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Welcome, everybody, to Big Tent.

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Live Events, the live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the humanities cultural programme itself,

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one of the founding stones, The Future Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.

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My name is Philip Bulik and I'm director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Big Tent.

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Life Events brings together researchers and students from across different disciplines to explore important subjects and ask timely questions.

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We're bringing you this programme online. Whilst we're all apart and we hope that you're all safe and well during these difficult days,

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we do look forward to being able to greet you in person just as soon as.

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If you'd like to ask any questions during our event tonight, then please do pop them in the comments box on YouTube.

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We encourage you to do this as early as possible so that our speakers have time to answer as many as they can during the Q&A.

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Towards the end of the session. So now it's my great honour to introduce our two wonderful speakers.

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I am delighted to welcome Professor Nyeri Woods and Professor Peter Franck upon.

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Together, they're going to discuss the world after Cauvin as part of our theme this week, Humanities Policy.

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Larry Woods is the founding dean of the Bullivant Nick School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University.

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The research focuses on how to enhance the governance of organisations,

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the challenges of globalisation, global government and the role of international institutions.

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Peter Frank Japan is Professor of Global History.

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Stavros Niarchos, Foundation director of the Oxford Centre for Business Research and Senior Research Fellow, was to college.

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He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Central and Southern Asia on relations between Christianity and Islam.

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I'm looking forward enormously to what they will have to say this evening. So without any further ado, I'm going to hand over the proceedings to them.

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Peter and Ari, thank you and welcome. Fantastic.

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Thank you very much, Phillip. Thank everybody for tuning in.

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And above all, thank you to Nyeri. It's a pleasure to have a chance to talk.

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I'm sorry we're doing this over the aether rather than in person.

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But I guess the question to ask the dean is going to government in Oxford is about government responses to pandemic,

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about why some countries seem to have done better or worse than each other to help us understand what's whether whether,

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in fact, they're going to respond differently or better or worse when we start to rebuild once this wave passes.

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So I don't know whether you have any ideas about some of those big trends of how to score what's been happening and why.

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Well, certainly at this school, my colleagues Tom Hale and Anna Petherick have been running the Oxford Government Response Track.

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So they've been tracking the response of every government around the world, using hundreds of our alumni to to submit material.

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I think there's three surprises for me about which countries have done best.

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You know, the first is I was part of an international working group a couple of years ago looking at pandemic preparedness.

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And one of the Segway to that was a an index of pandemic preparedness where

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Britain and the United States scored themselves right at the top of the ranking.

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And so the first surprises, those are not the countries that have done best.

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It's not been the countries that thought that they were the most prepared.

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I think a second surprise for me is that the last couple of years have seen a debate about scientists.

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We need scientists, more scientists in government. And yet that's been far too crude a debate.

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It's not the governments that are stacked with scientists that have done best.

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It's the government stacked with the right experts.

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So it's not mod players and epidemiologists necessarily on their own that you need advising governments.

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It's a country like Greece which has done outstandingly well, is a real sign of, wow,

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that's the kind of country that's done well, why it had a really bad financial crisis in 2009.

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It's cut its health spending by 40 percent, its hospital budgets by the same.

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It's it knew it had no capacity. It knew it couldn't afford to try and build hospitals at the bottom of the cliff.

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It had to build fences at the top of the cliff.

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It was led by a pathologist, an expert on infectious diseases, not a bunch of fiendish modellers trying to work out what may or may not happen,

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but somebody who knew and knew how to implement the basics of public health.

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And it's a government that's pulled together partly because they've been humble about how big the challenge was.

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They started long before others. They pulled together. When you ask one of the Greek government, oh, but what are you doing on such and such?

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They don't say as too many in this. And then the American governments say, oh, that's not my job.

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That's those people over there is job.

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They say we and it's the government pulling as a whole together and creating really good partnerships with others.

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So for me, the surprises have been it's not the countries that are big and wealthy and and and well appointed necessarily.

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A couple of those have done well. It's not just about science.

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It's about which kind of expertise it's having had.

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A crisis helps. Greece had a crisis. Korea had a crisis.

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The South most southernmost state of Brazil was in a financial crisis.

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And these places have all done much better.

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So lots to learn from this crisis for us as a school of government about a humble kind of leadership which says,

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gee, we can't we can't deal with this on our own.

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We've got to act fast, preventively and act in partnership with many others if we're going to, you know, knock this one back.

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And those governments have been the most effective and they've been the most quick to return their populations to a semblance of normal life.

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Well, you say I mean, overlaying interpretation on top of data is always has its own problems.

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There is a correlation and causation are two different things.

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But I mean, is that are you also saying then that complex, wealthy,

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hubristic societies who think that they know what they're doing have come come

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unstuck because they thought they could confront and deal with things that in fact,

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it's turned out that they've not been very good at, whereas smaller,

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more move it more apparently fragile states with less resources have had to put their

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backs to the wall quicker and therefore have managed to make tough decisions more easily.

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I mean, is there is there something in that, do you think? I think there's something in that.

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I don't think it's quite obviously it's not quite that simple.

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And, you know, Germany's done pretty well and it's got lots of the attributes of your first category.

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What Germany did very well right at the beginning. You know, China released the genome sequence to the world on the 11th and 12th of January.

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And by the 16th of January,

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the German government had already engaged to universities and they had already come up with an with an effective test for the virus.

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You know, so. So and that's all about governments that that got effective partnerships with their universities,

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with their business sectors and with their local governments. And they can kind of orchestrate their system of government.

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But, you know, in your part of the world, Peter, tell us what it looks like.

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So, you know, Russia and Eurasia, what's been your what surprised you in the response to the crisis?

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I think it's been the guy I was gonna say game of two halves. It's proved to be the game of a three three halves.

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I know that doesn't add up. But, you know, in the first couple of months of this year,

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all of this discussion points around this space was about the pressures on China's leadership,

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around the desire for democratisation, about the failure of the Communist Party to deal with.

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Had openly, properly and reasonably.

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And that the decisions that cost time and cost lives, not just in China, but if I said this globally, around the world,

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that has given way to a very different narrative, which has been that, in fact, within China, it's, you know, it's Bantry.

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But but also to look at how we forget that the world isn't just about the US, China, and in our case, the UK.

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There are other parts of world who are looking that say, well, on balance, China did quite well in dealing with it.

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And in fact, looking at these democratic states that are very wealthy, they have close connexions with with the private sector.

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They've got all these brilliant academics all around the world. And in fact, they seem to have dropped the ball, too.

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And as you know better than anybody, those kind of discussions about about the problems of democracy have been ongoing for quite some time now.

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And one of the real concerns in the US and in Europe is the lack of of faith in democratic systems by young people.

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You know, in every single country in Europe right now, confidence in what democracy means.

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And it's you know, these things are slightly up in the clouds. Depends. You ask the question where, why and how?

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It looks like people who should do better at resolving these problems haven't done so well.

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And that has, I think, played into China's hands in its domestic narrative.

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But, you know, in other states that have done conspicuously well across the region, South Korea in particular, but Southeast Asia, too.

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I think that they learn lessons from the Sarles outbreak in 2002, 2003, where the idea there is that when there are problems,

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they don't just get solved by doctors in white gowns, in hospitals and research scientists.

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They get sold by a guy. They get solved by digital. They get sold by tools that can supplement and identify and isolate and track things down.

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And in that sense, I think there is a sort of wider feeling across Asia is a very misleading and difficult time that

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there's really nothing you can compare a turkey down one end with North Korea down the other.

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But I think there is a sort of there is an awareness that the West hasn't really come to the party very well.

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And we've complicated that, I think, by by Peter Embattlement, in the case of the states,

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for example, of talking about how vaccines should be available versus United States.

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And again, China is doing it differently. So things look different in the last couple of months where there's a sort of buoyancy.

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I mean, we'll see what happens with this latest wave in Beijing.

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But there's a kind of buoyancy about, well, maybe this there are wider narratives around who's going to be most effective.

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And those are very dangerous for us in in Europe, where we understand what the value of freedoms are.

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You know, we teach students about that for very good reason. We understand what equalities you know, we've got a real issue with that.

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But again, layering on top of all of this, things like Black Lives matters,

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the Bolton revelations last night in his book that many people listening will have seen today in the press.

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You know, those those suggest that there are lots of that we're doing more wrong than right.

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And we need to change that narrative quite quickly to remind what it is that we do.

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Well, because a headline headline, we look very incompetent, looked at from anywhere outside Europe right now.

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I guess I don't think. Well, I think you're saying that there's a narrative in China and across some of Eurasia that democracies are doing badly.

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And that narrative is obviously wrong. But, you know, there are some democracies that are doing extremely well.

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So I've mentioned Greece, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, you know, Rio Grande did or Seweryn in Brazil.

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You know, these as these are all democracies that have done extremely well, Germany.

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And I don't think we can let the poor leadership in other democracies shrug this off and say it's a problem of democracy.

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It most certainly isn't. It is a problem of leadership. And I think that's a really important point to make.

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And I guess in in in the parts of the world that you're so expert on.

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Peter, we can see the reversed, too, right?

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So so Russia is is is not a democracy. And yet it hasn't done brilliantly, has it?

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I mean, it's a it's got a country with fantastic science, with clear hierarchical leadership, with quite a lot of social control.

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And it's done badly. So why. Well, the impact that this is going to have in Russia is going to be profound.

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I mean, there are already warning signs in the press, which is, you know,

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not necessarily the safest place to add these kind of opinions that the middle classes in Russia are going to get wiped out.

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And already that was under pressure because of natural resources prices, because of heavy spending on the military.

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But Kovik presents a massive problem. And there's a real disparity in the data in terms of infection levels in Moscow

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that look like it's coming down and then spiralling in other parts of the country.

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One of the stories I think about pandemic has been the aggravation of inequalities,

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regional gender ratio, et cetera, et cetera, around in every country, because that's what disease does.

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You know, it hurts people who don't have access to primary health care.

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It hurts people who can't get medicated, hurts people who live far from city centres and hospitals.

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So I think that in the case of in the case of Russia was done badly is that the state hasn't known how to handle this and has taken the line that,

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well, democracy don't really work. So we're not going to do worse than the US or the U.K. It turns out you can do a lot worse than the UK and the US.

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So I think it's about, you know, in the world, in your school, you know, one of the key things is to desegregate.

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Playing the individual and overfocusing on one leader sits at the top.

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However graphic, how visible they might be and to constantly drill down into the data to show what actually is happening.

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You know, in my world, in history, it's the other way round. What matters is telling the story.

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That's what the whole point of narrative history is, is to focus on typically on men, typically on leaders, typically on military battles.

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And to ignore, like Hagel says, the page is a piece of the page that are blank in history books.

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So we overweight things in the wrong direction. I think here the difficulty with pandemic is to stay calm enough to be culturally looking at what is

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actually the reality on the ground and that those questions will become more and more important,

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hopefully, as the disease rushes through the system.

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Because, you know, the challenge is coming towards us that are not medical related, are enormous in terms of the economic challenges we have.

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And about, again, something which I'm very sad to hear your view on how resilient we are in global cooperation,

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because I think you take the view that we're doing quite well in managing to work and and travel together in the same direction,

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and that we should be pushing back against the idea that this is a me first world where all countries only act in their own national interests.

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Yeah, I guess. I'm perhaps not quite that Pollyanna ish on global cooperation, but in a world where where I think people are saying, look.

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Global cooperation has completely broken down. We now live in a world where China and the United States are at loggerheads.

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Trade between the two has broken down. The decoupling on technology.

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You know, there, there. Beth there.

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Had they quickly moved into a Cold War and it could even become a hot war in the East China Sea.

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So there's there's there's that narrative that says, therefore, there's no global cooperation under that,

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you know, because everybody else is going to have to choose between the United States and China.

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And I think it is quite important. International cooperation is never as perfect as people would like it.

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It's always the easy thing to flog. But there has been cooperation that has worked,

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even as the United States has said the World Health Organisation is China's pawn and has withdrawn their funding from it.

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The rest of us need to look at the fact that that extremely underfunded and overstretched organisation,

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you know, its entire funding is less than the funding that it takes to run one large American hospital.

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And that's the World Health Organisation. That's supposed to be our frontline on these pandemics.

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It nevertheless does work with all countries. It can't send an army in if they refuse to share information with it.

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But China did share the the virus sequence with it.

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It did share that with the rest of the world. It is convening everyday conversations amongst scientists,

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which are enabling a much more rapid sharing of scientific advances in understanding the virus.

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And that even even in the more even in other areas of cooperation, people are saying, well,

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China in the United States are never going to cooperate as they did in 2009 to kind of restart global growth.

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But actually, underneath all the loud shouting by President Trump and the equally loud shouting domestically by President Xi Jinping,

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look at what the Federal Reserve is doing in quietly expanding credit lines,

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improving the conditions of those credit lines to ensure that at least 14 emerging economies,

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whether this crisis without catalysing a financial crisis, there's a quiet level of cooperation.

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And it's probably better, frankly, that it stays under the radar because if it pops its head over the radar,

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the politicians will surely shoot it, shoot it down. But that cooperation, which is quite fragile.

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We are going to have to nurture. Those are the tiny embers of the camp fire that we're going to have to grow.

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Blow into life. If countries are going to grow out of this crisis instead of crashing out of this crisis, I mean,

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one of the things that the school does so well, diplomatic, is to is to bring together rising stars from all over the world.

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And, you know, again, the focus on the U.S., China and maybe other big actors, maybe like Russia and so on.

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But, you know, it's such a diverse group that you get you come through the doors to give them fora, to try to work together and learn from each other.

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How do you see global cooperation going forward for four states that may be all

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represented on the front pages where even the middle pages of policy documents,

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the press, et cetera, et cetera,

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where the role of of what's going to happen in sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa and the Middle East, Central Asia and so on,

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that there isn't a kind of forum where that where these states can necessarily work and collaborate together.

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So they get leant on very heavily by bigger beasts. Tell us a little bit about how you helped provide that kind of resilience.

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Government level, what you teach at the school? Well, I think the worst world for the foot for all countries other than China and the United States,

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the worst world is a world in which they have to choose exclusively to be in one or rather camp.

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And that there is a risk that the world will move towards that.

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And in that world, what becomes even more important is the relations amongst those other countries.

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And so I guess one of our one of the most important things I think we're doing at the

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school and at Oxford more broadly is bringing people together from different countries,

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80 different countries in the school so that the Brazilian can actually know their interlocutor not just in China,

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but in South Africa, in Nigeria, in Germany, in Britain, in Canada, in Australia.

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That that that those personal relationships both bring those other countries alive and also give them somebody they can simply pick up the phone to.

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And that's not just about cooperation, that it's also about learning quickly from other countries.

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I mean, what we've seen in Koven is countries herding their sort of copying each other like lemmings,

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but not necessarily in a learning way and not necessarily saying, gosh, what do we learn?

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You know, what do what should Britain have learnt from Vietnam? Right.

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Britain should have learnt from Vietnam that you test, test, test.

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And even if you've got great A.I. and digital means, you still need your contact traces to go and knock on people's doors.

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Why? Because only then do people take it seriously. And so it's it's learning to learn in an open spirited way.

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You know, there's one thing I always say.

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Everyone that walks through the door of the Plotnick school has one little conviction, which is that their country is different.

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Other countries should all learn from each other, but their country is unique and special.

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And I think one of our ambitions is to sort of break that down and help people learn.

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Faster. From other countries so that they're not always reinventing the wheel.

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But I slightly want to come back round to you, Peter, and say, you know,

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you gave us this account of Russia and this pretty bleak, you know, next few years for Russia.

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What is that going to do to Russia in global cooperation?

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Russia's just kind of elbowed its way back into international security dialogue through its actions in Syria and elsewhere.

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Are we going to see a quieter Russia that that that is more willing to play both with China and the United States and Europe?

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Or are we going to see a more isolationist nationalist Russia?

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Well, I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who will have to take a different view.

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But, you know, I think over the last couple of hundred years, one could make the case that Russia is quite good at playing a weak hand strongly.

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I think I got last 10 years.

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It's gone into reverse where the real challenge over Putin is because he's played the cards he has in Crimea, Ukraine, the Middle East and so on.

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He's not really got that many places to turn.

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And Russia is the Russian establishment is acutely aware that it's now over dependent on China as a trade partner.

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It's overdependent as a military market at the doors to the G7 and towards the west are close.

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You know how people like Lavrov are very urbane, articulate foreign minister who says, you know,

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we can't trust Europe because it change its mind every few minutes, which if nothing else, reveals the frustration.

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I think about how do you rebuild bridges and is there a possible way in which you can do that?

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Given the current context and I think that some of those bridges have been so badly burned, it's quite hard to see what happens next.

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On top of all of that, you have oil supply, which, you know, last month when the intimate part was was was negative.

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And, you know, there are budgetary problems and challenges, too. So I think there's a real question mark, I think,

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about how Russia can hang on to and in a changing world where China is going to either become more volatile or more powerful.

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I guess one or the other. And I know Russia's real aim, I guess, is to try to get like the French,

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like Vedrine, the former French foreign minister, said it is a multipolar world.

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So it's in Russia's interest how balance is to China as much as it is to the US, EU and so on.

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So some of it is how to play, how to play those cards. And they don't look like it doesn't look like a particularly easy hand to play.

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So some of it, I guess, is about how how to manage to trade off positions in one part of the world with another.

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And, you know, like I said, Russia's as God has, as has always been much weaker than we think that it is in terms of its

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political hierarchies as well as in what steps it can and should take right now.

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And I think we have a real problem in the UK, in Europe, in the West, to work out what is it that we're willing to do, how far are we willing to go?

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And, you know, given that there's a lot of disagreement about all of that, you know, the pipe,

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the pipe has been built through the Baltic right now where the US have sanctions, any corporation state that intervenes in it.

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But Russia supplies 40 percent of gas to Germany. And so these links are very, very deep.

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And it's quite hard to see how one can can suddenly fill those out.

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Yeah, I think there's a.

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There's a transition that might be helpful to integrating Russia and China and the United States and Europe into one cooperative stance,

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which is I think a decade ago, people were and Europe has led on this idea of values based cooperation because the alternative was, you know,

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there was no question that cooperation was going to take place because globalisation what it was at its height.

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So it was did you have your values or did you not? Now we're in a different world where the World Choices are either no cooperation or

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cooperation on the basis of quite stark mutual interests where values play a lesser role.

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And and in a way, you know, there's an opening there.

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There's an opportunity to say, OK, let's not be trying to press values down each other's throats.

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First and foremost, we're all countries are in a crisis and the people that are bearing the brunt of that are the poorest and most vulnerable.

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So our first objective has to be the minimum international cooperation to protect the most poor and vulnerable.

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And to me,

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that's going to be the economic cooperation which enables countries that are very heavily indebted at the moment and becoming very heavily indebted,

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which includes Britain, Russia, etc. You know, most of the developing world is going to be measures that protect those countries,

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not to repeat a really harsh and stringent set of austerity measures because those on top of covered are just going

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to crush and contract their economies in a brutal way that will have reverberations for the rest of the world.

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So for me, I guess there's a question about whether there's an opening for a very pragmatic, like not values led cooperation,

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which says, OK, we need a growth pact, not unlike the two thousand and nine April 2009 G20 growth pact.

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We need that. Now, we're all going to cooperate in ensuring there is enough credit in the system to permit countries to do that.

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And then that's going to be a rising tide that carries all or national boats.

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Well, you know, optimistic. Yeah.

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I mean, listen, I think I think that no one would engineer themselves to be in a crisis of the scale that we're on now.

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But I suppose if there's a very positive to take away from it is that there's nothing like having to deal with deal with problems.

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But that forces you into more realistic perspectives, including of what you've got wrong in the past.

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So, I mean, it's a bit like what people were talking about, about reforming Russia in the first decade of the 21st century.

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So 10, 15 years ago. And I can remember who it was.

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It was either Suchin or Lavrov who'd said, you know, when it's an excuse, my language, there's this thing when it's pissing gold.

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Why would you ever bother to put up an umbrella? And that's what oil prices were going.

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Globalisation was hyper and so on. And I think when you have to take a reset, which we're having to do all sorts of reasons,

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you can't be much more honest about the failures of government preparation for a pandemic,

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about inefficiencies within the civil service, about how do you listen to the wrong kinds of how do you draw the wrong kinds of conclusions?

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And I think that there is all over the world and that there's discussions taking place in the US very acutely around us.

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Why is the US got China so wrong for the last 30, 40 years?

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Why is there's been this mantra that if you keep on encouraging China to change, it will that it will change in the direction that you want it to.

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And I think those discussions you find in Beijing in a few ying are very prominent figure in Beijing, written in Chinese Newsweek yesterday saying,

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you know, if we all did globalise, this is going to come at a cost for everybody around the world, if not starting with with China.

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So I think there is a kind of reset button right now where where we've made a lot of assumptions about how the world works and how we travel,

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about how we communicate about growth, all these kinds of things, you know, like Donlan Balaji been talking about for a while.

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And this may be the moment where we have very fundamental questions about how do we do

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business domestically with other states that allow us to perhaps relate how we do things.

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And I think, you know, we've spoken about this before. You know, that there are what one can one can become extremely depressed and hit the alcohol.

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But there are ways in which this can be a moment of real rejuvenation, of trying to work out what you're willing to do.

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But the first thing is to sit with a pen and paper and work out what your boundaries are.

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What are you willing to do and are you actually able to follow through with it?

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And, you know, we see those questions all the time with things like supply chain being reassured and, you know, Apple, what?

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General Motors sold more cars in China than they do in the US.

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So it's not so simple to say, well, we will take a moral position or political position on on one part of the world's.

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But but sacrifice shareholder value. And we've got to work out what comes first, shareholders or citizens.

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And probably it's fair to say it's it's a very generalised statement.

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But shareholders are wall customers of Wall. Consumers want at the price of citizens and at the price of jobs.

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And some of what we're seeing outside the pandemic, we're suggesting all of that has gone too far anyway.

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So a reset may not be in the worst, you know, not just Russia, China, but in different states in the world.

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But I think that's going to. I agree. And I think that's going to take more confident, more effective government.

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It's so interesting to see the debate both in Britain and in the United States, where CEOs and business are saying, look, you're underwriting us now.

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You've earned the right to set new conditions on us and governments.

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A little bit timorous about doing that. It's really interesting to see governments now playing such a huge role underwriting the economy,

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but almost paralysed in their fear of how to take some bold measures to to grow after it.

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And I you know, we sit in Britain. I know historians hate us, kind of instrumental lighting, historical examples.

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But if you think about the atme government in forty five sitting with a debt,

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which was two hundred and fifty per cent of GDP, like just huge debt load,

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and yet realising that what the Times called for because it was, it wasn't,

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you know, let's borrow to buy lunch tomorrow, it's we're in an existential crisis.

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We've had a war and now we either have to grow out of this or we'll be in misery for decades.

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And so they launched this huge, audacious plan, audacious not because it's an announceable at a prime minister's television conference,

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but audacious in the kind of planning and delivery that they went into to to kind of roll out housing for the masses,

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education for the masses, healthcare for the masses.

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You know, right at a time when many of today's governments would say, oh, no, no, no, we can't go into debt to do that, we're far too indebted.

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We have to tighten our belts where it will be. We as government shouldn't do anything.

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We should outsource everything. We don't have capabilities to implement.

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I think we're going to have to relearned all that and that the governments that some of the governments

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doing best are the governments that actually have the best capability within the government,

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within the public sector itself. And we're going to need really talented people in the public sector.

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And that's a challenge in itself, right over encouraging talent and on.

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And in the countries that I'm interested in the work on.

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You know, if you want to get ahead, you work with the states directly or very closely in Russia, Turkey, the Middle East, China.

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There's no other way. Vietnam. That's just how it works. And it's almost the opposite where you work often in multinational organisations,

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where your job is to pay as little tax as possible, say 100 of the Fortune 500 companies pay zero actual zero corporation tax.

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And that distorts the plane to when when all the brains go into finding ways to create efficiencies that that can reward investors,

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shareholders, employees, but not necessarily be joined up. But I mean, on that, I'm very interested and I don't I have a very open mind about it.

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Is is it harder for democracies where you have electoral systems coming around again and again and compromise as part of your deal?

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Is it harder to set course to be?

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That is brave decisions than, let's say, a benign dictator in a mythical city state where human rights are all respected and everybody's friendly.

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I mean, it does does does that decision making, making good long term plans?

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Is that is that harder in Democratic states? That's a great question, because it can cut both ways.

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It's true that if you know you've got 10 years in power, you can take a more long term view.

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But it's also true that if you're really good at being a democracy and you know, you've got to stand for election every four years,

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that the kind of policy that you're going to make is going to be really rooted in what the people you're representing need.

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And that that does not mean government run by focus groups and government run by PR agencies,

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which is the worst kind of access that democracy has kind of complacently slid into.

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It means really utilising every muscle of democracy to use its participatory process to make much better policy.

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And that's what we're seeing some of the good democracies in the world do.

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Yeah. I mean, I think that's all that must all be right.

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You know, I think that despite the kind of you know, the flip side is that in democracies, because we open our wounds in public so often,

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it looks like we're doing a terrible job because we reveal transparency's and problems and so on.

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You know, it's one of the issues right now. You know, 40 percent of newsroom jobs in the U.S. have been lost this year.

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And and yet we see the big social media platforms becoming more, more, more powerful and resistant to regulation.

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And, you know, depending where you sit on the government spectrum, it's not that their job isn't to regulate themselves.

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It's for governments to do that in an effective way.

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And you can't blame the social media businesses if they don't get the right kind of controls put on top of that with the right kind of direction.

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And look, I think that's a that's a great last point, I suspect, before we move to questions from the audience.

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But but the fact that that governments and democracies have had to think about the challenge of communication.

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Right. For the last five hundred years, you know, during the time of pamphleteering, you know,

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when the printing press was invented, people would print scurrilous things on pamphlets that cause riots.

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And so they had to regulate that. If you were going to print a pamphlet, you had to take the address of the person whose pamphlet you were printing.

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Similarly with radio. Similarly with television, we forget that radio has been the cause of genocides and riots in countries.

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Think about the use of radio in Rwanda, which which generate and amplify the genocide.

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And similarly with television, we forget that when television was invented,

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the United States had the foresight and wisdom to bring in fair comment rules which were dismantled during the 1980s,

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I think with with terrible consequences for an informed public debate.

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So now, well, this isn't the first time we've had to deal with these issues and the issue of how you regulate

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social media to actually ensure that you have an informed democracy is one that we've been.

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All countries have been too slow to grapple with and to and to regulate.

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And yet we're listening to this questions. I mean, as a historian, what they know, you go back to 10000,

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10000 years and you can see priests or Chaiman who who say that commune with the divine to get themselves into positions of authority of power.

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So, I mean, it's as old as not just the written word, as the old as as uber behaviour.

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It's that tendency to want to create hierarchy and to be able to say that you can control the

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narrative even when possibly some of these chabon's and holy priests and different religions,

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maybe they were able to. You know, it's not for me to say, but the claim that you can't.

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I think it does make the point that the fake new spectrum is not a new one.

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But I do know whether Phillip is going to come back in and take charge off of some questions before we wrap up.

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Indeed I am, and to the miracle of technology, here I am.

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As happens with these, since you are answering the questions that have been coming in, in the life chats organically,

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I think you've covered a large number of the questions a couple of people have asked about the relationship between the epidemic and foreign policy

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and how we might think about environmentalism and also the Green Revolution and whether this is going to be a consequence and how we do that.

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And perhaps a related question, or maybe I'm forcing a relation here is what about social inequality and wealth inequality in society?

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Is there a correlation between societies that are highly divided and highly,

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highly variegated and those who are sort of where equality is is perhaps more obvious?

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But does it just two questions that I'm trying to synthesise that come from the audience.

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If you want to riff on those. Murray, thank you.

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On the Green Revolution and on social inequality, I mean,

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what they have in common is that people who have been working on these issues for a long time and and,

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you know, with urgency see the crisis as a possible moment to reset.

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And there are moments, certainly during this crisis where I feel that there's a very long queue of people outside

373
00:36:11,960 --> 00:36:16,310
my door with the plan that they've been working on for a better world over the last decade.

374
00:36:16,310 --> 00:36:26,780
And this is the moment to reset. And I, I, I say that as somebody that, of course, wants to see a cleaner, fairer world coming out of covered.

375
00:36:26,780 --> 00:36:32,960
But I think it's it's not obvious that we'll get a clean and clean and a fairer world everywhere.

376
00:36:32,960 --> 00:36:37,490
And it's going to take everybody playing their part to actually to actually get there.

377
00:36:37,490 --> 00:36:42,380
That might sound a bit trite, but but it but it really it really will.

378
00:36:42,380 --> 00:36:44,990
It's going to take partnerships with governments.

379
00:36:44,990 --> 00:36:53,780
It's going to take a lot of both citizen and business and NGO action to to ensure that governments that are pressed for time,

380
00:36:53,780 --> 00:37:01,220
pressed for money, pressed for bandwidth, actually think about how they can do cleaner and fairer.

381
00:37:01,220 --> 00:37:08,150
What I would invite all the academics on this call to be doing is, you know, don't sit around waiting to criticise.

382
00:37:08,150 --> 00:37:13,040
Get in there and think about what is it that's possible within those constraints.

383
00:37:13,040 --> 00:37:22,970
Now, you know, in the next six months when Britain is going to face huge unemployment, huge constraints, where is it that your research,

384
00:37:22,970 --> 00:37:33,740
your work, your thinking could help fashion ways within those constraints to make it to rebuild in a cleaner way?

385
00:37:33,740 --> 00:37:36,780
I can't I can't, you know, nothing I can say better than that.

386
00:37:36,780 --> 00:37:43,520
But, you know, clearly the impact of the last few months has had enormous implications for us all.

387
00:37:43,520 --> 00:37:49,860
A lot will depend on what sticks and what doesn't. But, you know, the working from home, the meetings that you can do virtually and so on.

388
00:37:49,860 --> 00:37:54,510
There's a lot of sort of predict productivity around what's going happen to offices and so on.

389
00:37:54,510 --> 00:37:59,290
But clearly, there's there are people who have struggled through the through this process.

390
00:37:59,290 --> 00:38:05,860
If you've been living alone, if you have a abusive relationship, if you have small children, if you can't afford to feed them.

391
00:38:05,860 --> 00:38:11,370
It's been it's been catastrophic. The inequalities and the problems that have mounted up.

392
00:38:11,370 --> 00:38:19,320
But, you know, for for the workplace, a lot will depend on whether we start to work more productively, but less and consume less.

393
00:38:19,320 --> 00:38:21,960
So, I mean, you know, all the studies that, again,

394
00:38:21,960 --> 00:38:26,730
no one knows better than me that if we produced the last few years say that if you work for us four days a week,

395
00:38:26,730 --> 00:38:31,620
if you have eight hours a day, that you produce more, in fact, that the most compelling study is four days a week,

396
00:38:31,620 --> 00:38:36,060
you're 40 percent more productive than if you work five days a week.

397
00:38:36,060 --> 00:38:39,510
When you magnify that through different workforces, when you have different locations,

398
00:38:39,510 --> 00:38:44,430
different people, the energy consumption alone starts to drop very dramatically.

399
00:38:44,430 --> 00:38:48,420
I mean, so far, we're predicting this year that there's going to be eight percent decline in greenhouse gases,

400
00:38:48,420 --> 00:38:53,310
which is about the annual output of what India produces. So, you know, a lot will depend.

401
00:38:53,310 --> 00:38:55,830
In fact, one of the things I've been looking at when Ari said,

402
00:38:55,830 --> 00:39:01,140
see how your own work goes is correlating the fact that because there isn't a rush hour at the moment anymore.

403
00:39:01,140 --> 00:39:04,870
Well, I mean, we're getting back to it, but people are waking up at different times of the day.

404
00:39:04,870 --> 00:39:08,390
There's some fantastic data from Singapore, from Germany,

405
00:39:08,390 --> 00:39:13,710
that the time at which people put their cattle zone is spread out over a much longer period of time,

406
00:39:13,710 --> 00:39:17,490
which means that you can prepare your energy users in a different way.

407
00:39:17,490 --> 00:39:23,310
You have a much higher capacity to reach renewables. You can spread the costs and you can impact less on demand.

408
00:39:23,310 --> 00:39:27,850
And so you can incentivise your population to start not at night, but at 950.

409
00:39:27,850 --> 00:39:30,270
And you can incentivise businesses to stagger their days.

410
00:39:30,270 --> 00:39:36,330
And if you can, through these magnified small interventions, you can produce very substantial outcomes.

411
00:39:36,330 --> 00:39:40,230
So, you know, I think there are all sorts of ways in which this is quite a good moment to be thinking.

412
00:39:40,230 --> 00:39:46,220
Like like Murray says, we're very blue sky. And to really work out what is it that you think could change?

413
00:39:46,220 --> 00:39:53,190
And how do you measure it? Because there's just one other thing I want to add, Philip, to the social inequality bit.

414
00:39:53,190 --> 00:40:01,830
I mean, the obvious thing to say is that the this crisis has shown a very harsh spotlight on the inequalities.

415
00:40:01,830 --> 00:40:06,810
So, you know, the UN did a report on children in Britain a couple of years ago that showed that

416
00:40:06,810 --> 00:40:14,160
exposed how terribly deprived the lives of so many children in this country are.

417
00:40:14,160 --> 00:40:21,870
And the last couple of days of debate about malnourishment and children and meals has has highlighted that one report

418
00:40:21,870 --> 00:40:28,950
in the United States refers to 15 million Americans live in accommodation to which the water has been cut off.

419
00:40:28,950 --> 00:40:36,300
This is before covered. You know, this is that means living in an apartment in which you cannot flush the toilet.

420
00:40:36,300 --> 00:40:39,770
Right. And you've got families living in accommodation like that.

421
00:40:39,770 --> 00:40:43,620
And again, their conditions have been highly have been spotlit.

422
00:40:43,620 --> 00:40:51,210
But what's also been spotlit in this crisis is that when governments put their minds to it in partnership with business,

423
00:40:51,210 --> 00:40:56,940
they can do something about that. Britain has put almost all of its homeless people into hotels.

424
00:40:56,940 --> 00:41:03,180
So has France. You know, we've seen in the matter of two days where the footballer, you know,

425
00:41:03,180 --> 00:41:09,750
a free school meals plan expanded, although, you know, there is underneath that the need for much,

426
00:41:09,750 --> 00:41:18,390
much more action through local government budgets to ensure that the most deprived kids in Britain are supported through this crisis.

427
00:41:18,390 --> 00:41:26,790
India has discovered that it can, if it sets its mind to it, you know, provide food for a very large number of people.

428
00:41:26,790 --> 00:41:31,410
So what's going to be interesting is what happens when all those taps get shut off?

429
00:41:31,410 --> 00:41:36,090
Do we simply close the hotels and put everybody homeless back on the streets?

430
00:41:36,090 --> 00:41:46,950
Do we just stop the feeding programmes that have come with Cauvin across all countries in the world and accept that children die of hunger every day?

431
00:41:46,950 --> 00:41:56,390
Yeah, there were there is a there is in that sense an urgency to this moment, which I didn't want to overlook in my comments.

432
00:41:56,390 --> 00:42:02,070
And actually, the last part of this discussion we've been hearing was about populations and people.

433
00:42:02,070 --> 00:42:09,160
And I'm really struck by the shift in the conversation from the governors and the institutions towards the populations in the people.

434
00:42:09,160 --> 00:42:13,470
This reminds me of one of the questions which came in, which was about mentality's or psyche.

435
00:42:13,470 --> 00:42:18,750
Have you noticed any patterns about how different cultural traditions, different styles,

436
00:42:18,750 --> 00:42:26,430
different ways of being have related to the governmental decisions of the large scale institutional decisions?

437
00:42:26,430 --> 00:42:30,000
It's always hard to speculate about national mentalities as a modern linguist.

438
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:33,990
I spent my whole time resisting some of those categories. But, Kate, can can you.

439
00:42:33,990 --> 00:42:38,040
Have you had time to reflect or has there been work done on the compact between the

440
00:42:38,040 --> 00:42:43,780
governors and the governors on how this has played out in the handling of the crisis?

441
00:42:43,780 --> 00:42:49,260
From that perspective, from my perspective, you know, what what pandemic has done acutely as it as all of us is,

442
00:42:49,260 --> 00:42:52,650
it's shut down different kinds of information, supplies.

443
00:42:52,650 --> 00:42:57,680
I mean, so you can still read things and people still talk, but you don't get a chance to listen in the same kind of way.

444
00:42:57,680 --> 00:42:59,700
You know, you don't have the ability to follow.

445
00:42:59,700 --> 00:43:04,680
So, you know, you can read what people say in the press and you can talk to people on all of these kinds of platforms.

446
00:43:04,680 --> 00:43:08,850
But I think it's it's hard to get a real sense of what really is going on.

447
00:43:08,850 --> 00:43:16,000
But I think that the basis of governance rather than the governance, you know, this is such a shock, was such a sharply changing world.

448
00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:22,260
And coping, in a way, has just brought into sharp relief all these big trends that were coming already in about homelessness,

449
00:43:22,260 --> 00:43:25,530
about inequality, about race and about black lives matters and so on.

450
00:43:25,530 --> 00:43:32,490
And it's provided a trigger to start to engage with some of those and in some cases in a very effective and profound way.

451
00:43:32,490 --> 00:43:38,370
So I think it's hard to speak to how that is going to change, how that is currently changing in real time.

452
00:43:38,370 --> 00:43:43,110
But, you know, as a as a scale of what century we're living in by the end of this decade,

453
00:43:43,110 --> 00:43:47,700
by the end of a century, they're going to be six hundred million more people in six African countries.

454
00:43:47,700 --> 00:43:55,680
And there are in China. Right. So that the population distribution, the demographics, the food requirements, the infrastructure needs,

455
00:43:55,680 --> 00:44:00,900
all the opportunities that people are going to need to have mobile phone reception, bank accounts, food, et cetera.

456
00:44:00,900 --> 00:44:06,300
But also the other challenge to get right that democracy's freedoms, respect and so on.

457
00:44:06,300 --> 00:44:11,700
But this is the world around us is changing very quickly. And as a boring historian, it always has been.

458
00:44:11,700 --> 00:44:19,030
It's just I think that the pandemic has focussed in all of our minds that we're in a kind of pause where, as it happens in the kind of global change,

459
00:44:19,030 --> 00:44:26,930
development is not a bad moment to be starting to think how to engage with peoples, with ideas, with challenges that perhaps we should have.

460
00:44:26,930 --> 00:44:27,940
I mean, the blood.

461
00:44:27,940 --> 00:44:36,070
And I'm in her 30s and the bluebonnets is unusual, essentially, but has a more of an opportunity than normal to be really thinking through.

462
00:44:36,070 --> 00:44:43,850
Yeah, I think some. I think narratives can be used to blind us to learning proper lessons from other countries.

463
00:44:43,850 --> 00:44:49,450
So the number of people that say to me, well, Vietnam's done so well because it's a really powerful government with a,

464
00:44:49,450 --> 00:44:58,300
you know, huge public sector and and North Asian people are just, you know, obedient.

465
00:44:58,300 --> 00:45:02,680
They'll say in this crass way. And I say, well, none of those apply to Greece.

466
00:45:02,680 --> 00:45:08,480
So why has Greece done so well? And then they'll have a different narrative.

467
00:45:08,480 --> 00:45:15,340
And I think. So I think it can sort of blind us from from from seeing that said, we.

468
00:45:15,340 --> 00:45:19,840
We know that human beings need stories to make sense of what others are doing around them.

469
00:45:19,840 --> 00:45:26,890
And there was a moment in Britain at the beginning of this crisis where the idea that we were all staying home to protect each other,

470
00:45:26,890 --> 00:45:29,710
to protect our neighbours, to protect the elderly,

471
00:45:29,710 --> 00:45:38,110
it was really astonishing how quickly that was accepted by most people without coercion, without law.

472
00:45:38,110 --> 00:45:43,450
It was the simple idea. Stay home because you're going to protect others by staying home.

473
00:45:43,450 --> 00:45:49,030
I think we do have to pause and reflect how quickly that was accepted by people

474
00:45:49,030 --> 00:45:53,570
and acted on by people with only a tiny minority not taking that seriously.

475
00:45:53,570 --> 00:46:00,580
Now, having got people to there, you then have to cure rate that trust in an extremely careful way.

476
00:46:00,580 --> 00:46:05,470
And sadly, I don't think that's happened in this country.

477
00:46:05,470 --> 00:46:09,970
Well, on on that note, perhaps a little melancholy, but also inspiring about the power of stories.

478
00:46:09,970 --> 00:46:17,080
I think we should wrap up our discussion with the best events ones left with far more questions than one could possibly have answered.

479
00:46:17,080 --> 00:46:23,530
But really, I should like to extend my thanks to our two excellent speakers to dance Peter for their wonderful,

480
00:46:23,530 --> 00:46:30,040
rich and thought provoking answers and conversation. We'll look forward to what Life After Covet might be.

481
00:46:30,040 --> 00:46:33,970
And I think we have some skills and some answers to to draw on that.

482
00:46:33,970 --> 00:46:40,960
So thank you both for your time and your expertise. Thank you to the audience for joining us this evening.

483
00:46:40,960 --> 00:46:45,760
Apologies if we didn't get round to your questions, but I hope we've left you with some food for thought.

484
00:46:45,760 --> 00:46:50,020
Please join us next week. On Thursday, the 25th of June at 5:00 p.m.,

485
00:46:50,020 --> 00:46:56,560
when we'll be collaborating with the English faculty here at Oxford to host the Life Professor of Poetry Lecture with Alice Oswald.

486
00:46:56,560 --> 00:46:59,800
Alice Oswald is the current professor of poetry in the faculty of English.

487
00:46:59,800 --> 00:47:06,070
And in this lecture titled Interview with Water, she'll be looking at the strange connexion between words and grief.

488
00:47:06,070 --> 00:47:40,068
So we hope that you might be ale to join us again. And then in the meantime, thank you for watching and goodbye.