Hello and welcome to the book launch of this extraordinary book, Rescue From Global Crisis to a Better World by Ian Goldin.
This is a remarkable book, not least because of the speed at which it was written, but the depth, the breadth that there is in every single page.
As he writes, it is the most intense book I have ever written.
Now we're over the next hour, we're going to explore what Ian has said.
His analysis of where we are and also where we're going are the options for where we are going.
I can imagine almost all of you know in well, but I'm going to just underscore that.
Ian is professor of globalisation and development at the University of Oxford.
He leads the Oxford Martin programme on the future of work, technological and economic change and the future of development.
Prior to becoming the founding director of the Martin School,
he was vice president of the World Bank and he was chief executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa,
as well as working for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
So in remarkable. But you bring all of this to your book, and just before Ian gets going to summarise what is his analysis is,
but also to give you an idea of where we could be going.
Is it austerity or is it something which government has to support and the changes that we need for thinking?
Let me underscore that we'd love to hear from you, so please start asking questions, post them in the bottom right hand corner, then ask a question.
Let me just tell you, why am I going doing this?
William kindly invited me, partly because of the seven years of work that I've been doing on thinking the unthinkable.
And Ian is now taking that to the next stage, so I'm delighted to be here to pose some questions to him to exchange thoughts with him as well.
In about 20 minutes, but in This Is For You now the most intense book you've ever written.
But making it clear that there must be a step change, as you put it in direction,
not as you put it, incremental shuffle shuffles that lead us over another precipice.
The floor is yours. Get the questions coming in. Thank you so much, Nick, and thank you for agreeing to do this,
I can't think of someone who's better placed having been the anchor for BBC World News and then forming this thinking the unthinkable,
which is really doing what I am also trying to do and thank you to everyone that's joined from around the world.
I have seen in the chats people from all over, some I know, most I don't.
But it's a delight that you are part of this and I hope what you find in this, our inspiration.
I know people around the world are going through a terribly tough time at present.
And the reason I wrote the book was because I believe that the terrible suffering that so many are enduring the deaths,
the losses, the sickness and the disruption to lives, as well as the unemployment and growing inequality should not be in vain.
My hope is that this can lead to a better world.
The book is optimistic because it makes the argument that despite all this terrible suffering good could come of this terrible pandemic.
And that really depends on our ability to seise this moment, ensure that this is the pandemic to end all pandemics.
This is the pandemic that leads us to do things differently in the future, to overcome inequality, to accelerate our actions on climate change,
to work more effectively together and to recognise what's important in our personal lives and around the world to recalibrate, to think afresh.
I worry a lot about terms that are used, like bouncing back, even bouncing forward worries me because it implies we going on down the same track.
It's this road which leads over a cliff. It's this road which will lead to future pandemics to escalating climate change,
growing inequality, increasing tensions within our societies and between them.
It is not a world that we want to inhabit or our children do.
Even the term a reset worries me because reset implies we go back to the operating system that was pre.
Set in the system, like when we reset our computers, we go back to the factory defaults.
What we need is something very different now.
Radical change is a scary concept.
We all worry about being taken out of the familiar out of our comfort zones and radical has for many negative connotations, warring connotations.
But what I argue in the book is that business as usual is far more worrying.
It's far more destabilising. It would lead to much greater risk and uncertainty.
Our lives would be far worse off in the future if we went back to the old normal to the business as usual.
If this roaring 20s, which we are likely to see as our pent up need to party and to have a good time and spend the money we've saved in lockdown,
if we still haven't, we haven't been made. Unemployment leads to a roaring 20s.
But we should never forget what the previous Roaring Twenties led to after the First World War that was meant to be the war to end all wars.
H.G. Wells wrote that the leaders at the time felt that.
And when people were celebrating in the 20s after not only the war, but the Spanish flu,
which was a global pandemic that killed perhaps a third of the world's population.
They thought they were heading to a better world. Of course, what history teaches us is they were racing over a cliff.
The Great Depression, rising inequality, mass joblessness.
The rise of protectionism of fascism. And an even worse war that killed over the double the number of people that the First World War killed.
But what's so remarkable to me about the experience of the Second World War and I write about this in the book, is that despite.
The fact that bombs were dropping on Whitehall.
But the leaders were distracted by having to fight on five fronts in the U.K., we were in danger of being invaded around Oxford.
Even they'll block houses to repel Nazi invaders. Despite.
That emergency, that short term crisis, existential crisis.
The leaders were able to think long term to say this will be the war to end all wars to create.
In 1942, in the midst of the war, the Beveridge report.
Which established the welfare state to create the United Nations to ensure that nations would cooperate in the future.
To create the Bretton Woods institutions to allow trade. And economic integration.
With International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
the World Bank primarily established to help those that have been defeated Japan and Germany.
In their reconstruction, I'm like in the first war with World War, where countries had to pay reparations.
And, of course, the Marshall Plan, which led to three per cent,
which is a very large number of US income being transferred to Europe to help in reconstruction and
still the people that went off to sacrifice their lives and young people in the Second World War.
Could look forward to a better world, a world of full employment, of free education, of a National Health Service,
the GI Bill in the US, the welfare state in the UK and the establishment of a welfare state across Europe.
It was a different world leading to this radical change.
The golden age of capitalism, what history tells us was the golden age of capitalism from after the Second World War to the 1970s.
In France, the taunt lawyers the 30 glorious years.
Taxes with 70 percent sponsored by the US, pushed up by Roosevelt and then by subsequent presidents,
conservative and Democrat, Republican and Democrats alike.
And in the UK too, across the political spectrum, there was a support for a strong state.
Indeed, there had to be because what the Conservatives learnt after Churchill was deposed six weeks after the end of the Second World War,
the hero that had delivered the UK and the allies from certain defeat what was thought to be.
Deposed by a virtually unknown claim aptly. Because he would not support this progressive agenda.
So when we think about things as being radical today, a strong state redistribution,
a focus on welfare, free education, health and other services, these things are not radical.
These things have all been done before and they've been done by conservative governments.
High taxes have been implemented by conservative governments in the U.K., in the U.S. and around the world.
It is simply that over the last year since the Thatcher Reagan revolution, we've changed our focus.
We've imagined. That these things are unsustainable and cannot be done.
We've gone from societies that believe in we to societies that believe in me.
We've gone from.
The sense of us and community to a sense of individualism and as that primacy of the individual, which has been challenged so deeply by this pandemic.
The pandemic has shifted everything in terms of our understandings.
If the government had told us in January 2020 that it would tell us when to hug, I would have thought I lived in the Orwellian state.
If the government had told us it would tell us when to fly or when to go to work,
or any of the things it tells us now, we would think we were in the most authoritarian state in the world.
I don't think even the North Korean government tells its citizens when they can hug.
We accept behaviour change when we believe it's in the public interest, and we accept government's playing a role and now 10 to 20 percent of GDP.
Budget deficits 16 trillion dollars something like a quarter of the U.S.
Found of GDP found. For these new bills that Biden is proposing.
We can recalibrate very quickly, and we need to we need to build on this.
We had a pivotal moment.
And what the Second World War experience teaches me, and also the failures of the First World War and other crises is that if we don't act now,
while this is still fresh in our minds before we slip back into the complacency and familiarity of the old, if we don't act now,
we're going to miss a once in a generation opportunity to change the world for the better to act differently.
Now, the book goes through many dimensions of this inequality,
the relationship between old and young and how the young have sacrificed their education, their social lives.
Many of the job prospects and inherited a massive debt for the old.
What we pay back to them, how we promised the in return for their sacrifice because their risk of dying from COVID is extremely low.
They are taking a risk on our behalf and people my age and old as behalf.
What are we going to give them back in terms of a promise of a better future, a cleaner world and more sustainable world,
more equitable world, a world that isn't so riven by conflict, overcoming discrimination and of course, what the pandemic has done?
And I outline this is it's exacerbated and revealed the inequalities not only between rich and poor and those that can work
from home and those that counts and those governments that can afford to support their citizens and those that can't.
Like most developing countries and especially in low income countries,
but also within communities between women and men, massive widening of gender differentials between the young and old,
which I've mentioned, we've seen the particularly adverse effects of the pandemic on black, Asian and minority ethnic groups.
We've also seen the enormous sacrifice of essential workers.
We clap for them, but we don't give them the reward, the puny reward in the UK of one percent in terms of a pay increase well below what they deserve.
We need to think about how we translate these actions into substantial and permanent changes.
The book focuses as well on the future of work, and this is a massive topic not only who can work remotely and where they will work remotely,
but what the implications are for the future of cities and offices.
The prospects for people most jobs, certainly my own, but I think virtually everyone's all in effect apprenticeships.
We learn by observation. We learn through informal learning.
Often we learn by challenging people and organisations, thrive and grow and transform over time and become stronger, whether they private or public.
Through this constant challenge that newcomers bring in and the challenge of the young for the old newcomers and fresh ideas, the interdisciplinarity.
And in that we have to ask ourselves is what's going to happen to innovation and change through remote?
Can we be innovative? Can we be creative?
And the two dimensions to this, the one is could we have Silicon Valley without Silicon Valley cafes and proximity to Stanford?
And so what happens to the big innovation? There's also the creativity.
We will get stimulus from each other, from listening to new things, from the arts, from what's often the sublime.
And I talk about this and the remarkable experience I had listening to Tasmin Little Play Off Final Violin Concerto.
There are many things which are so precious that we in danger of losing unless we protect them.
And unless we really understand that the pandemic, through its automated processes, risks solidifying things which will not be for the better,
whether it's in the arts, whether it's remoteness or whether it's in the city of bouncing back.
Globalisation certainly is not dead, and by globalisation, I mean flows across national borders.
We've seen, in fact, an acceleration of this in many dimensions, we've seen it in the vaccine production.
Quite remarkable. Of course, those vaccine laboratories like the one up the road from the in Oxford people coming together in the same space.
We've seen it now in the challenge that we have to overcome a vaccine nationalism.
We've seen it in this conversation digitally, the explosion of digital conversations,
and of course with it, the explosion of wealth that of those that own the means the technology giants.
And we also seeing it in the record prices for containers on Asian routes.
Globalisation is not dead, but it's accelerating its transformation, and what the pandemic is doing is compressing into the period of a year or two.
Trends that would have taken 10, 20 years to emerge.
It's accelerating time. It's accelerating evolution and change.
And that places an onus on all of us to think differently. What could have been gradual evolution of our thinking now needs to be accelerated.
And what the book tries to do is provide a catalyst for this thinking to allow on multiple dimensions.
Readers to reflect on how the pandemic could change the world, but what we need to do as actors.
The lesson I take away from history and from previous crises.
And the huge challenges that we face. Is that the future is not set in stone at all?
It is what we make of it. It's made by all of us as individual actors working together.
Of course, politicians are important. And we may be lucky or unlucky in the politicians that we have.
But we shouldn't believe that we just are passive. First, we vote for the politicians,
but of course we can also vote them out in countries where democracy exists and we can
do things in many other dimensions which don't necessarily depend on political will,
what firms do in their companies and the decisions they make.
What we do in our cities and how we read and transform, rethink and we transform our cities,
and that's the focus of another chapter how we work together.
The extent to which we offer solidarity. The extent to which we recognise some of the issues which were hidden before the pandemic like mental health.
Which need to be revealed and dealt with. As other diseases are and sickness.
The pandemic has revealed many things about. The circles of trust that we have, who we can rely on, what systems we can rely on.
And as we look around the world and trying to make sense of why some countries have done so well and others so badly in light of the pandemic,
I go through an analysis of what it is that explains this.
Why is it that some countries, even in Europe?
Greece has done much better than much wealthier countries like Germany, the U.K. and the countries with the best science, like the U.K. and the U.S.,
have some of the highest levels of per capita per capita mortality and very poor countries like Mongolia and Vietnam that have much weaker science.
I've done much better, and it's not about autocracy or democracy.
Taiwan has done well as a democracy, and South Korea has done well in Australia, New Zealand and so is China.
As an autocracy. It's much more complicated, it's about trust, it's about listening.
It's about the capability to discern what's going on early and act on it.
The weak signals. Finding it's about understanding previous experience, which is one of the reason why Chinese neighbours, China's neighbours,
were so effective at managing this because they'd been there before and they'd seen it before,
and they were picking up informally long before the W.H.O. said.
What was happening? What was happening in Wuhan?
Countries that are arrogant then are too powerful where leaders are populists have uniformly done badly,
those that haven't listened intently to the science. Those that haven't listened to the World Health Organisation.
What the pandemic has shown us is the need not only for greater solidarity within our countries, but globally.
While the rich countries have been able to look after themselves for a large part,
many more people will die of starvation, then we'll die of COVID 19.
Three unlikely that anyone will die of starvation as a result of the pandemic in the rich countries.
The World Bank estimates that one hundred and twenty five million more people will be
pushed into absolute poverty that's living under $1 90 a day in developing countries.
The SDGs the Sustainable Development Goals have been derailed by at least five or 10 years.
Lack of funding, lack of capacity, and we need to redouble our efforts in this G7 coming up is an opportunity to stop that.
But the U.K. cutting its aid budget, of course, is heading in exactly the wrong direction in terms of signals on this.
And as countries, the rich countries economies contracted in 2020,
so did aid much more needs to be done and much more needs to be done to reinforce global institutions.
If there's one thing that this pandemic has taught us, I hope it's the need.
To cooperate between countries, there is no wall high enough that will keep out the great threats that we face in the future be like climate change,
like pandemics or other great threats. But one high walls do keep is the ideas, the technologies.
The people, the investment, the export opportunities and most of all,
our understanding and ability to cooperate with others to manage these shared threats.
The World Health Organisation is far from perfect. It urgently needs reform media resources.
A new capability to stop global threats, and I talk about this in the chapter on stopping future crises.
Is it possible? And I've interviewed many pandemic and other specialists.
Certainly it is. We spend over a thousand times as much money on military preparedness than we do on pandemic preparedness.
Even though all the intelligence agencies will tell us that the threat to our lives is far greater from pandemics than it is from a military conflict.
Why is this? Why are we using the rear-view mirror? Why have we so desperately failed?
And we need to look forward as to what the threats are and they can be stopped?
And of course, this applies to climate change as well. Has the pandemic helped us deal with climate change?
I hope so. Certainly, while two pandemics on we emitting much less, we fly much less to be driving much less,
etc. The real question is how the stimulus package is to recover from the pandemic.
I spent after the 2007 08 financial crisis, there was a massive spike.
In greenhouse gas emissions, as more and more infrastructure was built as the stimulus was spent on cement and steel.
And that's what we need to avoid.
So now is the time to think about now is the time to ensure that this massive stimulus of 16 trillion dollars that's been talked about.
Is spent wisely that we have a Green New Deal implemented, and it's heartening to see that many of these things are already happening in the US.
The book. Covers many different dimensions, and I hope that all of you will recognise in parts of it things which are dear to you.
I don't expect you to necessarily agree with all of it, but what I hope it does is stimulate your thinking,
give you insights into some of the things that the pandemic has caused and revealed you might
not have been aware of and help you think about how your lives and those that you care about,
whether it's the organisations or the individuals might change as a result and how you can be part of this change.
I believe that we all have the power and I've seen it in my life not only.
But the historical lessons that we read about with the Second World War or others, but I've seen it in South Africa, my home country.
How what I thought would never happen in my lifetime, a democratic,
non-racial South Africa could be established not just because the remarkable leadership of an individual like Mandela, but because of.
The struggle that was taking place within South Africa and globally to make this happen.
This is a battle of ideas. This is about how we think about our lives, our world and our future.
And if we don't engage in it, if we stay on the sidelines and let that happen, my fear is that it's going to unwind in very, very negative ways.
We will have. Definitely more pandemics, which could be much worse than this.
We will have rising inequality. We will have the negatives of globalisation, the hyper connectivity that I talk about in my book The Butterfly Effect.
Being in Demick and as our system gets more and more complex and more and more integrated.
That instability necessarily rises.
But it can be managed. And it can be that these flows across national borders.
Are a force for good. They the spread of the me too movement, they the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement,
the spread of vaccines and the spread of new technologies that will give us zero carbon.
Like all the good things that give us improving life expectancy and a better world.
Turning our back on globalisation is not the answer. Ensuring that we manage it for our needs and those of the planet's people and planet.
Needs to be the property. I hope Rescue provides the roadmap that I intended.
I hope it provides the sense of purpose of urgency of need.
And I hope, too, that you feel, as I did in concluding the book, if not now, when and if not we who.
Thank you very much. Thanks, Ian. Let me tell you, we've got quite a lot of questions coming in and I'm going to start picking on those now.
But I'm going to pick up also two or three points. But for example, Lynn Taylor,
what are the most effective tools to combat the apparent collective amnesia of states and
people after immediate crises past and for Mohammed Aloma in the age of polarisation,
political and cultural populism. Racism eradicating nationalism?
What will be left of globalisation? The globalisation of ideas.
Not only of trade of people, not only money now, but before we go into questions like that?
What I'd like to ask you because we share challenges that we've we've risen to.
When you talk about this is the most intense book I've ever written.
This time last year, you probably weren't really getting to the point of even thinking of writing it.
This has been a remarkable speed.
Whichever thing has happened, you are representative professor at the University of Oxford, and traditionally books like this take a long time.
Historians write them rather than contemporary historians.
But what you've produced is a book in about eight months published it literally within about two months of delivering the the text.
Now I'm asking you that because it is about shooting at moving targets.
It's about sourcing stuff. And I think therefore there's the discipline and I I talk about a book which I have I'm much impressed with.
I use the word marvellous because it is, but that comes with an incredible discipline of how on earth you actually track stuff,
research stuff, write stuff, get it edited and get it published in a timely way, which means we can talk about this in in May of 2021.
That May of 2022. Was it awful? Not awful, no.
You know, the pandemic, one of the silver linings for me of the pandemic is that basically being grounded,
having not travelling, not going to many meetings and and being energised by concern.
So it's, you know, it's tough and it's tough on those around me when I'm spending my nights at the computer rather than with them.
Did you feel about shadows all the time? It is your moving target is right.
I'm very relieved, but so far, I think I started it in basically in September.
I finished it in March.
So far, history hasn't overtaken me and I was able to capture, for example, the transition in the US, from Trump to Biden in a massive transition.
If I hadn't captured that, that would be a problem.
And I was able to, although I didn't pick it up, 3M's basically the sorts of things that he's done.
So so far, I don't feel that I've been overtaken by history.
But but there's no doubt that, you know,
maybe there'll be a second edition and it'll be slightly updated and different with some benefit of more information and hindsight.
I think that the the trends I'm picking up on all of the details will obviously require updating, but I think that the point is one that is robust.
And you know, Nick, that I've been saying since the butterfly defect in 2012 that there's going to be a global,
there's gonna be a pandemic and it's going to lead a global financial crisis.
For me, this is not news, but for me, this is like the timing, of course, and where it came from.
That's that is never known. And it could have come from anywhere people would blame.
Not this Trump. The China could have come from anywhere. It could have come from any country. Well, let me press you.
I'm so sorry.
I think that that is a constant which which which also I really felt I had to talk about that, and I hope I don't talk about it too much in the book.
You talk essentially, and I'm paraphrasing here, we need to do things in a different way.
We need to rebuild. And the question for me is, but can we rebuild?
Is there enough political will? Because only yesterday you have the report from the International Energy Agency from Fatih Birol,
the head of the agency, saying that we're facing enormous, enormous challenges.
On energy, you've got you've got John, John Kerry,
the US climate are saying we're not even close to agreeing a half of the reductions that are needed on climate emergency.
And I'm using these examples as really evidence that it's incredibly difficult to get people to think and change in a different way,
whether it be corporate leaders or government leaders in the way that you are advocating with the speed that you are advocating.
No, absolutely, and you know, you're doing it with with your organisation thinking the unthinkable,
also trying to raise this, but it's incredibly difficult. I have no, you know, I'm not confident that it's going to be won.
But if you don't engage in the battle, if you don't surface,
the idea is if you don't try to mobilise opinion and persuade people, then you're definitely going to lose.
And as we've seen in all these shifts in ideas, they start in small places,
they grow and they they care about, you know, Greta Thunberg stands outside her school.
She doesn't think she's going to change the world, and she creates a worldwide movement to me to tweet does the same thing.
Small changes, which seem absolutely marginal and impossibly in terms of the scale of the challenge do make systemic differences at times.
Obviously, people working together and lots of different people are making similar arguments to me.
I think so. Victory is not assured. The struggle is very tough, but if you don't engage, you're definitely going to lose.
And if you only make 20 percent of the gain that you expected to make, you've still made enormous progress.
You know, I will sleep very well thinking I've achieved an enormous amount.
If some of the things, but not necessarily all the things that I'm pushing for it come about.
So it's part of a thing that sort of. It's certainly not about me and what I'm saying.
It's about people feeling around the world. That change is necessary.
I think what we're seeing, by the way, in the US is proof that this does happen.
Of course, we can look at the negative side. Trump got 10 million more votes than he did in the prior election.
That's bad news for me. But Biden won, and Biden is being more radical that anyone thought was possible certainly much more than Obama was.
If that can happen in the U.S., it can happen elsewhere. And I believe it will be part of this movement for change if we want it to be.
Let's talk about economics, and I have to say many of your sections in chapters are Rescue, Rescue, Rescue Rescue.
So Rescue is is a is a spine which goes right through the book.
But let me ask you about the economics of all of this.
And that's where your speciality has been in your professional focus has been for so many years.
You are excoriating about what will happen if there is a default to austerity as a way
of clawing back the enormous amount of money that governments have been spending.
You also talk about this is now the age of government. Now what I'm going to ask you is how can that be achieved if there's going to be no austerity?
How do they claw back the enormity of money the governments and the state have been pouring after saving jobs, saving businesses, saving the economy?
Yeah. Absolutely central question. My own view is that the pendulum is shifting and it's shifting extremely rapidly.
We back away from the, you know, what we've experienced since the Thatcher Reagan revolution, the pendulum swinging back.
I don't think it's going to go all the way back, and I'm not advocating that it goes to the sorts of state we had in the past.
We need modern, effective states not not necessarily like the past, and there's a lot of reason why we can be optimistic about that.
Interest rates need to stay very low to make this amount of debt fundable.
We need to ensure that we have more dynamism in our economies, and I talk about that.
We need more productive economies, more effective economies and efficient, productive economies.
And of course, we need to ensure that it's worth the investment and what the money spent on that matters.
If the money is wasted and given to pals of the ministers, then it's a waste of money.
We are not going to get value for it.
But if it's invested in education, in an energy transition, in a better health service, then you improve the effectiveness of your country.
You improve your the stock of people and their skills, and you improve your efficiency and output and your economy grows more quickly.
So it's not a question of how much money you spend is how you spend it.
That really matters. The devil is in that detail.
We can have a massive debt and it leads to a debt crisis, or we can have a massive debt and that leads to higher growth.
The IMF, which is the sort of cathedral of orthodoxy in economics,
I did something with Christina Georgieva, the head of the IMF, a couple of weeks ago.
And she, you know, quite remarkably, is saying, we need bigger debts, we need more spending by governments.
That's the way out of this crisis. The ECB, Christine Lagarde is saying the same thing.
So it's not just the sort of I'm not just a lefty economists saying this.
The centrists, the orthodoxy are saying the same thing.
And I think when they say that and supports it, we should take comfort.
But it does in the end,
come down to this key question of how the money is spent is absolutely crucial is it's spent in ways that will stop the next pandemic,
create growth, stop the crises, reduce risk and generate sustainable growth.
Or is it spent in ways which are wasteful and increases inequality? That's just going to asset price booms, for example,
housing booms and technology stock booms that matches what you do with the money is what's important, not necessarily how much you have.
Well, leaders tend to be elected. Political parties tend to be elected on the basis that they're going to.
They're promising that the economy will be in good hands. There's a question here from Srikanth mangalam with questionable leadership in many
countries that are putting democratic institutions at risk in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Where do we citizens draw inspiration from to develop and build compassionate societies?
Are we as citizens at fault entirely for the leaders we have created?
The emphasis there is on compassion and compassion is what the handing out of this vast amount of debt has been about.
It's been about saving sanity and stability. Do you think the political leaders or the current generation of political leaders,
which is certainly central to our thinking, the unthinkable work really have the ability to break with conformity.
They are doing things that, you know, would have been unthinkable in in January 2020.
So leaders around the world are making decisions that that reflect this ability to change their minds,
many of them and are doing it too little, too late.
Some of them might have stuck their heads in the sand, and some are still saying, I mean, they I think they are.
One or two leaders know that Santa's cupboard doesn't really exist, but they are the tiny minority, an exception.
So people need us are doing things. The question is, are they doing them in the right way?
And are they going to revert to their bad old ways when the pandemic is over?
And and that's what the jury's out.
So and we don't know the answer, and that's what this book is about is we cannot allow that reversion.
And we need to ensure that the way that the money spent,
the way that this change happens is done in a way that's going to benefit poor people, poor countries and overcome the challenges.
So that's what it's about. Does it require different leaders?
I'm sure in many societies it does, but that's what elections are for in countries where we're allowed to elect our leaders and in other countries,
there will be public pressure as well. We've seen these movements across Eastern Europe, for example, in that respect.
So I'm more optimistic about that. Do you want me, Nick, to get back to these, these other questions?
Let me just continue this, if I may, because you say was the end of the book.
COVID 19 has shattered the mental mirrors that have prevented us from breaking from the past and embracing new horizons.
And there's there's a part of. My analysis, my personal analysis,
which is that it's incredibly difficult with the election cycles and so on to find politicians and leaders who are
prepared to dispense with the orthodoxy that got them to where they are and which they've appealed to the public on.
And I'm pushing you on this because of your own experience in several international institutions as to whether this really can be achievable.
The short termism of of politics in the short term has meant business business as well,
with the incentives on business that people get rewarded on profits in the short term, not whether the firm is sustainable.
Our massive problem, and that's what the Oxford Martin Commission for future generations and the report now for the long term
was all about that we created how do you create a longer term and the many ways of doing this vision?
But I do think and you know, we're seeing again in the change.
Great hope. If you had said to these governments in January 2020,
you'd be doing the following things they would have accused you of some sort of, you know, political caricature joke.
It's just not possible that we will be telling people whether it's when to hug or whether we're going to spend 15 percent of GDP and run a deficit,
which is the greatest deficit the UK has ever run. Johnson would have told you that's impossible, as would have other leaders, so they are doing it.
The question is to me, not what they're doing now. But your question, I think, is is this politically sustainable?
Are they going to revert to their bold battle? Was, is that hardwired into them?
That depends on what voters demand. That's my lesson from the Second World War.
If Churchill can be deposed after winning the Second World War, anyone can be deposed in the UK or in the US or elsewhere in a democracy.
People, if people want a different world, they were created no matter how popular or populist their leader might seem in the short term.
And we've seen these very sharp swings in political opinion polls, we've seen how quickly that people can fall off the pedestals.
And my view is that that is what's going to happen. People are going to have to be accountable.
The, you know, the deaths per capita is one way to say, how have you done, Mr. Prime Minister or president in COVID 19?
And that extremely differential across countries, I've put to you that actually there's a good chance that you would be able
to achieve or what you're suggesting is achievable if it were only COVID 19.
But you need to then surely layer on the climate emergency and the urgency of remaining within 1.5 degrees,
probably within the next six or seven years only. And the massive amount of probably to most people's sacrifice, not least in financial,
the finances of just where you boil is going to come from and how are you going to change it?
And so on that the level of change we're talking about now is more than just COVID 19 and the incredible seismic impact.
It's about a profound change to the stability we've taken for granted,
which therefore that's why I'm asking whether you're rescuing but actually only rescuing in an intermittent way,
because what's coming down the track is going to be even more seismic.
Yeah, well, one of the reasons I like the title rescue is that it doesn't tell you what, what happens after you rescue,
you know, you get rescued from the let's say, you know, you're drowning and you're rescued.
You learn you live another day. You have new options. You can start again.
You might have lost everything, but you have more opportunities to go forward better than the alternatives.
So rescue has a potential for a positive outcome, but it's not a guarantee at all.
It depends what you do next after you rescue. That will determine that.
And you're absolutely right. This is just one of the many compounding problems climate and then many others.
What I believe and I hope the book convinces readers of is that the idea that you
somehow are going to be relapsing to a more stable world if you don't do anything,
is the fantasy. The future world is radically uncertain and unstable.
It's a world in which we'll have many more pandemics. We didn't like this pandemic.
Well, you better make sure that you do something to stop the next one coming and because they're going to be more.
It's hardwired into the system that these viruses are growing around the world would go through airport hubs.
So it's like cyber viruses are can be going through cyber systems, energy systems.
If we don't change them, we'll create escalating destabilising climate change and all these other Typekit complex destabilising systems.
That's hard wired. That's inevitable.
So if we want to not have if we want a future that's more predictable, if we want a future that's more stable, more comfortable.
Then we need to change now. It might sound paradoxical, but you have to change to be like you were.
But that's what you have to do if you want a happy, peaceful world.
You have to change. You go back, you go back to Canes and say the day has arrived.
Milton Friedman's day is dead, as is underscored by the purpose work of that site, business school and so on.
But is there a model you could refer to quite apart from World War one, World War Two and so on?
We're obviously there was almost no data and none of the data that populates models these days.
Is there a model which would convince those who have to take big decisions that this is a risk worth taking?
They we are always making big decisions.
You know, governments are allocating their budget, the UK has just increased its military budget by a record amount that's based
on a decision about what the threats are and what how to spend the money.
They've cut the aid budget by a third. That's a decision. And so it's happening all the time on the basis of evidence.
I'm arguing that those are the wrong sorts of decisions and we need to think differently, not only nationally but also globally about these things.
So we have the data. Is there a model? There's not a one size fits all for all countries, but certainly there are many things that I talk about.
Them main risk is what can be done to stop future pandemics.
We know what to do to reduce the risks of climate change, just the acceleration of the transformation to zero carbon.
We know how to overcome inequality. I mean, this is not rocket science.
Many countries that have done it with even within Europe, you can compare countries,
some we have some of the lowest inequality in the world and some of them have left some of the highest in the advanced economies like the U.K.,
like the U.S. we know how to do these things. So there's no one Keynes.
And yes, we do need intellectual leadership. But I believe that most of what needs to be done is already reasonably apparent.
And if we put our will to it and we put that allocate money to it, we can solve the problems of the world with the knowledge we have.
I now haven't forgotten Lynne and Muhammad, but I want to pick up a couple of questions which have just come in on the economy,
Ian from Max Dry If every country has the same debt problem, why not just all mutually agreed to write it off?
After all, what is money? It's not real. It's only numbers to keep score, right?
And Bruce McNaughton with low interest rates and attempts to grow GDP.
And of course, you say that GDP doesn't actually accurately measure anymore what the state of the economy and everything is.
What is the impact of inflation on recovery and rescue? Yeah.
Right of that question reminds me of the conversations I had in my when when I used to wear a World Bank hat and in South Africa,
where the trade unions and others discussed the rights of debt, I believe that there should be a write off of debts of developing countries now.
I believe that in order to put the SDGs back on track, that the low income countries that have that will spend the money appropriately.
Not that they put the money in Swiss bank accounts, but where money is being spent appropriately,
that there should be a right of debt to get more fiscal space.
And it's really one of the tragedies of this particular crisis compared to previous crises that
that discussion hasn't advanced and that just has very poor leadership in the G7 and the G20,
because that's what led it before. But global rising death is a slightly different question.
Remember that debt is something that we also have assets our pensioners, other people who are going to get repaid.
These debts, you're giving all your money that then gets lent on to someone else and you need to get it back as a pensioner.
Certainly, I feel that as a president, I'm sure you didn't like approaching pension age.
The other side of these debt transactions are people who are lending their savings.
Or institutions which are giving their savings and that has to be resolved.
You can't just magic away that problem. So that is not necessary now when governments are creating debt.
They can be a sort of infinite postponement of if interest rates are low enough.
And that leads to the next question, which is on inflation. Inflation is a threat, a possible threat,
and it would lead to higher interest rates and it would unwind many of the benefits we're having of being able to live off very high levels of debt.
It would also, of course, lead to all sorts of other problems. Inflation tends to penalise people on fixed incomes.
Pensioners, people on unemployment, pay and others, so it needs to be managed.
My own view is that the threat is low, that energy prices which have driven inflation often in the past, are not going to go up dramatically.
And as we move to renewables, world actually will go down. So that is one major inflation threat that's taken away.
What would cause a big inflation spike is a global conflict and that needs to be avoided at all costs.
What we're also aggravated is tensions and rising tensions between the US or others and China.
And that, in my view, needs to be managed down that tension,
even though we need to have very serious and rigorous discussions with China on human rights abuses and other things that we're concerned about.
But inflation is a question that needs to be managed now.
My view is it's a low risk, but it's a risk that needs to be managed and certainly it has not gone away indefinitely.
That that idea, I think, is hopeful but not realistic.
So it's a concern. It's not a concern, I believe, over the next few years.
Immediate, immediate concern. But it needs to be something to be very vigilant about.
Maybe some inflation is fine. Inflation up to five percent or something is fine is when starts going up into 10, 20,
30 percent that we really need to get concerned and it's creeping up at the moment with worries in the markets.
Let me pick up that question from Linda Taylor. Thanks for your patience.
Lynn, what are the most effective tools to combat the apparent collective amnesia?
The phrase there in the question of states and people after immediate crises past, I'd put you actually this.
This immediate crisis is not going to pass. It's going to be with us for a much longer period than anyone assumes.
And certainly, that's the kind of advice we're seeing, I think,
from the World Health Organisation, but particularly this issue of collective amnesia of states.
Yeah, thanks, Lyn, and hello to you. One of the people, I do know that that's that's in on this.
Thank you for joining. It's the collective amnesia of states, and also I think of societies is is a huge risk.
I think the government will want us to to convince us that it's over and that it can go back.
And of course, there's a lot of vested interests in the old system, whether it's people who are producing things for the military or anything else.
Those that have existing contacts that are doing well out of the existing system have a very strong vested interest and lobbying.
And the power of love is a massive issue at, especially in the US, where you need $10 billion to be president, $10 million to be a congressperson.
So there's this interwoven system,
which is vested in the past and that needs to be changed through regulation and through transparency and other means.
And my view is that the collective amnesia needs to be countered by a constant reliving and retelling of the story so that a new narrative is told.
And this book, I hope, will be a contribution to that. A new narrative is told about what are the threats that we face in our society.
What are the issues we're concerned about? Why is inequality a big issue?
Why's climate change? Why pandemics? Why do we need to focus on these issues and how do we overcome them?
The amnesia after the First World War is what allowed the Second World War to happen and the Second World War,
because these people, like Churchill and Roosevelt and many others had lived through two World Wars.
They weren't going to let that happen again. Now we need to be darn sure that we understand that there's a rising risk.
We've seen lots of pandemics in the world in the early part of this millennia.
We've seen lots of threats and we need to as voters, as members of communities, as activists, we need to make sure that we raise this question.
And just like amnesia regarding something like the Holocaust was a great danger and remains a great danger.
So, too, is an amnesia about the other other dangers in our society that need to be overcome,
as well as the blind spots not seeing what happens to be Amy communities,
what not seeing, not seeing what happens in gender discrimination and so forth.
So I believe it's about society desires.
And so I believe in the end, individuals that express this by being part of communities that express these concerns.
I think we're into the last five minutes in. So this may be the last question unless you you answer it quite sharply.
I'm picking up on your section on rescue economics,
where you say quote altering the language of public policy is vital, revealing a wider range of economic options.
You asked this question yourself, but it's come as well from Daniel Scharf or any of the current variants of capitalism
capable of sustaining a good life 10 billion people on this planet and its flora and fauna,
underscoring really the David Attenborough view and which is from flora and fauna, international and so on,
which is that actually we are now no longer living comfortably with nature, and we've got to accept that this is no longer acceptable.
It's coming from André Hoffman as well, so you can see what that is going.
But briefly, if you can, is there a compromise we're going to have to come to to save nature,
to save the planet, but also a different kind of capitalism which will make this possible?
Yes, we definitely need a different form of capitalism. Clearly, we need a zero carbon capitalism.
We need a capitalism, I believe, which has formless meat eating for those that are eating excessive amounts of
meat where we understand much better how to live in harmony of the planet,
there's no one society I would hold up as a model. I think everyone is evolving.
But some are closer to it. Some have much lower levels of inequality.
Capitalism in for me is everything you know from Denmark, the US, everywhere except North Korea and maybe Venezuela and Cuba or capitalists.
So there's a huge range. China is a state, in my view, in many ways, the state capitalist society.
So there's a huge range and we can take elements of the different ones.
But we fundamentally yes, the answer is we need to change.
And what I argue very strongly in rescue is that I believe the pandemic can provide an added impetus to make these changes if it doesn't.
And we go back to business as normal. The dangers are even greater that we go over not only the cliff in terms of future crises,
but of course ecological collapse and all the other things that David Attenborough is concerned about.
The final point I'd make is this is not about the number of people. You know, I did.
The book is the planet full. I talk about that as well in rescue.
We need to be very careful to. I think, for us to be seeing a baby bust, not a baby boom in many countries,
but it's about what people do, and I believe people have the right to consume in an appropriate way.
New York state consumes more energy than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
It's about what people consume and how they consume it. That matters and that needs to change.
And that means capitalism in the way it operates needs to change.
Picking up on that, we've just got a moment or two here, but picking up on the future of capitalism by Paul Collier.
But what Harry Braganza talks about is how he asks you how far is are you optimistic
about our capacity to develop the asset of shared belonging and obligation today?
This is part of a potentially very profound change in the way we live our consumer led life.
Absolutely. And I think the greatest hope for the pandemic is that it's taught us to think much more about we,
how vulnerable we all are, how much we depend on others,
not only the essential workers, but those that support us in different ways, the people that we speak to, the people we engage with.
I think it's it's led to this recalibration and this sense of shared belonging that we've all for the first time in the history of humanity,
experienced something terrible, which is affecting everyone.
We're seeing it dramatically in India now, but we've all seen it in different places in our societies.
So that is this cataclysmic moment, which also can be a catalyst for, I believe, hope that's what rescues about.
And I really hope that if you read it, you feel optimistic that you can be part of this change.
And thank you so much for joining this Nikolaev for most minutes.
You know, you made the point of saying Page 82 fundamental transformation in our attitudes is needed not only to where and how we work,
but also to pay and rewards and incentivisation. Now, obviously, you're not the only person to be saying that,
but it is part of a profound recalibration which would be necessary under the kind of thing that you are proposing now.
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Ian, thank you very much indeed.
I'm thanking you for the book and for the pleasure of reading it. I did feel it was pleasure.
I felt it coincided with a number of my own assessments, but it's brilliantly written.
So thank you very much indeed for having this intense period of writing and reading in order to assemble this in literally about eight months.
And you can buy the book, you can press the button at the bottom. It's a green button underneath the images of Ian and me.
Thank you for inviting me in. Good luck. And the that things are moving very quickly, but I fear we haven't seen anything yet.
And so your next edition will probably have to be written in about six months, not six years.
If you've got the time. Thank you very much for inviting me in. Thanks to go ahead and thank all the participants from all over the world.
Really appreciate you being here and thank you so much, Nick.
It's been terrific in discussion with you and I hope that all the participants enjoy the book if they get it.
Thank you. There's a lot. There's a lot of good stuff on the chat line as well saying exactly the same thing.
Thank you for a fascinating discussion in Golden. Thank you very much. Bye bye.
Thank you.