Good day, everyone.
Thank you for joining this chat and conversation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs as we launch his new book, The Ages of Globalisation.
Delighted so many of you have joined from around the world. It really is one of the silver linings of this digital online that we are able to do this.
And we're very sorry. Jeff isn't with us in Oxford. Joining us from New York, but delighted so many of you have been able to do so as well.
I'm in Golden. I'm a professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University,
and I was the founding director of the Oxford Martin School and now run a couple of programmes within the school.
Jeff, as many of you know, is university professor and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
He directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016.
And in addition to his many, many accolades,
he has been engaged and really is a model to me of what an academic can do in terms of combining thought leadership with action leadership.
Jeffrey has been at the forefront of thinking on development,
but he's also been at the forefront of doing and making sure that actions get
translated into words with a very deep commitment to development over many,
many years. I first met him when he was a professor at Harvard University where he received his B.A.
M.A. MPH Ph.D. He subsequently moved to Columbia in 2002 to run the Earth Institute.
He's the director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
The Commission of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
He's been an adviser to three secretary generals of the U.N. and serves as the SD Giese advocate on development.
He is someone who has worked in many, many places and thought very deeply about many issues.
But I didn't think that he had a five thousand year sweep of our understanding of globalisation until I read his magisterial new book,
The Ages of Globalisation. Jeff, congratulations. It's a huge sweep through history.
It's helped me understand globalisation better.
As a professor who's worked on it for many, many years and given me all sorts of new insights.
Let's begin this conversation by perhaps you just giving a 10 minutes introduction for those that haven't been fortunate enough to read the book,
get to the book and what you'll see below on this webcast.
You can click on that and order Jeff's book while he's speaking. There you go.
Thank you very much, Ian. Thanks to everybody for joining in.
This book was born at Oxford. It was the first day delivered as a series of lectures at the School of Geography and Environment.
And I want to thank especially Gordon Clark, who the wonderful leader, a faculty leader of that school for so many years.
A great friend and was my host for those lectures at Oxford in twenty seventeen.
And those lectures gave me the chance to put on a paper and in a coherent way, I hope,
by themes that have been running through my head for the last thirty five years.
I began advising governments in nineteen eighty five, starting in Bolivia,
and Bolivia was notable not only for its macroeconomic imbalances with the hyperinflation that had reached tens of thousands percent per year,
but also for a landlocked country in the high Altiplano of the Andean region, at least the capital city, La Paz.
And it forced me really for the first time to think about the geography and development teams so basic.
But I went to a Portuguese programme, an undergraduate, thinking that countries were basically listed by alphabetical order.
I didn't think about countries that on maps like the wonderful book of maps that Professor Golden has just produced.
I thought about countries as having national economies with national income accounts.
But when you're up at 12000 or 14000 feet above sea level, you do think about geography.
When you're in a landlocked country, you think about geography.
When I began working in Poland a few years later, the post communist transition, that long flat plane that connects.
Poland, with the Germany to the west and with Russia to the east, was also a defining determinant of Poland's history and fate.
In fact, Poland was so easily invaded and divided so many times because of its geographic accessibility to two giant powers.
So on either side. Well, over the course of thirty five years of working at all parts of the world,
the poles of geography and shipping development came more and more to my thoughts and my mind.
But those geometric factors interact with two other factors is pivotal.
Geography changes depending on technology.
A landlocked country in an age of the Internet is very different from a landlocked country without the Internet.
Any country that has horses is very different from countries that are places that do not.
Especially after three thousand and horses have been domesticated.
Before that,
it didn't make all that much difference because people were basically eating horses rather than riding on them or using them for animal traction.
So the interaction of geography with technology, with institutions,
which is a rather core staple of economic analysis for me, has been a shaping theme.
And in this book, I look at the interaction of those great three thematic areas geography,
technology and institutions to look at the dynamics of globalisation across time.
And I in a way artificially. But I think with those some useful insight,
then put globalisation into a number of distinct ages that are paced strongly by either geographical change,
like fundamental climate change, the birth of civilisation with the Holocene 10000 years ago,
or Paiste by deep technological changes and their interactions with institutional change.
And the result is seven ages of globalisation.
I make the argument, which I didn't really appreciate fully thirty five years ago,
that we've always been globalised in some sense as long distance interactions and interdependence of human societies.
This goes back to the first migrations, the Palaeolithic migrations of anatomically modern humans out of Africa, roughly 50 to 70 thousand years ago,
to the birth of civilisation with the Holocene and agriculture to what I called the equestrienne age at the age of the horse,
because I regard the horse in economic history as at least as important as the automobile and transport of the last two centuries.
Fundamental game changer in power in the military, in the reach of empire, in the scale of a polities, in the productivity of economic life.
But some places didn't have the horse and others did. And that was a tremendous shaper of world dynamics.
From there is the classic age, the Roman Empire, the Hohn Empire, the other great classic empires,
the Persian Empire, the Mooradian Empire, the initial Islamic empires.
Starting in the 7th century and so on.
The next great stage is what Adam Smith famously called the two most important events in the history of mankind
the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas and from Europe to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope,
a part of the world it knows very well. And that gave us a globalisation in the sense we know it today.
Global scale, multinational enterprises, of which the first was the East Indies Company of London,
and the second was the Dutch East Indies company, founded in sixty, you know, two that created multinational global scale enterprise.
Sixth phase it was with the birth of the steam engine.
I think conveniently dated to another famous date, 1776.
That's when Adam Smith wrote his great book. It's When the Fallen Decline The Kind and Fall of the Roman Empire by.
It was written and it was when the. Declaration of Independence of the United States.
It was, of course, also promulgated.
So a pivotal year.
It gave rise to the industrial age, an age highly differentiated in power to an important extent, by who had coal and accessible coal and who did not.
Because now the steam engine was the primary driving force of industrialisation.
And then I argue that we're in the new 7th age of globalisation today, the digital age.
And while the book was written, obviously before Kofod 19 I the last weekend before going to press,
I had time to add a preface to the book about Koban 19,
yet another epidemic as shaper of globalisation as the Black Death was and other pandemic diseases.
But I think one of the things that we'll remember twenty twenty four was the dramatic acceleration of digitalisation of the world economy.
Were half online, half in brick and mortar.
The online part of the world economy is soaring. The brick and mortar part of the world economy has been in a state of near collapse.
It's a shocking change, redistribution of wealth and income.
And I think a shaper of things to come because we won't go back to the way things were in twenty nineteen.
Even if we do get a vaccine that quickly puts this pandemic to rest.
And sadly,
the most recent news is even then the eye and the antibody response might be short lived and we may be living with this for quite a long time.
But in any event, we'll be living with the digital age for years to come.
And I think that that is a great definer of the new age of globalisation.
Final point that I would make, as each age has had its power structures, its geopolitics, its winners and its losers and our age of the digital.
Globalisation is no different. It is already giving rise to dangerous geopolitical tensions, most notably between the US and China.
But I think the digital age, by shifting power structures, by opening up new avenues of warfare, cyber warfare,
surveillance, fake news is a destabilising force as well as an economically disruptive force for the good and for the bad.
So that that is the shape, the shape of the book in seven minutes for 70.
Yes. Thank you. Covering five thousand years and in seven minutes.
I'm really so I was very struck a long time ago when you wrote two seminal paper on the interface between geography and institutions and development,
which got me to think fresh about about development prospects then.
And I know many others felt the same way. And I think this book similarly does not.
Not least because the way you think about globalisation is very, very different for many people.
Globalisation is just a dirty word, which started recently.
But you see it as a much longer process, as you said, from the earliest migration.
What defines us as humans is our ability to globalise, which makes us pretty unique as a species.
So how do you define globalisation? When I was advising Bolivia, I thought that I was watching globalisation take place for the first time, you know?
Then I learnt a little bit more history and was reminded of some of my classes and so forth.
And then I thought, well, now it's really taking place for the second time because the 19th century was the age of free trade after all,
following the end of market ism. And I the prescriptions of Adam Smith, then I thought a little bit more about it.
Well, I that's not exactly right.
Even mercantilism was a form of globalisation. After all, that was the age of empire.
I mean, you could say that the Spanish empire was the first global empire,
the Portuguese and the pope dividing the world between the two and fourteen ninety four in the treaty of toward to see us.
So I kept get getting pushed back then, of course.
So we learnt from archaeologists and from historians more and more that the Han and the Chinese and the Roman empires were trading.
We had the Silk Route revived by President Xi Jinping in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative.
But completely with a view towards the ancient role of the Silk Roads in linking East and West I, we were reminded day of even the Mongol Empire,
the largest land empire in the history of the world, which we don't think about usually in too kindly and warm and fuzzy ways.
But it actually was a period of massive trade from east to west because it was under the safety, as it were, of Mongol rule.
And so for me, the dates just yet got pushed back farther and farther and farther.
And then I thought that a plausible definition of globalisation is long distance interaction of societies through exchanges of goods,
services, people, ideas, technologies, alphabets and so forth.
And in that sense, we've always been globalised, at least for tens of thousands of years.
Ancient Palaeolithic settlements. I find it remarkably I javins stones or objects of art work, jewellery that are based on substances, minerals,
the precious gems and so forth that must have come from hundreds or thousands of miles away in an era when that was basically by raft or by foot.
And so we know that we've been engaged in very long distance exchange and of course, migration since the very start of the exodus from from Africa.
That was the birth of the settlement of the world to anatomically modern humans.
As I said, somewhere between 50 and seven thousand years ago.
So I'm going to have a conversation with Jeff and I encourage you to post your questions and also to note that this is being recorded.
So if you're posing questions, they will be part of the record.
So, Jeff, globalisation for you is this long term historical process that basically defines humanity over its existence.
And I guess for that reason, you would see it as both a force for tremendous good and progress, bringing civilisations into contact with each other,
leapfrogging as well as a source of immense danger, which we see through pandemics that we've seen in many,
many other cascading shocks, what I call them, the butterfly effect of globalisation.
And in a previous book. How do you see those two positives and negatives interacting?
And do you think that the balance of positive and negative has changed?
And if so, is that because of policy, like we can stop the bonds?
Or is this sort of an inevitable and harvest the goods? Or is this just sort of an inevitable ebb and flow of good and bad?
What do we what we take away from 7000 years of 5000 years of observation?
I'm going to read, if I can. My favourite excerpt from The Wealth of Nations.
And it'll take a couple of minutes, but I think we have time. But it is for me, the quintessence of Adam Smith's wisdom and decency.
But it's also exactly your question. So I'm quoting the discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope.
Are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.
Their consequences have already been very great, but in the short period of between two and three centuries,
which have elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen.
What benefits or misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from these great events?
No human wisdom can foresee. Now, here's the point.
By uniting in some measure the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants,
to increase one another's enjoyments and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial to the natives.
However, both of the East and West Indies.
All the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasion.
So what is Smith saying? Adam Smith is saying global trade should be a win win, you know, because his basic theory, which I think is the right theory,
that global trade enables each part of the world to help meet the wants and the needs of other parts of the world should be mutually beneficial.
That's the gains from trade through specialisation. We study it from the first day.
Paul Samuelson gave the most elegant approves of it.
David Ricardo helped us to understand it. In the early 19th century, it's true.
Globalisation is good. We can I can have my coffee, which I'm not going to get out of a Central Park coffee farm.
I'm going to get it from Java or Ethiopia or Colombia or Brazil or Vietnam.
Thanks goodness I love my coffee. So globalisation should be a good thing.
And yet it is often then a terrible thing. And why a terrible thing?
What Smith talks about was the unequal power of the conquerors.
When they arrived in the Caribbean in in the ports of the Indian Ocean, in in the East Indies.
But he didn't know it was 1776, a hundred years before Pastore and Coke,
that what the Conky stores brought was not only their weapons, but even more importantly, they brought their pathogens.
They brought smallpox. They brought the measles. They brought other killer diseases because the old world was steeped in the pathogenic cauldron.
Many children died, but by the time you reached adulthood, you had adult immunity or most did.
You could carry it to the new world and end up destroying the population of the indigenous populations, which was wiped out.
Perhaps 90 percent in large parts of the Americas, mainly by disease,
also by suppression, slavery, disenfranchisement of land and other kinds of conquest.
But the point is, globalisation brings together this underlying promise of mutual benefit and especially of sharing.
Know how? Because the great, great, great, great, great benefit of knowhow is that it is non rival.
Once we know how to do something better, everyone can use it better in principle.
And so sharing know how is such a fundamental benefit of globalisation.
And I think in the end of the day, it has to be given first pride of place in the answer.
But globalisation brings together. People, societies that have unequal military force, different pathogens, different cultures, misunderstandings.
And we are pretty hard wired, I believe, to hate the other or to be at least primed.
So that one can hate the others. So globalisation brings conflict and it has long brought conflict.
In this sense, the general history has such a mess of bloody mindedness that what the ocean age that Smith is talking about,
broad, amongst other things, was the mass transatlantic slave trade.
It brought the middle passage of 14 million Africans to the slave plantations of Brazil,
the Caribbean and the United States and other parts of the Americas.
A horrendous, horrendous crime against humanity. But absolutely part of globalisation.
And so how do you make the balance? It is like you said, it's the balance of human history.
But what impresses me also is that it's really only.
Since the 16th century that we now have the idea of the whole world in our heads.
When I recently read Herodotus,
I was reminded that the extent of the known world for the Greeks or of the world for the Greeks basically ended around the Indus River.
There were some people living in India. There was no sense for Herodotus that there was China or East Asia at all.
Not even a hint of it. Not even a tale or a story.
It was just the notion of the world was so circumscribed still.
But since the 15 hundreds, we've seen the whole world and since the end of the 18th century, really with Immanuel Kant, in my view,
in his essay Seventeen Ninety Five on Perpetual Peace, we began to think about a world that could live together in peace as a concept.
And maybe you could go back to Isaiah in the Bible where Isaiah says that that the sword shall be beaten into ploughshares and.
Swords into ploughshares and. Oh, my God.
What's the penalty after the other into pruning hooks? It'll come to me.
And I say, I had the idea of a world at peace, but Emmanuel Conte really gave us the first modern conception.
And when I was writing this, I had not been aware of the special role that Jeremy Bentham played in laying out systematically for
the first time the ideas of international law that could underpin that peace a hundred years later,
that gave birth to the League of Nations.
That was a tragically stillborn institution because of the fairly regularly timed stupidity of my own country, the United States.
After 1945, the US did much better under Franklin Roosevelt's vision and helped to give birth to the U.N. this year,
where at the seventy fifth anniversary of the U.N. And my answer to your question,
bottom line is globalisation can be win win if it is paired with institutions
like the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Because then we tame the power structure and we get the best.
But it is ironic also that globalisation has long brought global disease and were experiencing that again this year.
Globalisation spread COBA 19 within days to the whole world.
I. Most likely from western China, from Wolfsheim to Italy within a few hours, the Black Death.
Another such famed and devastating example spread in 16 years from 13.
Thirty one in western China. Best guess by the historian William McNeil to thirteen forty seven.
Arriving in Italy. Then globalisation took 16 years for the passage.
This globalisation took 16 hours. And so this is the flip side of intense interconnectedness at the speed of the digital age.
You are finishing the book or you hold the book to finish it because of Koven 19, just as as I am with Rob Mugga did with Terra Incognita.
But do you know when you look back at these big shocks that have happened?
The financial crisis most recently, which was the super spreading of contagion, the Spanish flu and previous shocks.
Do you think that that covered 19 is going to allow us to better manage globally?
Does it teach us that we are interconnected and we need global governments, we need a w.h or that's effective?
From your reading of the history, is the jury's still out on that.
Or even worse. I hope it's not the case that actually it leads to more division, which which would be a pretty dismal thought.
My philosophy about this is basically like the prisoner's dilemma.
The prisoner's dilemma teaches us that there is an equilibrium,
maybe even the Nash equilibrium of defection, defection, where you lose the gains of cooperation.
But there's also the possibility of cooperation.
And in fact, that cooperation can be sustained either through iterative play that, you know, this isn't the last time we're gonna do this.
So we ought to cooperate with each other.
Or maybe by our hard wired desire to cooperate that overcomes our selfish Nash equilibrium, a vision of trying to take advantage of the other.
Whatever it is, people cooperate a lot and they cheat a lot.
And we know that there are two different outcomes.
And I think when you take the scale of a dyadic two person prisoner's dilemma and you see society as facing such dilemmas,
prosocial or anti-social dilemmas all the time,
the right point is to say, God, we could make a mess of things and that mess could be contagious,
because if everybody's fighting everybody else, if it's if it's a war of all against all.
Were we better fight two or the cooperative outcome where we learn some manners, some decency, abide by the law.
If nothing else, because everyone else is. So we are acting as so-called conditional co-operators is also a possibility.
And my view of history is more or less like that, that both kinds of outcomes are possible.
We can be wise and cooperative and far sighted.
We can be bloody minded. We can go through decades of peace.
And then instead of learning the lessons of preserving the peace, such as in Europe, from the Napoleonic wars onward for at least decades, ie,
ending up again in the disaster of World War One for no reason, basically,
except the players played the noncooperative equilibrium rather than the cooperative equilibrium.
There's no deep reason for World War One.
There were no causal elements. I would argue, other than.
Events. One event after another. That gives the tick tock history.
But no deep explanation because that was a time of great progress, prosperity, technological advance.
And we blew it. And that led to. Oh, my God.
Disaster deaths. And the Second World War. And so on.
So on the question, what will we learn? We can't view that.
Well, if you're a if you are a better, you can view that as a spectator sport.
You can bet long or short on humanity. And many people take that view if you're an activist like I am.
You can't afford to sit back and say, oh, we're going to learn because we're stupid.
So we may not learn at all. We may end up like we did after the Treaty of Society in 1919 and then squabbles so badly that for the
next 20 years that we ended up in World War Two or we could end up as we did in nineteen forty five.
Now, even then, that wasn't so great because we nearly blew ourselves up in thermonuclear war.
By 1962. But. We need, therefore, a constructive approach to your question.
We need to act to learn. We need to construct a peaceful approach.
That's why I'm so much on edge right now.
I'm hoping that we're going to turn out a power, the psychopathic president of the United States,
because he doesn't understand anything about cooperation. His only mode of operation is the defect mode.
So he understands defecting of cheating on the other.
He doesn't have an idea that there is an alternative possibility because you need to be able to peer into the future somehow for an iterative,
co-operative equilibrium in a prisoner's dilemma.
He just doesn't get it. So I asked me that question next week after November three,
and I'll give you a more refined answer on that about what's going to happen if for some horrible reason,
Trump holds on to power, I'd be extremely worried if he's turned out of power.
I'll be much more hopeful if he's turned out of power by a large margin.
I will be profoundly relieved and feel a lot better about my country.
I'm very worried right now. I think the whole world is the whole world.
We're going to have the problem except a lot of malevolent forces.
But is this something and this will be my last question.
So I see that 24 in the box. Is there something about this digital age that can make us hopeful?
Because unlike every pre previous age of globalisation, we really do understand a lot more now.
We can see the world at the macroscopic to the microscopic level.
We know that if we carry on our actions, we're going to be heading to a out of control climate change that Miami,
L.A. will be underwater, amongst other places. Mumbai, Jakarta, London.
Is there something about our knowledge and the fact that we are more connected,
we see Black Lives Matter spreading to over 100 countries in a couple of days.
We see they move to movement and we see greater thumb, but we see the ability of the combination of science and action to globalise.
Of course, we also see fake use, an anti vaccination movements, but it feels to me that this power of understanding,
combined with mobilisation is very different to anything that's ever happened in any prior age of globalisation,
and also that the stakes are higher than they've ever been. We really can blow the world up now in ways that we couldn't before.
And business as usual will blow it up. I think we're seeing not through climate change, escalating pandemics, et cetera.
So does not mean is there a sense that that that this could be the final age of globalisation if we don't get this right?
That's that there's a long, long trajectory that you outline is coming to some apex.
And hopefully this has been a learning, not least in the last decades.
One of my favourite quotations is of John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address when he said, for the world is very different now,
mankind holds in his mortal hands the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.
And he was speaking January 20th, 1961. But he was really expressing the existential reality of the modern age, which is that even as of 1960,
one technology was so advanced that we could end poverty everywhere or because of thermonuclear weapons, we could end human life everywhere.
And Kennedy was a rationalist. He was a very well-meaning and very eloquent and visionary leader.
But his actions and blunders, combined with actions and blunders of his counterpart in the Soviet Union,
Nikita Khrushchev, led to the closest scrape with the total nuclear annihilation that we ever have seen.
On October 26, I think it is 1962.
What happened, of course, is that from one misstep to the next, the U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961,
Khrushchev's harebrained idea to put the nuclear warheads into Cuba in 1962.
These two superpowers approached a nuclear confrontation and then what they didn't know.
And this is a story told in some really powerful recent historical writing.
What they didn't know was a moment came when a nuclear armed submarine of the Soviet fleet just about launched a nuclear tipped warhead,
a 15 kiloton nuclear tipped warhead that would almost surely have triggered thermonuclear war.
And he was countermanded at the final moment by one superior officer on the submarine.
It's a miracle we survived. And so we are in a trip wire age still.
We have six thousand four hundred nuclear warheads in the United States and Donald Trump is president.
It's unbelievable. And this is a that is an existential truth.
Now, the fact of the matter is what you say is completely right.
We know so much more even than 50 years ago, 60 years ago.
Every week when I get science and nature. My favourite arrival on Friday when the two magazines hard copy still arrive.
And I can read maybe a quarter of it or a half of it and kind of understand so much of it.
It's unbelievable the pace of knowledge that we have coming every week.
Not every year. Every week. Huge breakthroughs. Renewable energy.
Quantum computing. New ways to manage expert systems.
Artificial intelligence, you name it. But then we have this dingbat as president who's not only an ignoramus, but psychologically balanced.
And you're reminded, how can this go together?
And so another favourite quotation of mine, which so profoundly expresses.
Reality for me is what E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, my guru.
Tremendous inspiration and friend of mine at Harvard, wrote in a preface to one of my books several years ago.
He said that so we have entered the 21st century with our Stone Age.
Emotions are mediæval institutions and our godlike technologies.
And so we have to remember that we're operating on three different timelines.
One is our makeup as human beings, which drives us our prejudices, our biases,
our decision making formed on the African savannah one hundred thousand years ago.
Then we have our institutions in the United States, our Constitution was promulgated in 1787 in Philadelphia.
It is tremendously out of date. You would never write it this way if you were preparing it in the year 2020.
We have originalist Supreme Court appointees like the one that came in today who thinks you should read the original text at
something like fundamentalists reading the Bible as if you're going to find the truth through a fundamentalist reading of the Bible.
Well, they want to read 1787 document is a fundamentalist document.
It's a nonsense. We're living in the 21st century and we better get with it in that way.
And then we have technology that reached the Moore's Law, doubling speeds of of 18 to 24 months, basically since 1960 till today.
So 30 plus doublings of our digital computational connective power every few hours.
We're producing more data now than basically data that was produced in human history.
Don't quote me, it's not exactly that way. But it's it's that kind of geometric pace.
The amount of terabytes that we're producing is striking.
Probably every few days now is more than all the data, say, up to the year 2016 or 2017 in in human history, all the information flows.
So we don't have the institutions and our mindsets catching up with this.
If we did, we'd say, my God, we've got it made.
The computers will and the machines will do our work.
We can sit and have coffee all day and, you know, have a great time and and the quality of lives.
Time to think. Time to learn. Time to help each other while the machines do the grudge work grunt work.
But whether we're smart enough not to turn this knowledge into cyber warfare, this is really the matter.
I recently listened to some NATO generals talking about artificial intelligence as as the military option.
And instead of talking about trying to find some kind of limit to an A.I. arms race with China, they said, we're going to beat China at this, OK?
That is primitivism that could endanger all of us.
There's so much to talk about. It was Jeff with you. And we haven't even got to developmental climate change as yet.
But I certainly feel that we are in this Renaissance moment.
And I argued an edge of discovery that we need to learn from that huge creativity.
But that ended in disaster, not least the killing of Native Americans, but also, of course,
some huge setbacks in Europe and the burning of books by someone or other who was the 15th century.
Donald Trump.
And by the way, and it's interesting, I've spent a week for random reasons, quite a bit of time with the decade of the 15 tens five hundred years ago,
I was asked to give some five hundredth anniversary talk is a good example of Thomas Moore's utopia.
Yeah, that 10 years was extraordinary because you had Erasmus, you had Thomas Moore,
you had Machiavelli, you had and you had the first heliocentric manuscripts of couple Vernick.
It ended, of course, with Luther and the ninety five theses and then the progression of Europe in two religious wars.
Yeah. For the next 100 plus years. And so genius and breakthrough does not guarantee you that.
That's what age of discoveries about. All right.
We got 28 questions at ten minutes. So let's be fair to two people.
Now people, you can vote for the questions and I'm going to have to group them.
So I encourage you to try to vote so I can select the questions that are the most interest.
The first question is every Crunch's country makes use of whatever natural resource it is endowed with, points of view of Brazil.
And the president, the Amazon is Brazil's not yours.
If other countries want to enjoy the benefits of rainforest, shouldn't they compensate Brazil for not cutting down its rainforests?
Who should be by the costs of saving the Amazon at nine votes?
Good. I think we need to.
Pragmatic. Norway has been pragmatic, it's set up an Amazon fund.
Germany contributed to it. And I would like other countries to contribute to it so that we actually do help
to cope fund the stabilisation of a biome that is so critical for world survival.
And is so much on the edge. By the way, global warming itself, even without deforestation, could destroy the Amazon.
So I am in agreement that we need some sharing of funding and responsibility.
But let's not destroy the Amazon.
Prospects, we expect the U.N. to revise MDG targets and the deadlines as covered nineteens continue to be threatened in this country,
the threat mostly goes up. How does covered 19 impacts on this?
And what's the U.N. going to do about it? Well, first of all, with Koban 19, very briefly, you know, if we were smart, rational,
led properly, we would have suppressed this pandemic already, even without the vaccine.
And I just point you to the experiences of China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, amongst others.
All of them use public health means contact tracing, ample testing, quarantine and isolation facemasks,
the whole package to get this virus suppressed because of Trump also narrow and low others, other populist leaders.
We failed to do that in other places. And our freedom loving societies in the US and Europe behaved badly in this many people.
I don't want to wear face masks. That's a denial of my freedom and so forth.
Without the sense of social responsibility. But we need to stop the pandemic.
A vaccine would help. It may not be sufficient. Good behaviour, a proper etiquette, a proper social regard is absolutely essential.
Honest government is essential. Technical advice is essential.
OK, I'm going to stop. But that theme for the moment, because once we stop the pandemic, then we're going to see we've got the scarred world economy.
What do we do then? We're going to have to have significant public investment led recovery.
The good news. Europe has adopted a European green deal.
China just announced net zero emissions by 2060 as the as the formative basic goal.
Japan yesterday announced the reaching zero by 2050 if Joe Biden is elected president.
He is committed to reaching zero by 2050. Now, if you put a public investment led programme around that.
That's a lot of recovery. A rapid shift to renewable energy.
It's lots of jobs. If we connected to another call of the secretary general of the U.N. in recent months,
universal access to broadband, which is also technically easily within reach,
then we can expand rapidly telemedicine, distance, education, E payments, e banking, e governance and other services.
We actually could jump back and even leapfrog the earlier trajectory.
Through deployment of digital and a green recovery strategy.
So before we start shifting the timelines and the goalposts,
I want us to have a very serious look at how we can accelerate by undertaking the kind
of public investment led sustainable development that we should be undertaking now.
November three will determine a lot about this. Again, if Biden is elected, the US will be all in on this.
He's promised four trillion dollars of I'm sorry, two trillion dollars of spending over the first four years towards this green recovery.
And then I think we'll be in a position, actually, to bring about a real acceleration to the FSD.
Well, that leads to the next question, which I guess the answer is Will.
I'll tell you next week is the is the USA a failed democracy?
The U.S. is a deeply divided country that has these divisions with very deep roots.
The U.S. is a colonial settlement enterprise.
It arrived the Europeans and basically basically English settlers arrived to the
eastern seaboard of North America and battled their way across North America,
suppressing, killing Native Americans and enslaving millions of millions of African-Americans.
We've never fully overcome this legacy by any means.
Our apartheid state in the United States was in full swing between 1865.
The end of the civil war to the nineteen sixty five.
But I don't mean apartheid in a with quotation marks.
I mean apartheid. And there's a wonderful book.
I just wrote a Project Syndicate op ed citing it today. If you want to take a look called The Colour of Law,
which shows how deeply racism was embodied in U.S. structures deeply embodied in U.S. structures for one hundred years.
Now, Trump is, I hope, the last stage of this institutionalised deep racism in the United States.
He represents he is a racist and he represents this part of America.
He represents a white America that resists the broader social democratic tendencies.
And the tensions in the US rose significantly because our demographics are changing too much more than people of colour.
More Hispanics, much more Asian-Americans and so on.
And this is what our culture wars are heavily about. Not only that, but to an important extent.
So America's in the midst of culture wars. Our political institutions are also wounded because the constitutional design is really out of date.
Do not have presidents in your country have parliaments, believe me.
Much better idea. It wasn't so clear in seventeen eighty seven, but it's absolutely clear today you should not have people like King Donald,
even with the possibility of having this kind of power.
It's not a saviour to have democracy.
We know the history of time, our Germany, but still it is more secure to have parliamentary than a presidential system.
But we also became a plutocracy over the last 40 years.
This election cycle will involve more than 10 billion dollars of outlays by the candidates.
Think of all the corruption involved with that. It's massive. And so we've got a lot of cleaning up to do in the United States.
I just want the United States to be a co-operative, peaceful country abiding by international law.
I don't see it as the world's leader in any sense. Right now.
We've got too much to heal domestically anyway. But we don't need a leader country.
What we need is cooperation based on multilateral principles.
Most fundamentally, based on the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our generation's instantiation of that,
which is the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. I say we've got four minutes left, so very quickly, Jeff,
what's got four votes from Dosch on at the University of Houston is how can countries aspire to grow into growing protectionist environments?
Is that just gonna be a war of tariff barriers? And just very brief answer to that.
And then we'll wrap up, I'm afraid. Yeah.
When we had the last full out trade war, which started in the 1930s with the Smoot Holly tariff in the United States, a trade disintegrated.
The Great Depression was exacerbated, and it took us after a war.
It took us decades to come back to getting the gains of open trade.
We should not go into a trade war. This is a case, again, of.
Ignorant President I and a very unnerved the political establishment in the United States, just terrified of China, but phenomenally too much afraid.
We should get Trump out of power and then go back to a WTO based international trading system.
Of course, it needs some updating, but I think open trade is our best call.
But it's got to be combined with redistribution of income both within countries and
internationally to make sure that losers are absolutely compensated and help to become winners.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
And and without actually, I think we need to be thinking about carbon adjustments as well, because what we don't want to be doing,
which is what the UK is, is going to zero carbon domestically and becoming the biggest importer.
In fact, our carbon content of our products and services has increased,
although we're very proud of the fact that we're moving to fully renewable energy production.
And what we also don't want is constraints going to zero internally and exporting their carbon with it.
That's right, because I guess that's the other side of it, which many states in Western Canada, U.S. and Australia.
Exactly. Yeah. Jeff, as always, it's been a huge pleasure.
I know it has been for the many hundreds of people that have joined us from all around the world.
I'm terribly sorry that we can't now go for a drink, can do it together and in Oxford, as we would normally do in New York.
But a pleasure to see you. And really, I want to encourage people to look at and by Jex inspiring book, Ages of Globalisation.
Having worked on globalisation for three decades, I've learnt a huge amount.
And sure, all of you will to do tweet about this if you've found it interesting and you'll
find the Oxford Martin School mind GIPS hashtags around and other social media.
Oxford Martin School is devoted to interdisciplinary thinking on the big challenges of the future.
This book exemplifies and Jeff's work what we all about.
There's a lot of other events and I encourage you to look at the Oxford Martin School's events page.
There's a whole series of events in the coming weeks, many of them focussed on cupboard's and its implications and what to do about it,
including by people who are associated with the vaccine in in in Oxford.
So to have a look at that. Thanks to all of you for joining. And thanks, Jeff.
I know your schedule is packed. Thanks so much to you being part of it.
Thank you. And thanks to everybody that was joining today. Take a.
All best.