that connects. 43 00:04:59,930 --> 00:05:10,850 Poland, with the Germany to the west and with Russia to the east, was also a defining determinant of Poland's history and fate. 44 00:05:10,850 --> 00:05:20,670 In fact, Poland was so easily invaded and divided so many times because of its geographic accessibility to two giant powers. 45 00:05:20,670 --> 00:05:29,120 So on either side. Well, over the course of thirty five years of working at all parts of the world, 46 00:05:29,120 --> 00:05:40,820 the poles of geography and shipping development came more and more to my thoughts and my mind. 47 00:05:40,820 --> 00:05:47,330 But those geometric factors interact with two other factors is pivotal. 48 00:05:47,330 --> 00:05:51,380 Geography changes depending on technology. 49 00:05:51,380 --> 00:05:57,500 A landlocked country in an age of the Internet is very different from a landlocked country without the Internet. 50 00:05:57,500 --> 00:06:04,310 Any country that has horses is very different from countries that are places that do not. 51 00:06:04,310 --> 00:06:09,710 Especially after three thousand and horses have been domesticated. 52 00:06:09,710 --> 00:06:10,340 Before that, 53 00:06:10,340 --> 00:06:18,110 it didn't make all that much difference because people were basically eating horses rather than riding on them or using them for animal traction. 54 00:06:18,110 --> 00:06:24,290 So the interaction of geography with technology, with institutions, 55 00:06:24,290 --> 00:06:32,390 which is a rather core staple of economic analysis for me, has been a shaping theme. 56 00:06:32,390 --> 00:06:40,070 And in this book, I look at the interaction of those great three thematic areas geography, 57 00:06:40,070 --> 00:06:47,090 technology and institutions to look at the dynamics of globalisation across time. 58 00:06:47,090 --> 00:06:55,370 And I in a way artificially. But I think with those some useful insight, 59 00:06:55,370 --> 00:07:07,790 then put globalisation into a number of distinct ages that are paced strongly by either geographical change, 60 00:07:07,790 --> 00:07:16,250 like fundamental climate change, the birth of civilisation with the Holocene 10000 years ago, 61 00:07:16,250 --> 00:07:24,380 or Paiste by deep technological changes and their interactions with institutional change. 62 00:07:24,380 --> 00:07:29,480 And the result is seven ages of globalisation. 63 00:07:29,480 --> 00:07:33,500 I make the argument, which I didn't really appreciate fully thirty five years ago, 64 00:07:33,500 --> 00:07:42,830 that we've always been globalised in some sense as long distance interactions and interdependence of human societies. 65 00:07:42,830 --> 00:07:55,160 This goes back to the first migrations, the Palaeolithic migrations of anatomically modern humans out of Africa, roughly 50 to 70 thousand years ago, 66 00:07:55,160 --> 00:08:05,570 to the birth of civilisation with the Holocene and agriculture to what I called the equestrienne age at the age of the horse, 67 00:08:05,570 --> 00:08:15,860 because I regard the horse in economic history as at least as important as the automobile and transport of the last two centuries. 68 00:08:15,860 --> 00:08:28,580 Fundamental game changer in power in the military, in the reach of empire, in the scale of a polities, in the productivity of economic life. 69 00:08:28,580 --> 00:08:35,690 But some places didn't have the horse and others did. And that was a tremendous shaper of world dynamics. 70 00:08:35,690 --> 00:08:44,320 From there is the classic age, the Roman Empire, the Hohn Empire, the other great classic empires, 71 00:08:44,320 --> 00:08:54,350 the Persian Empire, the Mooradian Empire, the initial Islamic empires. 72 00:08:54,350 --> 00:08:58,220 Starting in the 7th century and so on. 73 00:08:58,220 --> 00:09:06,470 The next great stage is what Adam Smith famously called the two most important events in the history of mankind 74 00:09:06,470 --> 00:09:12,680 the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas and from Europe to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope, 75 00:09:12,680 --> 00:09:20,660 a part of the world it knows very well. And that gave us a globalisation in the sense we know it today. 76 00:09:20,660 --> 00:09:27,410 Global scale, multinational enterprises, of which the first was the East Indies Company of London, 77 00:09:27,410 --> 00:09:37,550 and the second was the Dutch East Indies company, founded in sixty, you know, two that created multinational global scale enterprise. 78 00:09:37,550 --> 00:09:42,460 Sixth phase it was with the birth of the steam engine. 79 00:09:42,460 --> 00:09:47,420 I think conveniently dated to another famous date, 1776. 80 00:09:47,420 --> 00:09:56,900 That's when Adam Smith wrote his great book. It's When the Fallen Decline The Kind and Fall of the Roman Empire by. 81 00:09:56,900 --> 00:10:02,370 It was written and it was when the. Declaration of Independence of the United States. 82 00:10:02,370 --> 00:10:07,030 It was, of course, also promulgated. 83 00:10:07,030 --> 00:10:08,740 So a pivotal year. 84 00:10:08,740 --> 00:10:21,430 It gave rise to the industrial age, an age highly differentiated in power to an important extent, by who had coal and accessible coal and who did not. 85 00:10:21,430 --> 00:10:28,270 Because now the steam engine was the primary driving force of industrialisation. 86 00:10:28,270 --> 00:10:35,830 And then I argue that we're in the new 7th age of globalisation today, the digital age. 87 00:10:35,830 --> 00:10:45,280 And while the book was written, obviously before Kofod 19 I the last weekend before going to press, 88 00:10:45,280 --> 00:10:52,300 I had time to add a preface to the book about Koban 19, 89 00:10:52,300 --> 00:11:01,390 yet another epidemic as shaper of globalisation as the Black Death was and other pandemic diseases. 90 00:11:01,390 --> 00:11:11,450 But I think one of the things that we'll remember twenty twenty four was the dramatic acceleration of digitalisation of the world economy. 91 00:11:11,450 --> 00:11:18,070 Were half online, half in brick and mortar. 92 00:11:18,070 --> 00:11:28,330 The online part of the world economy is soaring. The brick and mortar part of the world economy has been in a state of near collapse. 93 00:11:28,330 --> 00:11:34,150 It's a shocking change, redistribution of wealth and income. 94 00:11:34,150 --> 00:11:42,130 And I think a shaper of things to come because we won't go back to the way things were in twenty nineteen. 95 00:11:42,130 --> 00:11:48,130 Even if we do get a vaccine that quickly puts this pandemic to rest. 96 00:11:48,130 --> 00:11:49,240 And sadly, 97 00:11:49,240 --> 00:12:01,240 the most recent news is even then the eye and the antibody response might be short lived and we may be living with this for quite a long time. 98 00:12:01,240 --> 00:12:05,320 But in any event, we'll be living with the digital age for years to come. 99 00:12:05,320 --> 00:12:09,640 And I think that that is a great definer of the new age of globalisation. 100 00:12:09,640 --> 00:12:23,560 Final point that I would make, as each age has had its power structures, its geopolitics, its winners and its losers and our age of the digital. 101 00:12:23,560 --> 00:12:34,840 Globalisation is no different. It is already giving rise to dangerous geopolitical tensions, most notably between the US and China. 102 00:12:34,840 --> 00:12:46,330 But I think the digital age, by shifting power structures, by opening up new avenues of warfare, cyber warfare, 103 00:12:46,330 --> 00:12:57,190 surveillance, fake news is a destabilising force as well as an economically disruptive force for the good and for the bad. 104 00:12:57,190 --> 00:13:06,860 So that that is the shape, the shape of the book in seven minutes for 70. 105 00:13:06,860 --> 00:13:13,780 Yes. Thank you. Covering five thousand years and in seven minutes. 106 00:13:13,780 --> 00:13:24,880 I'm really so I was very struck a long time ago when you wrote two seminal paper on the interface between geography and institutions and development, 107 00:13:24,880 --> 00:13:29,460 which got me to think fresh about about development prospects then. 108 00:13:29,460 --> 00:13:34,720 And I know many others felt the same way. And I think this book similarly does not. 109 00:13:34,720 --> 00:13:40,900 Not least because the way you think about globalisation is very, very different for many people. 110 00:13:40,900 --> 00:13:46,090 Globalisation is just a dirty word, which started recently. 111 00:13:46,090 --> 00:13:51,580 But you see it as a much longer process, as you said, from the earliest migration. 112 00:13:51,580 --> 00:13:59,050 What defines us as humans is our ability to globalise, which makes us pretty unique as a species. 113 00:13:59,050 --> 00:14:12,940 So how do you define globalisation? When I was advising Bolivia, I thought that I was watching globalisation take place for the first time, you know? 114 00:14:12,940 --> 00:14:18,740 Then I learnt a little bit more history and was reminded of some of my classes and so forth. 115 00:14:18,740 --> 00:14:25,880 And then I thought, well, now it's really taking place for the second time because the 19th century was the age of free trade after all, 116 00:14:25,880 --> 00:14:37,550 following the end of market ism. And I the prescriptions of Adam Smith, then I thought a little bit more about it. 117 00:14:37,550 --> 00:14:41,240 Well, I that's not exactly right. 118 00:14:41,240 --> 00:14:46,970 Even mercantilism was a form of globalisation. After all, that was the age of empire. 119 00:14:46,970 --> 00:14:52,050 I mean, you could say that the Spanish empire was the first global empire, 120 00:14:52,050 --> 00:15:00,110 the Portuguese and the pope dividing the world between the two and fourteen ninety four in the treaty of toward to see us. 121 00:15:00,110 --> 00:15:05,460 So I kept get getting pushed back then, of course. 122 00:15:05,460 --> 00:15:16,140 So we learnt from archaeologists and from historians more and more that the Han and the Chinese and the Roman empires were trading. 123 00:15:16,140 --> 00:15:23,950 We had the Silk Route revived by President Xi Jinping in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative. 124 00:15:23,950 --> 00:15:41,990 But completely with a view towards the ancient role of the Silk Roads in linking East and West I, we were reminded day of even the Mongol Empire, 125 00:15:41,990 --> 00:15:51,200 the largest land empire in the history of the world, which we don't think about usually in too kindly and warm and fuzzy ways. 126 00:15:51,200 --> 00:16:01,400 But it actually was a period of massive trade from east to west because it was under the safety, as it were, of Mongol rule. 127 00:16:01,400 --> 00:16:08,600 And so for me, the dates just yet got pushed back farther and farther and farther. 128 00:16:08,600 --> 00:16:21,230 And then I thought that a plausible definition of globalisation is long distance interaction of societies through exchanges of goods, 129 00:16:21,230 --> 00:16:27,950 services, people, ideas, technologies, alphabets and so forth. 130 00:16:27,950 --> 00:16:35,780 And in that sense, we've always been globalised, at least for tens of thousands of years. 131 00:16:35,780 --> 00:16:51,840 Ancient Palaeolithic settlements. I find it remarkably I javins stones or objects of art work, jewellery that are based on substances, minerals, 132 00:16:51,840 --> 00:17:02,990 the precious gems and so forth that must have come from hundreds or thousands of miles away in an era when that was basically by raft or by foot. 133 00:17:02,990 --> 00:17:17,240 And so we know that we've been engaged in very long distance exchange and of course, migration since the very start of the exodus from from Africa. 134 00:17:17,240 --> 00:17:25,670 That was the birth of the settlement of the world to anatomically modern humans. 135 00:17:25,670 --> 00:17:31,610 As I said, somewhere between 50 and seven thousand years ago. 136 00:17:31,610 --> 00:17:40,310 So I'm going to have a conversation with Jeff and I encourage you to post your questions and also to note that this is being recorded. 137 00:17:40,310 --> 00:17:46,430 So if you're posing questions, they will be part of the record. 138 00:17:46,430 --> 00:17:57,850 So, Jeff, globalisation for you is this long term historical process that basically defines humanity over its existence. 139 00:17:57,850 --> 00:18:08,330 And I guess for that reason, you would see it as both a force for tremendous good and progress, bringing civilisations into contact with each other, 140 00:18:08,330 --> 00:18:16,160 leapfrogging as well as a source of immense danger, which we see through pandemics that we've seen in many, 141 00:18:16,160 --> 00:18:21,490 many other cascading shocks, what I call them, the butterfly effect of globalisation. 142 00:18:21,490 --> 00:18:30,180 And in a previous book. How do you see those two positives and negatives interacting? 143 00:18:30,180 --> 00:18:34,120 And do you think that the balance of positive and negative has changed? 144 00:18:34,120 --> 00:18:39,410 And if so, is that because of policy, like we can stop the bonds? 145 00:18:39,410 --> 00:18:46,360 Or is this sort of an inevitable and harvest the goods? Or is this just sort of an inevitable ebb and flow of good and bad? 146 00:18:46,360 --> 00:18:53,020 What do we what we take away from 7000 years of 5000 years of observation? 147 00:18:53,020 --> 00:19:00,490 I'm going to read, if I can. My favourite excerpt from The Wealth of Nations. 148 00:19:00,490 --> 00:19:09,790 And it'll take a couple of minutes, but I think we have time. But it is for me, the quintessence of Adam Smith's wisdom and decency. 149 00:19:09,790 --> 00:19:19,840 But it's also exactly your question. So I'm quoting the discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope. 150 00:19:19,840 --> 00:19:24,580 Are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. 151 00:19:24,580 --> 00:19:29,650 Their consequences have already been very great, but in the short period of between two and three centuries, 152 00:19:29,650 --> 00:19:37,330 which have elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. 153 00:19:37,330 --> 00:19:42,130 What benefits or misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from these great events? 154 00:19:42,130 --> 00:19:45,340 No human wisdom can foresee. Now, here's the point. 155 00:19:45,340 --> 00:19:52,810 By uniting in some measure the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants, 156 00:19:52,810 --> 00:20:01,960 to increase one another's enjoyments and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial to the natives. 157 00:20:01,960 --> 00:20:04,390 However, both of the East and West Indies. 158 00:20:04,390 --> 00:20:14,230 All the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasion. 159 00:20:14,230 --> 00:20:26,860 So what is Smith saying? Adam Smith is saying global trade should be a win win, you know, because his basic theory, which I think is the right theory, 160 00:20:26,860 --> 00:20:36,040 that global trade enables each part of the world to help meet the wants and the needs of other parts of the world should be mutually beneficial. 161 00:20:36,040 --> 00:20:41,650 That's the gains from trade through specialisation. We study it from the first day. 162 00:20:41,650 --> 00:20:45,580 Paul Samuelson gave the most elegant approves of it. 163 00:20:45,580 --> 00:20:51,920 David Ricardo helped us to understand it. In the early 19th century, it's true. 164 00:20:51,920 --> 00:21:01,360 Globalisation is good. We can I can have my coffee, which I'm not going to get out of a Central Park coffee farm. 165 00:21:01,360 --> 00:21:08,650 I'm going to get it from Java or Ethiopia or Colombia or Brazil or Vietnam. 166 00:21:08,650 --> 00:21:14,290 Thanks goodness I love my coffee. So globalisation should be a good thing. 167 00:21:14,290 --> 00:21:19,510 And yet it is often then a terrible thing. And why a terrible thing? 168 00:21:19,510 --> 00:21:25,450 What Smith talks about was the unequal power of the conquerors. 169 00:21:25,450 --> 00:21:35,710 When they arrived in the Caribbean in in the ports of the Indian Ocean, in in the East Indies. 170 00:21:35,710 --> 00:21:41,650 But he didn't know it was 1776, a hundred years before Pastore and Coke, 171 00:21:41,650 --> 00:21:49,540 that what the Conky stores brought was not only their weapons, but even more importantly, they brought their pathogens. 172 00:21:49,540 --> 00:22:01,600 They brought smallpox. They brought the measles. They brought other killer diseases because the old world was steeped in the pathogenic cauldron. 173 00:22:01,600 --> 00:22:08,050 Many children died, but by the time you reached adulthood, you had adult immunity or most did. 174 00:22:08,050 --> 00:22:16,120 You could carry it to the new world and end up destroying the population of the indigenous populations, which was wiped out. 175 00:22:16,120 --> 00:22:21,910 Perhaps 90 percent in large parts of the Americas, mainly by disease, 176 00:22:21,910 --> 00:22:32,710 also by suppression, slavery, disenfranchisement of land and other kinds of conquest. 177 00:22:32,710 --> 00:22:43,260 But the point is, globalisation brings together this underlying promise of mutual benefit and especially of sharing. 178 00:22:43,260 --> 00:22:50,800 Know how? Because the great, great, great, great, great benefit of knowhow is that it is non rival. 179 00:22:50,800 --> 00:22:56,710 Once we know how to do something better, everyone can use it better in principle. 180 00:22:56,710 --> 00:23:03,400 And so sharing know how is such a fundamental benefit of globalisation. 181 00:23:03,400 --> 00:23:09,940 And I think in the end of the day, it has to be given first pride of place in the answer. 182 00:23:09,940 --> 00:23:24,300 But globalisation brings together. People, societies that have unequal military force, different pathogens, different cultures, misunderstandings. 183 00:23:24,300 --> 00:23:32,340 And we are pretty hard wired, I believe, to hate the other or to be at least primed. 184 00:23:32,340 --> 00:23:39,120 So that one can hate the others. So globalisation brings conflict and it has long brought conflict. 185 00:23:39,120 --> 00:23:50,790 In this sense, the general history has such a mess of bloody mindedness that what the ocean age that Smith is talking about, 186 00:23:50,790 --> 00:23:57,150 broad, amongst other things, was the mass transatlantic slave trade. 187 00:23:57,150 --> 00:24:05,040 It brought the middle passage of 14 million Africans to the slave plantations of Brazil, 188 00:24:05,040 --> 00:24:10,290 the Caribbean and the United States and other parts of the Americas. 189 00:24:10,290 --> 00:24:16,960 A horrendous, horrendous crime against humanity. But absolutely part of globalisation. 190 00:24:16,960 --> 00:24:22,530 And so how do you make the balance? It is like you said, it's the balance of human history. 191 00:24:22,530 --> 00:24:28,510 But what impresses me also is that it's really only. 192 00:24:28,510 --> 00:24:37,240 Since the 16th century that we now have the idea of the whole world in our heads. 193 00:24:37,240 --> 00:24:41,020 When I recently read Herodotus, 194 00:24:41,020 --> 00:24:52,150 I was reminded that the extent of the known world for the Greeks or of the world for the Greeks basically ended around the Indus River. 195 00:24:52,150 --> 00:24:59,950 There were some people living in India. There was no sense for Herodotus that there was China or East Asia at all. 196 00:24:59,950 --> 00:25:03,760 Not even a hint of it. Not even a tale or a story. 197 00:25:03,760 --> 00:25:09,490 It was just the notion of the world was so circumscribed still. 198 00:25:09,490 --> 00:25:21,700 But since the 15 hundreds, we've seen the whole world and since the end of the 18th century, really with Immanuel Kant, in my view, 199 00:25:21,700 --> 00:25:33,340 in his essay Seventeen Ninety Five on Perpetual Peace, we began to think about a world that could live together in peace as a concept. 200 00:25:33,340 --> 00:25:48,890 And maybe you could go back to Isaiah in the Bible where Isaiah says that that the sword shall be beaten into ploughshares and. 201 00:25:48,890 --> 00:25:55,400 Swords into ploughshares and. Oh, my God. 202 00:25:55,400 --> 00:26:00,380 What's the penalty after the other into pruning hooks? It'll come to me. 203 00:26:00,380 --> 00:26:06,760 And I say, I had the idea of a world at peace, but Emmanuel Conte really gave us the first modern conception. 204 00:26:06,760 --> 00:26:15,070 And when I was writing this, I had not been aware of the special role that Jeremy Bentham played in laying out systematically for 205 00:26:15,070 --> 00:26:21,370 the first time the ideas of international law that could underpin that peace a hundred years later, 206 00:26:21,370 --> 00:26:24,430 that gave birth to the League of Nations. 207 00:26:24,430 --> 00:26:36,310 That was a tragically stillborn institution because of the fairly regularly timed stupidity of my own country, the United States. 208 00:26:36,310 --> 00:26:44,320 After 1945, the US did much better under Franklin Roosevelt's vision and helped to give birth to the U.N. this year, 209 00:26:44,320 --> 00:26:50,860 where at the seventy fifth anniversary of the U.N. And my answer to your question, 210 00:26:50,860 --> 00:26:58,150 bottom line is globalisation can be win win if it is paired with institutions 211 00:26:58,150 --> 00:27:03,190 like the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 212 00:27:03,190 --> 00:27:09,490 Because then we tame the power structure and we get the best. 213 00:27:09,490 --> 00:27:20,440 But it is ironic also that globalisation has long brought global disease and were experiencing that again this year. 214 00:27:20,440 --> 00:27:27,960 Globalisation spread COBA 19 within days to the whole world. 215 00:27:27,960 --> 00:27:38,920 I. Most likely from western China, from Wolfsheim to Italy within a few hours, the Black Death. 216 00:27:38,920 --> 00:27:48,970 Another such famed and devastating example spread in 16 years from 13. 217 00:27:48,970 --> 00:27:57,730 Thirty one in western China. Best guess by the historian William McNeil to thirteen forty seven. 218 00:27:57,730 --> 00:28:04,600 Arriving in Italy. Then globalisation took 16 years for the passage. 219 00:28:04,600 --> 00:28:18,390 This globalisation took 16 hours. And so this is the flip side of intense interconnectedness at the speed of the digital age. 220 00:28:18,390 --> 00:28:29,320 You are finishing the book or you hold the book to finish it because of Koven 19, just as as I am with Rob Mugga did with Terra Incognita. 221 00:28:29,320 --> 00:28:34,210 But do you know when you look back at these big shocks that have happened? 222 00:28:34,210 --> 00:28:43,030 The financial crisis most recently, which was the super spreading of contagion, the Spanish flu and previous shocks. 223 00:28:43,030 --> 00:28:49,060 Do you think that that covered 19 is going to allow us to better manage globally? 224 00:28:49,060 --> 00:28:56,800 Does it teach us that we are interconnected and we need global governments, we need a w.h or that's effective? 225 00:28:56,800 --> 00:29:00,880 From your reading of the history, is the jury's still out on that. 226 00:29:00,880 --> 00:29:09,820 Or even worse. I hope it's not the case that actually it leads to more division, which which would be a pretty dismal thought. 227 00:29:09,820 --> 00:29:15,970 My philosophy about this is basically like the prisoner's dilemma. 228 00:29:15,970 --> 00:29:19,630 The prisoner's dilemma teaches us that there is an equilibrium, 229 00:29:19,630 --> 00:29:27,700 maybe even the Nash equilibrium of defection, defection, where you lose the gains of cooperation. 230 00:29:27,700 --> 00:29:31,150 But there's also the possibility of cooperation. 231 00:29:31,150 --> 00:29:39,320 And in fact, that cooperation can be sustained either through iterative play that, you know, this isn't the last time we're gonna do this. 232 00:29:39,320 --> 00:29:41,740 So we ought to cooperate with each other. 233 00:29:41,740 --> 00:29:53,770 Or maybe by our hard wired desire to cooperate that overcomes our selfish Nash equilibrium, a vision of trying to take advantage of the other. 234 00:29:53,770 --> 00:29:58,330 Whatever it is, people cooperate a lot and they cheat a lot. 235 00:29:58,330 --> 00:30:01,720 And we know that there are two different outcomes. 236 00:30:01,720 --> 00:30:14,050 And I think when you take the scale of a dyadic two person prisoner's dilemma and you see society as facing such dilemmas, 237 00:30:14,050 --> 00:30:18,490 prosocial or anti-social dilemmas all the time, 238 00:30:18,490 --> 00:30:26,170 the right point is to say, God, we could make a mess of things and that mess could be contagious, 239 00:30:26,170 --> 00:30:33,400 because if everybody's fighting everybody else, if it's if it's a war of all against all. 240 00:30:33,400 --> 00:30:43,390 Were we better fight two or the cooperative outcome where we learn some manners, some decency, abide by the law. 241 00:30:43,390 --> 00:30:53,530 If nothing else, because everyone else is. So we are acting as so-called conditional co-operators is also a possibility. 242 00:30:53,530 --> 00:31:02,440 And my view of history is more or less like that, that both kinds of outcomes are possible. 243 00:31:02,440 --> 00:31:06,430 We can be wise and cooperative and far sighted. 244 00:31:06,430 --> 00:31:11,890 We can be bloody minded. We can go through decades of peace. 245 00:31:11,890 --> 00:31:24,230 And then instead of learning the lessons of preserving the peace, such as in Europe, from the Napoleonic wars onward for at least decades, ie, 246 00:31:24,230 --> 00:31:30,750 ending up again in the disaster of World War One for no reason, basically, 247 00:31:30,750 --> 00:31:37,610 except the players played the noncooperative equilibrium rather than the cooperative equilibrium. 248 00:31:37,610 --> 00:31:42,310 There's no deep reason for World War One. 249 00:31:42,310 --> 00:31:48,480 There were no causal elements. I would argue, other than. 250 00:31:48,480 --> 00:31:53,340 Events. One event after another. That gives the tick tock history. 251 00:31:53,340 --> 00:31:59,130 But no deep explanation because that was a time of great progress, prosperity, technological advance. 252 00:31:59,130 --> 00:32:03,180 And we blew it. And that led to. Oh, my God. 253 00:32:03,180 --> 00:32:08,580 Disaster deaths. And the Second World War. And so on. 254 00:32:08,580 --> 00:32:16,390 So on the question, what will we learn? We can't view that. 255 00:32:16,390 --> 00:32:20,200 Well, if you're a if you are a better, you can view that as a spectator sport. 256 00:32:20,200 --> 00:32:27,220 You can bet long or short on humanity. And many people take that view if you're an activist like I am. 257 00:32:27,220 --> 00:32:32,890 You can't afford to sit back and say, oh, we're going to learn because we're stupid. 258 00:32:32,890 --> 00:32:43,540 So we may not learn at all. We may end up like we did after the Treaty of Society in 1919 and then squabbles so badly that for the 259 00:32:43,540 --> 00:32:52,140 next 20 years that we ended up in World War Two or we could end up as we did in nineteen forty five. 260 00:32:52,140 --> 00:32:59,470 Now, even then, that wasn't so great because we nearly blew ourselves up in thermonuclear war. 261 00:32:59,470 --> 00:33:06,850 By 1962. But. We need, therefore, a constructive approach to your question. 262 00:33:06,850 --> 00:33:13,000 We need to act to learn. We need to construct a peaceful approach. 263 00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:16,980 That's why I'm so much on edge right now. 264 00:33:16,980 --> 00:33:22,960 I'm hoping that we're going to turn out a power, the psychopathic president of the United States, 265 00:33:22,960 --> 00:33:30,520 because he doesn't understand anything about cooperation. His only mode of operation is the defect mode. 266 00:33:30,520 --> 00:33:34,660 So he understands defecting of cheating on the other. 267 00:33:34,660 --> 00:33:43,600 He doesn't have an idea that there is an alternative possibility because you need to be able to peer into the future somehow for an iterative, 268 00:33:43,600 --> 00:33:47,230 co-operative equilibrium in a prisoner's dilemma. 269 00:33:47,230 --> 00:33:53,620 He just doesn't get it. So I asked me that question next week after November three, 270 00:33:53,620 --> 00:34:04,570 and I'll give you a more refined answer on that about what's going to happen if for some horrible reason, 271 00:34:04,570 --> 00:34:09,880 Trump holds on to power, I'd be extremely worried if he's turned out of power. 272 00:34:09,880 --> 00:34:16,240 I'll be much more hopeful if he's turned out of power by a large margin. 273 00:34:16,240 --> 00:34:22,120 I will be profoundly relieved and feel a lot better about my country. 274 00:34:22,120 --> 00:34:28,500 I'm very worried right now. I think the whole world is the whole world. 275 00:34:28,500 --> 00:34:32,530 We're going to have the problem except a lot of malevolent forces. 276 00:34:32,530 --> 00:34:36,690 But is this something and this will be my last question. 277 00:34:36,690 --> 00:34:43,900 So I see that 24 in the box. Is there something about this digital age that can make us hopeful? 278 00:34:43,900 --> 00:34:49,810 Because unlike every pre previous age of globalisation, we really do understand a lot more now. 279 00:34:49,810 --> 00:34:53,830 We can see the world at the macroscopic to the microscopic level. 280 00:34:53,830 --> 00:35:01,810 We know that if we carry on our actions, we're going to be heading to a out of control climate change that Miami, 281 00:35:01,810 --> 00:35:08,980 L.A. will be underwater, amongst other places. Mumbai, Jakarta, London. 282 00:35:08,980 --> 00:35:12,420 Is there something about our knowledge and the fact that we are more connected, 283 00:35:12,420 --> 00:35:18,240 we see Black Lives Matter spreading to over 100 countries in a couple of days. 284 00:35:18,240 --> 00:35:25,650 We see they move to movement and we see greater thumb, but we see the ability of the combination of science and action to globalise. 285 00:35:25,650 --> 00:35:34,770 Of course, we also see fake use, an anti vaccination movements, but it feels to me that this power of understanding, 286 00:35:34,770 --> 00:35:41,070 combined with mobilisation is very different to anything that's ever happened in any prior age of globalisation, 287 00:35:41,070 --> 00:35:47,460 and also that the stakes are higher than they've ever been. We really can blow the world up now in ways that we couldn't before. 288 00:35:47,460 --> 00:35:55,230 And business as usual will blow it up. I think we're seeing not through climate change, escalating pandemics, et cetera. 289 00:35:55,230 --> 00:36:05,460 So does not mean is there a sense that that that this could be the final age of globalisation if we don't get this right? 290 00:36:05,460 --> 00:36:11,610 That's that there's a long, long trajectory that you outline is coming to some apex. 291 00:36:11,610 --> 00:36:18,210 And hopefully this has been a learning, not least in the last decades. 292 00:36:18,210 --> 00:36:28,530 One of my favourite quotations is of John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address when he said, for the world is very different now, 293 00:36:28,530 --> 00:36:37,410 mankind holds in his mortal hands the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. 294 00:36:37,410 --> 00:36:50,070 And he was speaking January 20th, 1961. But he was really expressing the existential reality of the modern age, which is that even as of 1960, 295 00:36:50,070 --> 00:37:03,150 one technology was so advanced that we could end poverty everywhere or because of thermonuclear weapons, we could end human life everywhere. 296 00:37:03,150 --> 00:37:17,730 And Kennedy was a rationalist. He was a very well-meaning and very eloquent and visionary leader. 297 00:37:17,730 --> 00:37:25,290 But his actions and blunders, combined with actions and blunders of his counterpart in the Soviet Union, 298 00:37:25,290 --> 00:37:36,030 Nikita Khrushchev, led to the closest scrape with the total nuclear annihilation that we ever have seen. 299 00:37:36,030 --> 00:37:41,100 On October 26, I think it is 1962. 300 00:37:41,100 --> 00:37:50,040 What happened, of course, is that from one misstep to the next, the U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, 301 00:37:50,040 --> 00:37:58,380 Khrushchev's harebrained idea to put the nuclear warheads into Cuba in 1962. 302 00:37:58,380 --> 00:38:04,860 These two superpowers approached a nuclear confrontation and then what they didn't know. 303 00:38:04,860 --> 00:38:12,270 And this is a story told in some really powerful recent historical writing. 304 00:38:12,270 --> 00:38:27,740 What they didn't know was a moment came when a nuclear armed submarine of the Soviet fleet just about launched a nuclear tipped warhead, 305 00:38:27,740 --> 00:38:34,290 a 15 kiloton nuclear tipped warhead that would almost surely have triggered thermonuclear war. 306 00:38:34,290 --> 00:38:41,130 And he was countermanded at the final moment by one superior officer on the submarine. 307 00:38:41,130 --> 00:38:47,970 It's a miracle we survived. And so we are in a trip wire age still. 308 00:38:47,970 --> 00:38:53,880 We have six thousand four hundred nuclear warheads in the United States and Donald Trump is president. 309 00:38:53,880 --> 00:39:00,450 It's unbelievable. And this is a that is an existential truth. 310 00:39:00,450 --> 00:39:06,000 Now, the fact of the matter is what you say is completely right. 311 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:11,790 We know so much more even than 50 years ago, 60 years ago. 312 00:39:11,790 --> 00:39:21,870 Every week when I get science and nature. My favourite arrival on Friday when the two magazines hard copy still arrive. 313 00:39:21,870 --> 00:39:29,610 And I can read maybe a quarter of it or a half of it and kind of understand so much of it. 314 00:39:29,610 --> 00:39:38,040 It's unbelievable the pace of knowledge that we have coming every week. 315 00:39:38,040 --> 00:39:42,600 Not every year. Every week. Huge breakthroughs. Renewable energy. 316 00:39:42,600 --> 00:39:47,490 Quantum computing. New ways to manage expert systems. 317 00:39:47,490 --> 00:39:56,520 Artificial intelligence, you name it. But then we have this dingbat as president who's not only an ignoramus, but psychologically balanced. 318 00:39:56,520 --> 00:40:00,750 And you're reminded, how can this go together? 319 00:40:00,750 --> 00:40:08,210 And so another favourite quotation of mine, which so profoundly expresses. 320 00:40:08,210 --> 00:40:16,490 Reality for me is what E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, my guru. 321 00:40:16,490 --> 00:40:24,390 Tremendous inspiration and friend of mine at Harvard, wrote in a preface to one of my books several years ago. 322 00:40:24,390 --> 00:40:32,420 He said that so we have entered the 21st century with our Stone Age. 323 00:40:32,420 --> 00:40:38,510 Emotions are mediƦval institutions and our godlike technologies. 324 00:40:38,510 --> 00:40:44,480 And so we have to remember that we're operating on three different timelines. 325 00:40:44,480 --> 00:40:50,930 One is our makeup as human beings, which drives us our prejudices, our biases, 326 00:40:50,930 --> 00:40:56,980 our decision making formed on the African savannah one hundred thousand years ago. 327 00:40:56,980 --> 00:41:07,390 Then we have our institutions in the United States, our Constitution was promulgated in 1787 in Philadelphia. 328 00:41:07,390 --> 00:41:16,180 It is tremendously out of date. You would never write it this way if you were preparing it in the year 2020. 329 00:41:16,180 --> 00:41:25,940 We have originalist Supreme Court appointees like the one that came in today who thinks you should read the original text at 330 00:41:25,940 --> 00:41:34,300 something like fundamentalists reading the Bible as if you're going to find the truth through a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. 331 00:41:34,300 --> 00:41:39,700 Well, they want to read 1787 document is a fundamentalist document. 332 00:41:39,700 --> 00:41:46,390 It's a nonsense. We're living in the 21st century and we better get with it in that way. 333 00:41:46,390 --> 00:41:57,680 And then we have technology that reached the Moore's Law, doubling speeds of of 18 to 24 months, basically since 1960 till today. 334 00:41:57,680 --> 00:42:07,780 So 30 plus doublings of our digital computational connective power every few hours. 335 00:42:07,780 --> 00:42:13,870 We're producing more data now than basically data that was produced in human history. 336 00:42:13,870 --> 00:42:20,920 Don't quote me, it's not exactly that way. But it's it's that kind of geometric pace. 337 00:42:20,920 --> 00:42:25,570 The amount of terabytes that we're producing is striking. 338 00:42:25,570 --> 00:42:36,910 Probably every few days now is more than all the data, say, up to the year 2016 or 2017 in in human history, all the information flows. 339 00:42:36,910 --> 00:42:43,480 So we don't have the institutions and our mindsets catching up with this. 340 00:42:43,480 --> 00:42:47,610 If we did, we'd say, my God, we've got it made. 341 00:42:47,610 --> 00:42:50,680 The computers will and the machines will do our work. 342 00:42:50,680 --> 00:42:59,680 We can sit and have coffee all day and, you know, have a great time and and the quality of lives. 343 00:42:59,680 --> 00:43:06,670 Time to think. Time to learn. Time to help each other while the machines do the grudge work grunt work. 344 00:43:06,670 --> 00:43:16,120 But whether we're smart enough not to turn this knowledge into cyber warfare, this is really the matter. 345 00:43:16,120 --> 00:43:24,670 I recently listened to some NATO generals talking about artificial intelligence as as the military option. 346 00:43:24,670 --> 00:43:36,790 And instead of talking about trying to find some kind of limit to an A.I. arms race with China, they said, we're going to beat China at this, OK? 347 00:43:36,790 --> 00:43:42,490 That is primitivism that could endanger all of us. 348 00:43:42,490 --> 00:43:50,800 There's so much to talk about. It was Jeff with you. And we haven't even got to developmental climate change as yet. 349 00:43:50,800 --> 00:43:54,590 But I certainly feel that we are in this Renaissance moment. 350 00:43:54,590 --> 00:44:01,360 And I argued an edge of discovery that we need to learn from that huge creativity. 351 00:44:01,360 --> 00:44:06,250 But that ended in disaster, not least the killing of Native Americans, but also, of course, 352 00:44:06,250 --> 00:44:13,660 some huge setbacks in Europe and the burning of books by someone or other who was the 15th century. 353 00:44:13,660 --> 00:44:15,610 Donald Trump. 354 00:44:15,610 --> 00:44:26,590 And by the way, and it's interesting, I've spent a week for random reasons, quite a bit of time with the decade of the 15 tens five hundred years ago, 355 00:44:26,590 --> 00:44:33,050 I was asked to give some five hundredth anniversary talk is a good example of Thomas Moore's utopia. 356 00:44:33,050 --> 00:44:39,520 Yeah, that 10 years was extraordinary because you had Erasmus, you had Thomas Moore, 357 00:44:39,520 --> 00:44:48,130 you had Machiavelli, you had and you had the first heliocentric manuscripts of couple Vernick. 358 00:44:48,130 --> 00:44:57,250 It ended, of course, with Luther and the ninety five theses and then the progression of Europe in two religious wars. 359 00:44:57,250 --> 00:45:06,160 Yeah. For the next 100 plus years. And so genius and breakthrough does not guarantee you that. 360 00:45:06,160 --> 00:45:09,780 That's what age of discoveries about. All right. 361 00:45:09,780 --> 00:45:16,720 We got 28 questions at ten minutes. So let's be fair to two people. 362 00:45:16,720 --> 00:45:20,200 Now people, you can vote for the questions and I'm going to have to group them. 363 00:45:20,200 --> 00:45:26,800 So I encourage you to try to vote so I can select the questions that are the most interest. 364 00:45:26,800 --> 00:45:36,180 The first question is every Crunch's country makes use of whatever natural resource it is endowed with, points of view of Brazil. 365 00:45:36,180 --> 00:45:39,910 And the president, the Amazon is Brazil's not yours. 366 00:45:39,910 --> 00:45:47,380 If other countries want to enjoy the benefits of rainforest, shouldn't they compensate Brazil for not cutting down its rainforests? 367 00:45:47,380 --> 00:45:52,750 Who should be by the costs of saving the Amazon at nine votes? 368 00:45:52,750 --> 00:45:56,490 Good. I think we need to. 369 00:45:56,490 --> 00:46:01,500 Pragmatic. Norway has been pragmatic, it's set up an Amazon fund. 370 00:46:01,500 --> 00:46:09,420 Germany contributed to it. And I would like other countries to contribute to it so that we actually do help 371 00:46:09,420 --> 00:46:16,560 to cope fund the stabilisation of a biome that is so critical for world survival. 372 00:46:16,560 --> 00:46:24,240 And is so much on the edge. By the way, global warming itself, even without deforestation, could destroy the Amazon. 373 00:46:24,240 --> 00:46:31,950 So I am in agreement that we need some sharing of funding and responsibility. 374 00:46:31,950 --> 00:46:36,750 But let's not destroy the Amazon. 375 00:46:36,750 --> 00:46:46,600 Prospects, we expect the U.N. to revise MDG targets and the deadlines as covered nineteens continue to be threatened in this country, 376 00:46:46,600 --> 00:46:50,640 the threat mostly goes up. How does covered 19 impacts on this? 377 00:46:50,640 --> 00:46:59,730 And what's the U.N. going to do about it? Well, first of all, with Koban 19, very briefly, you know, if we were smart, rational, 378 00:46:59,730 --> 00:47:07,200 led properly, we would have suppressed this pandemic already, even without the vaccine. 379 00:47:07,200 --> 00:47:19,980 And I just point you to the experiences of China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, amongst others. 380 00:47:19,980 --> 00:47:30,360 All of them use public health means contact tracing, ample testing, quarantine and isolation facemasks, 381 00:47:30,360 --> 00:47:41,940 the whole package to get this virus suppressed because of Trump also narrow and low others, other populist leaders. 382 00:47:41,940 --> 00:47:52,650 We failed to do that in other places. And our freedom loving societies in the US and Europe behaved badly in this many people. 383 00:47:52,650 --> 00:47:56,670 I don't want to wear face masks. That's a denial of my freedom and so forth. 384 00:47:56,670 --> 00:48:03,180 Without the sense of social responsibility. But we need to stop the pandemic. 385 00:48:03,180 --> 00:48:13,560 A vaccine would help. It may not be sufficient. Good behaviour, a proper etiquette, a proper social regard is absolutely essential. 386 00:48:13,560 --> 00:48:19,290 Honest government is essential. Technical advice is essential. 387 00:48:19,290 --> 00:48:30,660 OK, I'm going to stop. But that theme for the moment, because once we stop the pandemic, then we're going to see we've got the scarred world economy. 388 00:48:30,660 --> 00:48:37,950 What do we do then? We're going to have to have significant public investment led recovery. 389 00:48:37,950 --> 00:48:42,630 The good news. Europe has adopted a European green deal. 390 00:48:42,630 --> 00:48:51,060 China just announced net zero emissions by 2060 as the as the formative basic goal. 391 00:48:51,060 --> 00:48:58,140 Japan yesterday announced the reaching zero by 2050 if Joe Biden is elected president. 392 00:48:58,140 --> 00:49:05,490 He is committed to reaching zero by 2050. Now, if you put a public investment led programme around that. 393 00:49:05,490 --> 00:49:11,850 That's a lot of recovery. A rapid shift to renewable energy. 394 00:49:11,850 --> 00:49:19,710 It's lots of jobs. If we connected to another call of the secretary general of the U.N. in recent months, 395 00:49:19,710 --> 00:49:26,610 universal access to broadband, which is also technically easily within reach, 396 00:49:26,610 --> 00:49:36,840 then we can expand rapidly telemedicine, distance, education, E payments, e banking, e governance and other services. 397 00:49:36,840 --> 00:49:44,090 We actually could jump back and even leapfrog the earlier trajectory. 398 00:49:44,090 --> 00:49:50,150 Through deployment of digital and a green recovery strategy. 399 00:49:50,150 --> 00:49:56,150 So before we start shifting the timelines and the goalposts, 400 00:49:56,150 --> 00:50:03,500 I want us to have a very serious look at how we can accelerate by undertaking the kind 401 00:50:03,500 --> 00:50:10,310 of public investment led sustainable development that we should be undertaking now. 402 00:50:10,310 --> 00:50:17,630 November three will determine a lot about this. Again, if Biden is elected, the US will be all in on this. 403 00:50:17,630 --> 00:50:28,940 He's promised four trillion dollars of I'm sorry, two trillion dollars of spending over the first four years towards this green recovery. 404 00:50:28,940 --> 00:50:38,440 And then I think we'll be in a position, actually, to bring about a real acceleration to the FSD. 405 00:50:38,440 --> 00:50:42,930 Well, that leads to the next question, which I guess the answer is Will. 406 00:50:42,930 --> 00:50:48,530 I'll tell you next week is the is the USA a failed democracy? 407 00:50:48,530 --> 00:50:56,240 The U.S. is a deeply divided country that has these divisions with very deep roots. 408 00:50:56,240 --> 00:51:00,950 The U.S. is a colonial settlement enterprise. 409 00:51:00,950 --> 00:51:10,250 It arrived the Europeans and basically basically English settlers arrived to the 410 00:51:10,250 --> 00:51:17,210 eastern seaboard of North America and battled their way across North America, 411 00:51:17,210 --> 00:51:24,770 suppressing, killing Native Americans and enslaving millions of millions of African-Americans. 412 00:51:24,770 --> 00:51:29,990 We've never fully overcome this legacy by any means. 413 00:51:29,990 --> 00:51:37,460 Our apartheid state in the United States was in full swing between 1865. 414 00:51:37,460 --> 00:51:41,450 The end of the civil war to the nineteen sixty five. 415 00:51:41,450 --> 00:51:44,840 But I don't mean apartheid in a with quotation marks. 416 00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:49,760 I mean apartheid. And there's a wonderful book. 417 00:51:49,760 --> 00:51:55,940 I just wrote a Project Syndicate op ed citing it today. If you want to take a look called The Colour of Law, 418 00:51:55,940 --> 00:52:05,540 which shows how deeply racism was embodied in U.S. structures deeply embodied in U.S. structures for one hundred years. 419 00:52:05,540 --> 00:52:14,090 Now, Trump is, I hope, the last stage of this institutionalised deep racism in the United States. 420 00:52:14,090 --> 00:52:19,790 He represents he is a racist and he represents this part of America. 421 00:52:19,790 --> 00:52:27,110 He represents a white America that resists the broader social democratic tendencies. 422 00:52:27,110 --> 00:52:39,230 And the tensions in the US rose significantly because our demographics are changing too much more than people of colour. 423 00:52:39,230 --> 00:52:43,310 More Hispanics, much more Asian-Americans and so on. 424 00:52:43,310 --> 00:52:49,580 And this is what our culture wars are heavily about. Not only that, but to an important extent. 425 00:52:49,580 --> 00:53:01,490 So America's in the midst of culture wars. Our political institutions are also wounded because the constitutional design is really out of date. 426 00:53:01,490 --> 00:53:06,230 Do not have presidents in your country have parliaments, believe me. 427 00:53:06,230 --> 00:53:16,100 Much better idea. It wasn't so clear in seventeen eighty seven, but it's absolutely clear today you should not have people like King Donald, 428 00:53:16,100 --> 00:53:19,520 even with the possibility of having this kind of power. 429 00:53:19,520 --> 00:53:21,500 It's not a saviour to have democracy. 430 00:53:21,500 --> 00:53:30,440 We know the history of time, our Germany, but still it is more secure to have parliamentary than a presidential system. 431 00:53:30,440 --> 00:53:34,550 But we also became a plutocracy over the last 40 years. 432 00:53:34,550 --> 00:53:41,750 This election cycle will involve more than 10 billion dollars of outlays by the candidates. 433 00:53:41,750 --> 00:53:49,790 Think of all the corruption involved with that. It's massive. And so we've got a lot of cleaning up to do in the United States. 434 00:53:49,790 --> 00:53:57,350 I just want the United States to be a co-operative, peaceful country abiding by international law. 435 00:53:57,350 --> 00:54:00,950 I don't see it as the world's leader in any sense. Right now. 436 00:54:00,950 --> 00:54:07,040 We've got too much to heal domestically anyway. But we don't need a leader country. 437 00:54:07,040 --> 00:54:11,750 What we need is cooperation based on multilateral principles. 438 00:54:11,750 --> 00:54:20,900 Most fundamentally, based on the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our generation's instantiation of that, 439 00:54:20,900 --> 00:54:32,250 which is the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. I say we've got four minutes left, so very quickly, Jeff, 440 00:54:32,250 --> 00:54:43,200 what's got four votes from Dosch on at the University of Houston is how can countries aspire to grow into growing protectionist environments? 441 00:54:43,200 --> 00:54:46,920 Is that just gonna be a war of tariff barriers? And just very brief answer to that. 442 00:54:46,920 --> 00:54:49,550 And then we'll wrap up, I'm afraid. Yeah. 443 00:54:49,550 --> 00:55:01,410 When we had the last full out trade war, which started in the 1930s with the Smoot Holly tariff in the United States, a trade disintegrated. 444 00:55:01,410 --> 00:55:06,360 The Great Depression was exacerbated, and it took us after a war. 445 00:55:06,360 --> 00:55:12,810 It took us decades to come back to getting the gains of open trade. 446 00:55:12,810 --> 00:55:19,020 We should not go into a trade war. This is a case, again, of. 447 00:55:19,020 --> 00:55:35,070 Ignorant President I and a very unnerved the political establishment in the United States, just terrified of China, but phenomenally too much afraid. 448 00:55:35,070 --> 00:55:43,410 We should get Trump out of power and then go back to a WTO based international trading system. 449 00:55:43,410 --> 00:55:48,870 Of course, it needs some updating, but I think open trade is our best call. 450 00:55:48,870 --> 00:55:52,980 But it's got to be combined with redistribution of income both within countries and 451 00:55:52,980 --> 00:56:00,530 internationally to make sure that losers are absolutely compensated and help to become winners. 452 00:56:00,530 --> 00:56:02,040 Yeah, I absolutely agree. 453 00:56:02,040 --> 00:56:07,230 And and without actually, I think we need to be thinking about carbon adjustments as well, because what we don't want to be doing, 454 00:56:07,230 --> 00:56:12,600 which is what the UK is, is going to zero carbon domestically and becoming the biggest importer. 455 00:56:12,600 --> 00:56:16,530 In fact, our carbon content of our products and services has increased, 456 00:56:16,530 --> 00:56:21,800 although we're very proud of the fact that we're moving to fully renewable energy production. 457 00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:27,570 And what we also don't want is constraints going to zero internally and exporting their carbon with it. 458 00:56:27,570 --> 00:56:35,040 That's right, because I guess that's the other side of it, which many states in Western Canada, U.S. and Australia. 459 00:56:35,040 --> 00:56:40,260 Exactly. Yeah. Jeff, as always, it's been a huge pleasure. 460 00:56:40,260 --> 00:56:44,850 I know it has been for the many hundreds of people that have joined us from all around the world. 461 00:56:44,850 --> 00:56:51,760 I'm terribly sorry that we can't now go for a drink, can do it together and in Oxford, as we would normally do in New York. 462 00:56:51,760 --> 00:57:02,070 But a pleasure to see you. And really, I want to encourage people to look at and by Jex inspiring book, Ages of Globalisation. 463 00:57:02,070 --> 00:57:05,790 Having worked on globalisation for three decades, I've learnt a huge amount. 464 00:57:05,790 --> 00:57:13,680 And sure, all of you will to do tweet about this if you've found it interesting and you'll 465 00:57:13,680 --> 00:57:19,410 find the Oxford Martin School mind GIPS hashtags around and other social media. 466 00:57:19,410 --> 00:57:24,930 Oxford Martin School is devoted to interdisciplinary thinking on the big challenges of the future. 467 00:57:24,930 --> 00:57:30,150 This book exemplifies and Jeff's work what we all about. 468 00:57:30,150 --> 00:57:36,750 There's a lot of other events and I encourage you to look at the Oxford Martin School's events page. 469 00:57:36,750 --> 00:57:44,070 There's a whole series of events in the coming weeks, many of them focussed on cupboard's and its implications and what to do about it, 470 00:57:44,070 --> 00:57:49,800 including by people who are associated with the vaccine in in in Oxford. 471 00:57:49,800 --> 00:57:53,760 So to have a look at that. Thanks to all of you for joining. And thanks, Jeff. 472 00:57:53,760 --> 00:57:58,470 I know your schedule is packed. Thanks so much to you being part of it. 473 00:57:58,470 --> 00:58:02,540 Thank you. And thanks to everybody that was joining today. Take a. 474 00:58:02,540 --> 00:58:03,977 All best.