Welcome, everybody, to Big Tent.
Live Events, the live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the humanities cultural programme itself,
one of the founding stones, The Future Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Philip Bulik and I'm director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Big Tent.
Life Events brings together researchers and students from across different disciplines to explore important subjects and ask timely questions.
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,
we do look forward to being able to greet you in person just as soon as.
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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.
Towards the end of the session. So now it's my great honour to introduce our two wonderful speakers.
I am delighted to welcome Professor Nyeri Woods and Professor Peter Franck upon.
Together, they're going to discuss the world after Cauvin as part of our theme this week, Humanities Policy.
Larry Woods is the founding dean of the Bullivant Nick School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University.
The research focuses on how to enhance the governance of organisations,
the challenges of globalisation, global government and the role of international institutions.
Peter Frank Japan is Professor of Global History.
Stavros Niarchos, Foundation director of the Oxford Centre for Business Research and Senior Research Fellow, was to college.
He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Central and Southern Asia on relations between Christianity and Islam.
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.
Peter and Ari, thank you and welcome. Fantastic.
Thank you very much, Phillip. Thank everybody for tuning in.
And above all, thank you to Nyeri. It's a pleasure to have a chance to talk.
I'm sorry we're doing this over the aether rather than in person.
But I guess the question to ask the dean is going to government in Oxford is about government responses to pandemic,
about why some countries seem to have done better or worse than each other to help us understand what's whether whether,
in fact, they're going to respond differently or better or worse when we start to rebuild once this wave passes.
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.
Well, certainly at this school, my colleagues Tom Hale and Anna Petherick have been running the Oxford Government Response Track.
So they've been tracking the response of every government around the world, using hundreds of our alumni to to submit material.
I think there's three surprises for me about which countries have done best.
You know, the first is I was part of an international working group a couple of years ago looking at pandemic preparedness.
And one of the Segway to that was a an index of pandemic preparedness where
Britain and the United States scored themselves right at the top of the ranking.
And so the first surprises, those are not the countries that have done best.
It's not been the countries that thought that they were the most prepared.
I think a second surprise for me is that the last couple of years have seen a debate about scientists.
We need scientists, more scientists in government. And yet that's been far too crude a debate.
It's not the governments that are stacked with scientists that have done best.
It's the government stacked with the right experts.
So it's not mod players and epidemiologists necessarily on their own that you need advising governments.
It's a country like Greece which has done outstandingly well, is a real sign of, wow,
that's the kind of country that's done well, why it had a really bad financial crisis in 2009.
It's cut its health spending by 40 percent, its hospital budgets by the same.
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.
It had to build fences at the top of the cliff.
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,
but somebody who knew and knew how to implement the basics of public health.
And it's a government that's pulled together partly because they've been humble about how big the challenge was.
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?
They don't say as too many in this. And then the American governments say, oh, that's not my job.
That's those people over there is job.
They say we and it's the government pulling as a whole together and creating really good partnerships with others.
So for me, the surprises have been it's not the countries that are big and wealthy and and and well appointed necessarily.
A couple of those have done well. It's not just about science.
It's about which kind of expertise it's having had.
A crisis helps. Greece had a crisis. Korea had a crisis.
The South most southernmost state of Brazil was in a financial crisis.
And these places have all done much better.
So lots to learn from this crisis for us as a school of government about a humble kind of leadership which says,
gee, we can't we can't deal with this on our own.
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.
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.
Well, you say I mean, overlaying interpretation on top of data is always has its own problems.
There is a correlation and causation are two different things.
But I mean, is that are you also saying then that complex, wealthy,
hubristic societies who think that they know what they're doing have come come
unstuck because they thought they could confront and deal with things that in fact,
it's turned out that they've not been very good at, whereas smaller,
more move it more apparently fragile states with less resources have had to put their
backs to the wall quicker and therefore have managed to make tough decisions more easily.
I mean, is there is there something in that, do you think? I think there's something in that.
I don't think it's quite obviously it's not quite that simple.
And, you know, Germany's done pretty well and it's got lots of the attributes of your first category.
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.
And by the 16th of January,
the German government had already engaged to universities and they had already come up with an with an effective test for the virus.
You know, so. So and that's all about governments that that got effective partnerships with their universities,
with their business sectors and with their local governments. And they can kind of orchestrate their system of government.
But, you know, in your part of the world, Peter, tell us what it looks like.
So, you know, Russia and Eurasia, what's been your what surprised you in the response to the crisis?
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.
I know that doesn't add up. But, you know, in the first couple of months of this year,
all of this discussion points around this space was about the pressures on China's leadership,
around the desire for democratisation, about the failure of the Communist Party to deal with.
Had openly, properly and reasonably.
And that the decisions that cost time and cost lives, not just in China, but if I said this globally, around the world,
that has given way to a very different narrative, which has been that, in fact, within China, it's, you know, it's Bantry.
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.
There are other parts of world who are looking that say, well, on balance, China did quite well in dealing with it.
And in fact, looking at these democratic states that are very wealthy, they have close connexions with with the private sector.
They've got all these brilliant academics all around the world. And in fact, they seem to have dropped the ball, too.
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.
And one of the real concerns in the US and in Europe is the lack of of faith in democratic systems by young people.
You know, in every single country in Europe right now, confidence in what democracy means.
And it's you know, these things are slightly up in the clouds. Depends. You ask the question where, why and how?
It looks like people who should do better at resolving these problems haven't done so well.
And that has, I think, played into China's hands in its domestic narrative.
But, you know, in other states that have done conspicuously well across the region, South Korea in particular, but Southeast Asia, too.
I think that they learn lessons from the Sarles outbreak in 2002, 2003, where the idea there is that when there are problems,
they don't just get solved by doctors in white gowns, in hospitals and research scientists.
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.
And in that sense, I think there is a sort of wider feeling across Asia is a very misleading and difficult time that
there's really nothing you can compare a turkey down one end with North Korea down the other.
But I think there is a sort of there is an awareness that the West hasn't really come to the party very well.
And we've complicated that, I think, by by Peter Embattlement, in the case of the states,
for example, of talking about how vaccines should be available versus United States.
And again, China is doing it differently. So things look different in the last couple of months where there's a sort of buoyancy.
I mean, we'll see what happens with this latest wave in Beijing.
But there's a kind of buoyancy about, well, maybe this there are wider narratives around who's going to be most effective.
And those are very dangerous for us in in Europe, where we understand what the value of freedoms are.
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.
But again, layering on top of all of this, things like Black Lives matters,
the Bolton revelations last night in his book that many people listening will have seen today in the press.
You know, those those suggest that there are lots of that we're doing more wrong than right.
And we need to change that narrative quite quickly to remind what it is that we do.
Well, because a headline headline, we look very incompetent, looked at from anywhere outside Europe right now.
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.
And that narrative is obviously wrong. But, you know, there are some democracies that are doing extremely well.
So I've mentioned Greece, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, you know, Rio Grande did or Seweryn in Brazil.
You know, these as these are all democracies that have done extremely well, Germany.
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.
It most certainly isn't. It is a problem of leadership. And I think that's a really important point to make.
And I guess in in in the parts of the world that you're so expert on.
Peter, we can see the reversed, too, right?
So so Russia is is is not a democracy. And yet it hasn't done brilliantly, has it?
I mean, it's a it's got a country with fantastic science, with clear hierarchical leadership, with quite a lot of social control.
And it's done badly. So why. Well, the impact that this is going to have in Russia is going to be profound.
I mean, there are already warning signs in the press, which is, you know,
not necessarily the safest place to add these kind of opinions that the middle classes in Russia are going to get wiped out.
And already that was under pressure because of natural resources prices, because of heavy spending on the military.
But Kovik presents a massive problem. And there's a real disparity in the data in terms of infection levels in Moscow
that look like it's coming down and then spiralling in other parts of the country.
One of the stories I think about pandemic has been the aggravation of inequalities,
regional gender ratio, et cetera, et cetera, around in every country, because that's what disease does.
You know, it hurts people who don't have access to primary health care.
It hurts people who can't get medicated, hurts people who live far from city centres and hospitals.
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,
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.
So I think it's about, you know, in the world, in your school, you know, one of the key things is to desegregate.
Playing the individual and overfocusing on one leader sits at the top.
However graphic, how visible they might be and to constantly drill down into the data to show what actually is happening.
You know, in my world, in history, it's the other way round. What matters is telling the story.
That's what the whole point of narrative history is, is to focus on typically on men, typically on leaders, typically on military battles.
And to ignore, like Hagel says, the page is a piece of the page that are blank in history books.
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
actually the reality on the ground and that those questions will become more and more important,
hopefully, as the disease rushes through the system.
Because, you know, the challenge is coming towards us that are not medical related, are enormous in terms of the economic challenges we have.
And about, again, something which I'm very sad to hear your view on how resilient we are in global cooperation,
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,
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.
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.
Global cooperation has completely broken down. We now live in a world where China and the United States are at loggerheads.
Trade between the two has broken down. The decoupling on technology.
You know, there, there. Beth there.
Had they quickly moved into a Cold War and it could even become a hot war in the East China Sea.
So there's there's there's that narrative that says, therefore, there's no global cooperation under that,
you know, because everybody else is going to have to choose between the United States and China.
And I think it is quite important. International cooperation is never as perfect as people would like it.
It's always the easy thing to flog. But there has been cooperation that has worked,
even as the United States has said the World Health Organisation is China's pawn and has withdrawn their funding from it.
The rest of us need to look at the fact that that extremely underfunded and overstretched organisation,
you know, its entire funding is less than the funding that it takes to run one large American hospital.
And that's the World Health Organisation. That's supposed to be our frontline on these pandemics.
It nevertheless does work with all countries. It can't send an army in if they refuse to share information with it.
But China did share the the virus sequence with it.
It did share that with the rest of the world. It is convening everyday conversations amongst scientists,
which are enabling a much more rapid sharing of scientific advances in understanding the virus.
And that even even in the more even in other areas of cooperation, people are saying, well,
China in the United States are never going to cooperate as they did in 2009 to kind of restart global growth.
But actually, underneath all the loud shouting by President Trump and the equally loud shouting domestically by President Xi Jinping,
look at what the Federal Reserve is doing in quietly expanding credit lines,
improving the conditions of those credit lines to ensure that at least 14 emerging economies,
whether this crisis without catalysing a financial crisis, there's a quiet level of cooperation.
And it's probably better, frankly, that it stays under the radar because if it pops its head over the radar,
the politicians will surely shoot it, shoot it down. But that cooperation, which is quite fragile.
We are going to have to nurture. Those are the tiny embers of the camp fire that we're going to have to grow.
Blow into life. If countries are going to grow out of this crisis instead of crashing out of this crisis, I mean,
one of the things that the school does so well, diplomatic, is to is to bring together rising stars from all over the world.
And, you know, again, the focus on the U.S., China and maybe other big actors, maybe like Russia and so on.
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.
How do you see global cooperation going forward for four states that may be all
represented on the front pages where even the middle pages of policy documents,
the press, et cetera, et cetera,
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,
that there isn't a kind of forum where that where these states can necessarily work and collaborate together.
So they get leant on very heavily by bigger beasts. Tell us a little bit about how you helped provide that kind of resilience.
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,
the worst world is a world in which they have to choose exclusively to be in one or rather camp.
And that there is a risk that the world will move towards that.
And in that world, what becomes even more important is the relations amongst those other countries.
And so I guess one of our one of the most important things I think we're doing at the
school and at Oxford more broadly is bringing people together from different countries,
80 different countries in the school so that the Brazilian can actually know their interlocutor not just in China,
but in South Africa, in Nigeria, in Germany, in Britain, in Canada, in Australia.
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.
And that's not just about cooperation, that it's also about learning quickly from other countries.
I mean, what we've seen in Koven is countries herding their sort of copying each other like lemmings,
but not necessarily in a learning way and not necessarily saying, gosh, what do we learn?
You know, what do what should Britain have learnt from Vietnam? Right.
Britain should have learnt from Vietnam that you test, test, test.
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.
Why? Because only then do people take it seriously. And so it's it's learning to learn in an open spirited way.
You know, there's one thing I always say.
Everyone that walks through the door of the Plotnick school has one little conviction, which is that their country is different.
Other countries should all learn from each other, but their country is unique and special.
And I think one of our ambitions is to sort of break that down and help people learn.
Faster. From other countries so that they're not always reinventing the wheel.
But I slightly want to come back round to you, Peter, and say, you know,
you gave us this account of Russia and this pretty bleak, you know, next few years for Russia.
What is that going to do to Russia in global cooperation?
Russia's just kind of elbowed its way back into international security dialogue through its actions in Syria and elsewhere.
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?
Or are we going to see a more isolationist nationalist Russia?
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who will have to take a different view.
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.
I think I got last 10 years.
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.
He's not really got that many places to turn.
And Russia is the Russian establishment is acutely aware that it's now over dependent on China as a trade partner.
It's overdependent as a military market at the doors to the G7 and towards the west are close.
You know how people like Lavrov are very urbane, articulate foreign minister who says, you know,
we can't trust Europe because it change its mind every few minutes, which if nothing else, reveals the frustration.
I think about how do you rebuild bridges and is there a possible way in which you can do that?
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.
On top of all of that, you have oil supply, which, you know, last month when the intimate part was was was negative.
And, you know, there are budgetary problems and challenges, too. So I think there's a real question mark, I think,
about how Russia can hang on to and in a changing world where China is going to either become more volatile or more powerful.
I guess one or the other. And I know Russia's real aim, I guess, is to try to get like the French,
like Vedrine, the former French foreign minister, said it is a multipolar world.
So it's in Russia's interest how balance is to China as much as it is to the US, EU and so on.
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.
So some of it, I guess, is about how how to manage to trade off positions in one part of the world with another.
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
political hierarchies as well as in what steps it can and should take right now.
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?
And, you know, given that there's a lot of disagreement about all of that, you know, the pipe,
the pipe has been built through the Baltic right now where the US have sanctions, any corporation state that intervenes in it.
But Russia supplies 40 percent of gas to Germany. And so these links are very, very deep.
And it's quite hard to see how one can can suddenly fill those out.
Yeah, I think there's a.
There's a transition that might be helpful to integrating Russia and China and the United States and Europe into one cooperative stance,
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,
there was no question that cooperation was going to take place because globalisation what it was at its height.
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
cooperation on the basis of quite stark mutual interests where values play a lesser role.
And and in a way, you know, there's an opening there.
There's an opportunity to say, OK, let's not be trying to press values down each other's throats.
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.
So our first objective has to be the minimum international cooperation to protect the most poor and vulnerable.
And to me,
that's going to be the economic cooperation which enables countries that are very heavily indebted at the moment and becoming very heavily indebted,
which includes Britain, Russia, etc. You know, most of the developing world is going to be measures that protect those countries,
not to repeat a really harsh and stringent set of austerity measures because those on top of covered are just going
to crush and contract their economies in a brutal way that will have reverberations for the rest of the world.
So for me, I guess there's a question about whether there's an opening for a very pragmatic, like not values led cooperation,
which says, OK, we need a growth pact, not unlike the two thousand and nine April 2009 G20 growth pact.
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.
And then that's going to be a rising tide that carries all or national boats.
Well, you know, optimistic. Yeah.
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.
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.
But that forces you into more realistic perspectives, including of what you've got wrong in the past.
So, I mean, it's a bit like what people were talking about, about reforming Russia in the first decade of the 21st century.
So 10, 15 years ago. And I can remember who it was.
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.
Why would you ever bother to put up an umbrella? And that's what oil prices were going.
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,
you can't be much more honest about the failures of government preparation for a pandemic,
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?
And I think that there is all over the world and that there's discussions taking place in the US very acutely around us.
Why is the US got China so wrong for the last 30, 40 years?
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.
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,
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.
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,
about how we communicate about growth, all these kinds of things, you know, like Donlan Balaji been talking about for a while.
And this may be the moment where we have very fundamental questions about how do we do
business domestically with other states that allow us to perhaps relate how we do things.
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.
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.
But the first thing is to sit with a pen and paper and work out what your boundaries are.
What are you willing to do and are you actually able to follow through with it?
And, you know, we see those questions all the time with things like supply chain being reassured and, you know, Apple, what?
General Motors sold more cars in China than they do in the US.
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.
But but sacrifice shareholder value. And we've got to work out what comes first, shareholders or citizens.
And probably it's fair to say it's it's a very generalised statement.
But shareholders are wall customers of Wall. Consumers want at the price of citizens and at the price of jobs.
And some of what we're seeing outside the pandemic, we're suggesting all of that has gone too far anyway.
So a reset may not be in the worst, you know, not just Russia, China, but in different states in the world.
But I think that's going to. I agree. And I think that's going to take more confident, more effective government.
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.
You've earned the right to set new conditions on us and governments.
A little bit timorous about doing that. It's really interesting to see governments now playing such a huge role underwriting the economy,
but almost paralysed in their fear of how to take some bold measures to to grow after it.
And I you know, we sit in Britain. I know historians hate us, kind of instrumental lighting, historical examples.
But if you think about the atme government in forty five sitting with a debt,
which was two hundred and fifty per cent of GDP, like just huge debt load,
and yet realising that what the Times called for because it was, it wasn't,
you know, let's borrow to buy lunch tomorrow, it's we're in an existential crisis.
We've had a war and now we either have to grow out of this or we'll be in misery for decades.
And so they launched this huge, audacious plan, audacious not because it's an announceable at a prime minister's television conference,
but audacious in the kind of planning and delivery that they went into to to kind of roll out housing for the masses,
education for the masses, healthcare for the masses.
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.
We have to tighten our belts where it will be. We as government shouldn't do anything.
We should outsource everything. We don't have capabilities to implement.
I think we're going to have to relearned all that and that the governments that some of the governments
doing best are the governments that actually have the best capability within the government,
within the public sector itself. And we're going to need really talented people in the public sector.
And that's a challenge in itself, right over encouraging talent and on.
And in the countries that I'm interested in the work on.
You know, if you want to get ahead, you work with the states directly or very closely in Russia, Turkey, the Middle East, China.
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,
where your job is to pay as little tax as possible, say 100 of the Fortune 500 companies pay zero actual zero corporation tax.
And that distorts the plane to when when all the brains go into finding ways to create efficiencies that that can reward investors,
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.
Is is it harder for democracies where you have electoral systems coming around again and again and compromise as part of your deal?
Is it harder to set course to be?
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.
I mean, it does does does that decision making, making good long term plans?
Is that is that harder in Democratic states? That's a great question, because it can cut both ways.
It's true that if you know you've got 10 years in power, you can take a more long term view.
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,
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.
And that that does not mean government run by focus groups and government run by PR agencies,
which is the worst kind of access that democracy has kind of complacently slid into.
It means really utilising every muscle of democracy to use its participatory process to make much better policy.
And that's what we're seeing some of the good democracies in the world do.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's all that must all be right.
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,
it looks like we're doing a terrible job because we reveal transparency's and problems and so on.
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.
And and yet we see the big social media platforms becoming more, more, more powerful and resistant to regulation.
And, you know, depending where you sit on the government spectrum, it's not that their job isn't to regulate themselves.
It's for governments to do that in an effective way.
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.
And look, I think that's a that's a great last point, I suspect, before we move to questions from the audience.
But but the fact that that governments and democracies have had to think about the challenge of communication.
Right. For the last five hundred years, you know, during the time of pamphleteering, you know,
when the printing press was invented, people would print scurrilous things on pamphlets that cause riots.
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.
Similarly with radio. Similarly with television, we forget that radio has been the cause of genocides and riots in countries.
Think about the use of radio in Rwanda, which which generate and amplify the genocide.
And similarly with television, we forget that when television was invented,
the United States had the foresight and wisdom to bring in fair comment rules which were dismantled during the 1980s,
I think with with terrible consequences for an informed public debate.
So now, well, this isn't the first time we've had to deal with these issues and the issue of how you regulate
social media to actually ensure that you have an informed democracy is one that we've been.
All countries have been too slow to grapple with and to and to regulate.
And yet we're listening to this questions. I mean, as a historian, what they know, you go back to 10000,
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.
So, I mean, it's as old as not just the written word, as the old as as uber behaviour.
It's that tendency to want to create hierarchy and to be able to say that you can control the
narrative even when possibly some of these chabon's and holy priests and different religions,
maybe they were able to. You know, it's not for me to say, but the claim that you can't.
I think it does make the point that the fake new spectrum is not a new one.
But I do know whether Phillip is going to come back in and take charge off of some questions before we wrap up.
Indeed I am, and to the miracle of technology, here I am.
As happens with these, since you are answering the questions that have been coming in, in the life chats organically,
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
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.
And perhaps a related question, or maybe I'm forcing a relation here is what about social inequality and wealth inequality in society?
Is there a correlation between societies that are highly divided and highly,
highly variegated and those who are sort of where equality is is perhaps more obvious?
But does it just two questions that I'm trying to synthesise that come from the audience.
If you want to riff on those. Murray, thank you.
On the Green Revolution and on social inequality, I mean,
what they have in common is that people who have been working on these issues for a long time and and,
you know, with urgency see the crisis as a possible moment to reset.
And there are moments, certainly during this crisis where I feel that there's a very long queue of people outside
my door with the plan that they've been working on for a better world over the last decade.
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.
But I think it's it's not obvious that we'll get a clean and clean and a fairer world everywhere.
And it's going to take everybody playing their part to actually to actually get there.
That might sound a bit trite, but but it but it really it really will.
It's going to take partnerships with governments.
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,
pressed for money, pressed for bandwidth, actually think about how they can do cleaner and fairer.
What I would invite all the academics on this call to be doing is, you know, don't sit around waiting to criticise.
Get in there and think about what is it that's possible within those constraints.
Now, you know, in the next six months when Britain is going to face huge unemployment, huge constraints, where is it that your research,
your work, your thinking could help fashion ways within those constraints to make it to rebuild in a cleaner way?
I can't I can't, you know, nothing I can say better than that.
But, you know, clearly the impact of the last few months has had enormous implications for us all.
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.
There's a lot of sort of predict productivity around what's going happen to offices and so on.
But clearly, there's there are people who have struggled through the through this process.
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.
It's been it's been catastrophic. The inequalities and the problems that have mounted up.
But, you know, for for the workplace, a lot will depend on whether we start to work more productively, but less and consume less.
So, I mean, you know, all the studies that, again,
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,
if you have eight hours a day, that you produce more, in fact, that the most compelling study is four days a week,
you're 40 percent more productive than if you work five days a week.
When you magnify that through different workforces, when you have different locations,
different people, the energy consumption alone starts to drop very dramatically.
I mean, so far, we're predicting this year that there's going to be eight percent decline in greenhouse gases,
which is about the annual output of what India produces. So, you know, a lot will depend.
In fact, one of the things I've been looking at when Ari said,
see how your own work goes is correlating the fact that because there isn't a rush hour at the moment anymore.
Well, I mean, we're getting back to it, but people are waking up at different times of the day.
There's some fantastic data from Singapore, from Germany,
that the time at which people put their cattle zone is spread out over a much longer period of time,
which means that you can prepare your energy users in a different way.
You have a much higher capacity to reach renewables. You can spread the costs and you can impact less on demand.
And so you can incentivise your population to start not at night, but at 950.
And you can incentivise businesses to stagger their days.
And if you can, through these magnified small interventions, you can produce very substantial outcomes.
So, you know, I think there are all sorts of ways in which this is quite a good moment to be thinking.
Like like Murray says, we're very blue sky. And to really work out what is it that you think could change?
And how do you measure it? Because there's just one other thing I want to add, Philip, to the social inequality bit.
I mean, the obvious thing to say is that the this crisis has shown a very harsh spotlight on the inequalities.
So, you know, the UN did a report on children in Britain a couple of years ago that showed that
exposed how terribly deprived the lives of so many children in this country are.
And the last couple of days of debate about malnourishment and children and meals has has highlighted that one report
in the United States refers to 15 million Americans live in accommodation to which the water has been cut off.
This is before covered. You know, this is that means living in an apartment in which you cannot flush the toilet.
Right. And you've got families living in accommodation like that.
And again, their conditions have been highly have been spotlit.
But what's also been spotlit in this crisis is that when governments put their minds to it in partnership with business,
they can do something about that. Britain has put almost all of its homeless people into hotels.
So has France. You know, we've seen in the matter of two days where the footballer, you know,
a free school meals plan expanded, although, you know, there is underneath that the need for much,
much more action through local government budgets to ensure that the most deprived kids in Britain are supported through this crisis.
India has discovered that it can, if it sets its mind to it, you know, provide food for a very large number of people.
So what's going to be interesting is what happens when all those taps get shut off?
Do we simply close the hotels and put everybody homeless back on the streets?
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?
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.
And actually, the last part of this discussion we've been hearing was about populations and people.
And I'm really struck by the shift in the conversation from the governors and the institutions towards the populations in the people.
This reminds me of one of the questions which came in, which was about mentality's or psyche.
Have you noticed any patterns about how different cultural traditions, different styles,
different ways of being have related to the governmental decisions of the large scale institutional decisions?
It's always hard to speculate about national mentalities as a modern linguist.
I spent my whole time resisting some of those categories. But, Kate, can can you.
Have you had time to reflect or has there been work done on the compact between the
governors and the governors on how this has played out in the handling of the crisis?
From that perspective, from my perspective, you know, what what pandemic has done acutely as it as all of us is,
it's shut down different kinds of information, supplies.
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.
You know, you don't have the ability to follow.
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.
But I think it's it's hard to get a real sense of what really is going on.
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.
And coping, in a way, has just brought into sharp relief all these big trends that were coming already in about homelessness,
about inequality, about race and about black lives matters and so on.
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.
So I think it's hard to speak to how that is going to change, how that is currently changing in real time.
But, you know, as a as a scale of what century we're living in by the end of this decade,
by the end of a century, they're going to be six hundred million more people in six African countries.
And there are in China. Right. So that the population distribution, the demographics, the food requirements, the infrastructure needs,
all the opportunities that people are going to need to have mobile phone reception, bank accounts, food, et cetera.
But also the other challenge to get right that democracy's freedoms, respect and so on.
But this is the world around us is changing very quickly. And as a boring historian, it always has been.
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,
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.
I mean, the blood.
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.
Yeah, I think some. I think narratives can be used to blind us to learning proper lessons from other countries.
So the number of people that say to me, well, Vietnam's done so well because it's a really powerful government with a,
you know, huge public sector and and North Asian people are just, you know, obedient.
They'll say in this crass way. And I say, well, none of those apply to Greece.
So why has Greece done so well? And then they'll have a different narrative.
And I think. So I think it can sort of blind us from from from seeing that said, we.
We know that human beings need stories to make sense of what others are doing around them.
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,
to protect our neighbours, to protect the elderly,
it was really astonishing how quickly that was accepted by most people without coercion, without law.
It was the simple idea. Stay home because you're going to protect others by staying home.
I think we do have to pause and reflect how quickly that was accepted by people
and acted on by people with only a tiny minority not taking that seriously.
Now, having got people to there, you then have to cure rate that trust in an extremely careful way.
And sadly, I don't think that's happened in this country.
Well, on on that note, perhaps a little melancholy, but also inspiring about the power of stories.
I think we should wrap up our discussion with the best events ones left with far more questions than one could possibly have answered.
But really, I should like to extend my thanks to our two excellent speakers to dance Peter for their wonderful,
rich and thought provoking answers and conversation. We'll look forward to what Life After Covet might be.
And I think we have some skills and some answers to to draw on that.
So thank you both for your time and your expertise. Thank you to the audience for joining us this evening.
Apologies if we didn't get round to your questions, but I hope we've left you with some food for thought.
Please join us next week. On Thursday, the 25th of June at 5:00 p.m.,
when we'll be collaborating with the English faculty here at Oxford to host the Life Professor of Poetry Lecture with Alice Oswald.
Alice Oswald is the current professor of poetry in the faculty of English.
And in this lecture titled Interview with Water, she'll be looking at the strange connexion between words and grief.
So we hope that you might be ale to join us again. And then in the meantime, thank you for watching and goodbye.