- I was very excited by this topic.
I work at the Dalberg Group
and we've dedicated our enterprise
over these last 17 years
to tackling questions of inequality
and a lack of sustainability
that plague the global economy
in all the places where
we've tried to work,
in part, because of the
sheer wasted potential
that that particular dynamic represents.
Billions of people excluded
from attaining their dreams
and living lives of meaning and purpose
just by virtue of the
way that we have chosen
to structure our human affairs.
And so, this is a particularly
interesting topic for me,
particularly coming at the end of,
or during the course of
this week here at Skoll.
I don't know how many of you
were at the awards ceremony yesterday
but I found it really inspiring
seeing each of these social entrepreneurs
stand up and talk about ways
that they are using tools,
time, talent, treasure
to tackle some of the
challenges facing society.
This can be very inspiring,
watching all these brains,
all of these passionate
people having an impact.
But something that was said
by the very last awardee,
Bright Simons, a good friend.
He told the story about the
antisocial entrepreneurs.
I don't know if you caught that.
That struck a chord with me
because on the one hand,
I was sitting in there,
thinking, you know, with such a hall
full of impassioned, caring people,
wanting to make the world a better place,
why are we still struggling
with the system as it is?
And could it be, as in
part alluded to by Bright,
that there's an equally passionate group
of antisocial entrepreneurs?
And to some extent, yes, that is true.
But I think, more
importantly, there's a system
that, while not having any
mustache-twirling villains
in the background,
causes us all to behave in ways
that collectively turn humanity
into a mustache-twirling villain.
And I'm gendering that
on purpose
because part of the way
the power is allocated
is to people who can twirl a mustache.
And so, hopefully, we can
have a discussion today
about that system, how it works,
how, why, and what it does,
and what we can do about it.
And I cannot think of
a better set of guides
for that discussion than
our three panelists today.
Kate, Roger, Shamika will
each take a strand of that
and tease it out.
I will not attempt to in any way summarize
or give an overview of
their extensive resumes
and qualifications.
I will pick the wrong ones to highlight
and you are all very literate.
So, I would urge you to look them up
and I know that their
comments and presentations
will speak for themselves.
Hopefully, we can have a quick
set of early presentations,
a few questions back and forth,
and, as soon as possible,
invite you all in
because I don't think the four of us
can rewrite the rules
of the global economy,
but I think the 50-odd of us
here might just have a shot.
So, we'll try and come back to you
and hopefully welcome
your question and comments
as soon as possible.
With that, it's early in the morning,
breakfast is a bit further behind us,
hopefully we've all
brought in some coffee,
so I would like us to start
with a donut to accompany it.
Kate, why don't you do the honors?
- Thank you, thank you very much.
It's a real pleasure to be here.
Is the slide up, no?
Yes, great.
Yes, I'm gonna talk about donuts.
Don't eat too many donuts.
We know they're not good for us.
I'm going to introduce you to the one
that may well turn out to
be very good for humanity
in the 21st century.
If we're gonna rewrite
the rules of the system,
well, first, we need to figure out
what it is we're trying
to do in a clear purpose.
I wanna start with purpose.
So, I offer you a donut that gives us
purpose of the 21st century.
Imagine humanity's use of resources
radiating out from the
middle of this picture.
That means the hole in
the middle is a place
where people are left falling short
on these centers of life.
Without the food, water,
healthcare, education,
political voice, housing,
access to energy, income,
every social right that
people the world over have
to lead a life of dignity and
opportunity and community.
It's the waste of human potential
that James was talking about.
We want to leave nobody in that hole.
I crowdsourced those 12 dimensions
from the world's governments.
They are the 12 social
priorities in the SDGs,
which means that all
the world's governments
have already agreed that
all the world's people
have a claim to meeting
these essential needs.
We want to leave no one in that hole,
get everybody into the green ring,
but, and this is a big but,
we cannot used Earth's
resources in such a way
that we overshoot the outer
ring, the ecological ceiling,
and put so much pressure on this unique,
delicately balanced living planet
that we kick our planet out of kilter
and we cause climate breakdown
and acidify the oceans
and create a hole in the ozone layer
and catastrophic levels
of biodiversity loss.
And so, these nine
dimensions around the outside
are the nine planetary boundaries
of Earth system science,
the nine life-supporting systems
that keep our planet in the
home-sweet-home for humanity.
Put those two together
and this is a compass
for meeting the needs of all people
within a thriving, living planet.
If that's a compass, you
wanna know where we are.
We want the KPIs, right?
All that red shows you where we are.
The red in the middle shows
the extent to which people
are falling short on
the essentials of life.
You could see the little red
wedge of food at the top,
it moves 11% of the way to
the middle of the circle
because 11% of people
don't have enough food
to eat every day.
You can see on every
one of those dimensions,
there are millions,
indeed billions of people
falling short on life's essentials.
We want to eliminate that red
from the middle of the circle
so everyone meets the social foundation.
But simultaneously, we
have already overshot
the ecological ceiling on climate change,
biodiversity loss,
excessive fertilizer use,
land conversion.
So, this is a selfie of humanity
in these early days of the 21st century.
This is what we look like on our planet.
Once we've seen this, we
cannot go back and ignore it.
This, to me, is why we need new rules
for an ecological and
thriving social system
for the whole of humanity.
But we can't just jump into writing rules.
If you're gonna write rules,
you need to know the dynamics
that you wish to bring about.
So, I'm not actually
gonna talk about rules.
I'm gonna talk about dynamics
that I think underpin any
attempt to put a rule on it.
And I want to talk about three dynamics
that I think we most need to shift
from the 20th to the 21st century.
Never travel without a hosepipe.
The first dynamic
is that we have a
degenerative linear economy.
We take Earth's materials,
stuff them in the pipe of production,
make them into stuff we want,
use it for a while, and throw it away.
This is cutting against the
cycles of the living world.
We need to bend those arrows around
and reuse Earth's resources
so that there's no such thing as waste;
it becomes food for the next process,
an economy that runs on sunlight
instead of fossil fuels.
We need to move from degenerative
to regenerative economic systems.
Some call it the circle
economy, the cycle economy,
regenerative design.
The second dynamic is
that we have inherited,
thanks to 20th-century
technologies and institutions,
we have inherited economies
that centralize the returns
of economic activity
in the hands of a 1%.
We need to transform that into economy
that's no longer centralizing
but rather an economy
that is distributive.
There we are.
This is what we want to look like.
- [Audience Member] Do it again!
Do it again, do it!
- Do it again.
Think 20th-century fossil fuel for energy,
21st-century renewable energy,
a web all over the world of
solar panels and wind power.
20th-century production in one big factory
where the workers come and get paid a wage
and the returns go to shareholders;
21st-century employer-owned
enterprises, cooperatives,
small-scale desktop 3D printing
for a start makes this possible.
20th-century communications,
every telephone call
went through an operator
switchboard and out the other side;
21st century, you already
have a node of this network
in your pocket or in your hand.
It's your iPhone.
And then 20th century,
indeed from the 15th century,
knowledge was handled in
patents and copyrights,
intended to share ideas,
but as we know they're
actually being used to block
and prevent competition and innovation.
Now, we've got the Creative
Commons, open-source world.
This is an unprecedented
opportunity for humanity.
We need to transform from
centralized to distributive.
And then the last one, the hardest one
because we're so darn
addicted to endless growth.
Every government speaks
of its economy's future
as progress, as ever-rising GDP growth,
no matter how rich an economy already is.
I'm sitting next to James in Kenya, right?
Kenya, absolutely, we want to
see the economy of Kenya grow
so that it can meet people's needs.
But I'm sitting here in one
of the richest countries
in the world and still,
our government too here,
is obsessed with further
and endless GDP growth.
I believe we need to move this century
from being growth-addicted
to becoming growth-agnostic
so that economies
actually start to grow up,
so that we stop having institutions
that are financially, politically,
and socially addicted to endless growth,
and that we can actually
instead have economies
that learn to thrive.
This, I think, is the
existential economic question
of the century.
I'm just gonna leave it at
the level of design ideas
and leave it to other to
propose the kinds of rules,
through markets, through regulations,
through collaboration,
through the Commons,
that could bring this about.
I'll say one more thing, though,
that I wrote a book about these ideas
almost two years ago.
It's very well to put ideas in play;
what you really want to see is practice.
And I'm now focusing my
work on working with others
to put these ideas in practice,
with teachers who want to
teach these ideas in school,
cities working with the C40
to bring these ideas into
the design of cities,
governments, community
organizations, tech disruptors.
If that's of interest to you,
I'd love to talk to you later
about how to turn these
new dynamics of the economy
into practice.
Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
Thank you, Kate.
In my notes, as you were speaking
and I was furiously noting things down,
I summarized this as donuts and hosepipes.
- Oh, there we go.
- One aspect that you alluded to,
looking at that selfie,
one of the questions I asked
myself is there's a lot of,
there's a narrative of
inequality embedded there,
- Yes.
- and one you alluded to as well.
It's a dimension of inequality both within
and between societies.
How do you think,
how do we begin to tackle that dialogue
in any sort of meaningful way?
And I know that we'll be coming back to it
with each of the panelists,
but I did want, from your perspective,
how do we begin to have that dialogue,
on one level, within societies,
but on another level, as you said,
the narrative for Kenya
in terms of where the
priorities might need to be,
in terms of that central circle,
might be very different
from where the priorities
need to be in Great Britain,
how do we have that conversation
in some sort of structured way?
- I think we need to
start having conversations
in some of the world's
highest-income countries,
moving the narrative
from growth to thriving.
I hear a few very courageous politicians
start to talk like that.
I'm working with the C40
who are launching a
thriving cities initiative
to talk about what's it
mean for a city to thrive,
to shift away from the idea
that our well-being
lies in endless growth,
because it doesn't.
In our own bodies, we call that cancer.
Our own bodies' health lies in balance
and I think we need to
move from the human body
to the planetary body
and think of moving into balance.
The reason why so many
high-income countries
find this incredibly hard
is because, as you just said,
they're extraordinarily unequal, too.
And so, the idea that betterment
would always come from endless growth,
actually, it needs to
come from redistributing
not just income but the
opportunities to generate wealth,
and that for me is,
that potential lies here.
Redistribute the sources
of wealth creation.
That's what we've got to do.
- I was mistaken.
Donuts, hosepipes, and funky toys.
Thank you.
We hear a bit about this
system and that selfie.
Roger, you have some ideas
on how that selfie came to be
and how it perpetuates itself.
- Yes, yes.
I will start, if this will go up.
Keep it mine.
Oh, thank you.
What is that?
That's something that's
very familiar to all of us.
It's normal distribution.
We call it a normal distribution
because it occurs so
often in human endeavors
and in nature and in other systems.
Height among males is
normally distributed,
among females is normally distributed,
intelligence is normally distributed.
We tend to think that most
things are normally distributed
unless proven otherwise.
I would argue that it is
our fundamental belief about the economy
that it produces results like
this, normally distributed.
In fact, I would argue
that democratic capitalism
is based on a premise that
this is the distribution.
We say you can only develop as a country
when you have, what?
The rise of a large middle class.
Well, that's the bulge in the middle
of the normal distribution.
And then, of course,
there are rich people,
who hopefully we tax higher,
and there are poor people who
we provide more resources to,
and that is the, I would
argue, the conception
of the modern economy.
And the way forward for that
modern economy to get better
is to have that distribution
slowly but surely move rightward
so that the poorest in the distribution
are getting better off every year.
So, I would argue that's the
conception of the economy.
However, there are things
that influence whether something
is a normal distribution or not.
Turns out that complexity theorists
have studied the phenomenon
and say two things
tend to push this kind
of normal distribution
to another kind of distribution.
The application of pressure,
increasing pressure on
a normal distribution,
combined with lowering
the cost of the connection
between the items in
the normal distribution,
causes a different kind of distribution.
So, if we think of the distribution
of Instagram followers,
it actually doesn't look at all like this.
The reason is because
if you asked yourself the question,
who do you follow on Instagram,
what is the method of choosing,
what's the method of choosing
who to follow on Instagram?
What is a key criteria
for you in deciding that?
- Number of followers.
- Number of followers.
So, that's an effect, number of followers,
that becomes the cause
of more of that effect.
And so, if you then follow somebody
who's got a lot of followers,
they have more followers still
and they will have more followers
still and so on and so on.
What happens is when you
have that phenomenon,
you get this transformation
in the distribution.
From that to what's called
a Pareto distribution,
80-20 distribution, where very few,
so the average person has 150 followers,
or the median person, I should say,
has 150 followers on Instagram,
and Kim Kardashian, last I checked,
at 130 million followers.
If you apply ever more
pressure to a system
and lower the cost of connections
so there's greater pressure
for fame and fortune now than there was
and way lower cost of connection,
you can know who's famous,
all you have to do is click on Instagram
and figure that out,
you get this transition.
What I'd argue is that this is the way
the economy is taking shape now
and we rue it and we say there's
greater income inequality,
why is this happening.
It's happening, unfortunately,
for very fundamental, profound reasons.
The reason is that we have
applied ever more efficiency
pressure to economies.
Ever since Adam Smith to David Ricardo
to Frederick Winslow
Taylor to Edwards Deming,
we have said we want
to have more efficiency
because that is what will move
those distributions to the right.
If we keep making the
economy more efficient,
that'll happen.
Accidentally, it was,
I don't think anybody
had a purpose in it,
accidentally, we've done something
to the distribution of income
that has made it more Pareto.
The trouble with Pareto distributions,
the great thing about
normally distributions
is as you go along, they get
more normally distributed.
If they're not quite normally distributed,
there's a central limit theorem
that says they get more that way.
The trouble with this kind of distribution
is they have a tendency
to get more extreme.
So, we shouldn't be surprised
at what's happening in the economy.
If our goal is in a world
where we've lowered the cost of connection
with the internet,
lowered the cost of transportation,
and we've put more and
more pressure on it,
we will have a Pareto
distribution of humans
in terms of their wealth,
of cities, of companies in industries,
of countries on the planet,
and it'll get more and more this way.
So, what I view our task is
is to figure out how to create a balance
between, and this, I
like your balance point,
a balance between efficiency,
efficiency has great elements to it,
and friction.
Friction has been a bad thing.
We've taken friction out of the system
by lowering trade barriers,
deregulating industries
because we believe that friction is bad
and efficiency is good, full stop.
If you just read any,
anything that's written
in economics and whatever,
the implicit assumption,
whether it says it,
is always we gotta get rid of friction
and increase efficiency.
Sorry.
That's getting us that curve
and it'll get us that
curve to a greater extent
with each passing year
which, I think, will in the end undermine
this wonderful thing of
democratic capitalism
unless we start to figure out
how to put enough friction
in economic systems
to get a curve that is
more normal than Pareto.
- Thank you, Roger.
As a former economics major,
thinking about efficiency as a problem
is a bit of a mind shift
but it actually does explain a lot.
It came to life from
actually in your hometown,
current hometown of Toronto.
I was there a few weeks
ago for some meetings
and I was at the Eaton Centre,
very fancy shopping center, et cetera.
It was very cold and there
were a lot of homeless people
wandering the shopping mall kind of lanes,
walking past really fancy stores.
Some of them were sidling past this robot
that was mopping the floors.
And so, you had dozens
of able-bodied people
literally facing death
if they stepped outside
and it was in the middle of a,
I think it was a polar vortex,
- We have those things.
- unable to earn an income,
essentially rendered
or viewed as valueless
by our very efficient system,
and a very expensive machine,
still cheaper than an
employee, doing that work.
Now, everyone who led, every
decision that led to that
was a rational decision
by an individual actor.
How do we even begin?
So, taking your point,
how do you even begin
to address that?
I mean, you posed the question,
but how do you even
begin to address the fact
that we are at such an extreme level
of almost sociopathic
behavior by the system?
- Yeah, I know it, I
think it's gonna be tough
because everybody's taught that formula:
more efficiency, good;
less friction, good.
I think we just have to rethink by sector
how much efficiency we want.
For instance, the view
is, in most governments,
the view is if we sign
more free-trade agreements,
we're doing a good thing.
I'd just like, no.
I wouldn't, actually.
I'd say we got enough.
Let this settle.
Antitrust.
I'm trained as an economist
too, sadly, sorry.
There is now in the EU and
the United States, officially,
an efficiency defense for monopolization.
If you can demonstrate,
yeah, you would know that.
If you can demonstrate that
you've increased the efficiency
of the system by merging
to create a more monopolistic company
that is past the Herfindahl index limit,
they say, that's okay.
Which is insane when you
think about what antitrust,
what Sherman and Clayton
was designed to do.
It said we can't allow this
because they have too much power.
And now, we're saying, but
it's okay if it's efficient.
So, some things like
that, we just have to say.
Oops, made a big boo-boo,
we've gotta reverse course.
But, James, your basic point is right on.
It's going to be hard to root out
this absolutely fundamental
belief structure
that is just embedded now in everything
that any economist has taught
probably in most public policy courses
that are now economics-driven.
If we don't do it, we should just expect
much more Pareto distributions
20 years from now than now.
So, inequality, we should
expect to be much greater
in 20 years than now.
Not a little greater, much greater.
- Something, Kate, that you said.
You used the R-word as part
of your, in your reflections,
the need for some sort of
redistribution in the system.
Shamika, I would love
to hear your reflections
on what we can do about
some of these dynamics.
What are the tools that
may be at our disposal
that do not involve
potentially brainwashing
every economist currently alive.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing.
It would actually be a very good thing.
- I'm not so sure.
First of all, I do have a very
different perspective on this
because I currently, I live in Delhi.
From where I sit, unfortunately, Roger,
and to some extent even Kate's points,
they don't hold because the last 25 years
of globalization has witnessed
unprecedented reduction
in absolute poverty in
my part of the world.
And reduction of absolute
poverty, in many ways,
is the first-order problem
for an emerging economy
such as India and China.
Inequality is a concern but
it is a second-order concern.
In fact, and again, as
intelligent people, not just,
I mean, everyone realizes
that, eventually,
even in the best potential outcome,
some degree of inequality,
we will have to live with.
I have two boys.
I'm raising them exactly the same.
I know they will have different worlds
because they eventually
have different aptitudes
and capabilities, the way it
is rewarded in the market.
But, you know, in India,
if I compare one part with the other,
areas that have grown fast, James,
have witnessed rapid reduction in poverty
in a very inclusive way,
meaning rural and urban India,
it talks about, gender-wise,
a women-headed household.
If you look at maternal
mortality reduction,
if you look at infant mortality reduction,
these are unprecedented gains to a society
which is largely attributed to growth,
but there is a recipe, by the way,
for poverty reduction
and equitable growth,
which is growth plus development spending.
And we have seen local
governments within India
enact that recipe well
such that we've had the kind of progress
and race prosperity.
So, globalization has
done us a lot of good.
I realize that this
anti-globalization sentiment
is very much an OECD problem.
Currently, this is not a concern.
I would say in another 20 years,
it will be a larger concern for us.
Right now, we're really gaining from this.
In fact, if you look at
the comments in the 1980s,
most emerging markets
were against globalization
because the multilaterals, if
you look at the kind of rules
in terms of trade that were being written,
and written by the OECD countries,
countries such as India and China
actually objected a lot to globalization.
We forget.
But today, having done a
lot of those open, you know,
liberalizations of these economies,
the gains are there for people to see.
That's number one.
Number two, for electoral democracies,
meaning places where you have elections,
and by the way, today's the first day
of the general elections in India.
For us, it's a reality of life.
We will have to develop
institutions along the way
which caters to an electoral democracy,
which means everyone has a vote,
though not everyone pays taxes,
and therefore, we will have to respond
to the larger citizenship
where we have not felt a
pushback against globalization
but we are seeing elite
societies, elite institutions
which have tremendous entry barriers.
The third point is really,
again, in an electoral democracy,
you cannot ignore the
changes that is happening
to labor markets.
Because at the end of the day, James,
we can, again, from an efficiency hat,
if we perceive increased prosperity,
while there is some degree of exclusion,
we can think of ways in which
the redistribution can happen,
which is efficient, by the way,
and that's why we're having discussions
like the Direct Benefit Transfer,
the universal basic income.
We're experimenting with it in India.
It is on the manifestos
of all major parties.
And yet that's, again, only
limited to the economic,
this tunnel vision we have,
because we don't quite know
whether people know what
to do with their time
if they don't have a job.
So, it's not just the income.
It's not like people work
just to earn a living.
You also do a job because
it keeps you busy.
You socialize on your job,
most jobs, I would imagine.
There are many things, many benefits,
ways of life which are impacted
by the job that you do,
and earnings is a very limited
way of looking at that.
I wish there were solutions
we would just throw at policymakers.
We don't.
So, we do recommend DBTs and UBI
because we think it will take care
of some degree of uneasiness
in the labor market
and in, let's say, the
bottom 20%, percentile
of the voting citizenship of a country.
But frankly, we don't yet
know whether people are ready
for raised levels of
income with nothing to do.
That can lead to all kinds
of tensions in society
which we aren't really prepared
and frankly we haven't
given it a deep thought yet.
- That response, and I think
it does speak to one aspect
as we were talking about the inequality
both within and between societies.
As you think about different societies
on some sort of curve towards
or progress towards prosperity,
you will see a different case
for a focus on efficiency and so on.
I do struggle with the fact, though,
that that seems to wrestle a lot
with Kate's inner boundary,
the whole question of
inclusion and prosperity.
It doesn't deal with the outer boundary.
The whole question of what
are the ecological limits
that we're running up against.
And those affect developing
countries in particular
on two dimensions.
One, we are bearing the brunt
of the heaviest effects of climate change
and ecological damage.
And two, particularly the
faster-growing economies
are the more rapidly growing contributors
to that same dynamic.
Hugely unjustly because of course
others have had the benefit of centuries
to grow rich while polluting
to their heart's content.
But how do you reckon with that?
How do you balance those two boundaries
or those two priorities, in a sense,
without saying, yeah, globalization,
we'll all be rich but
we'll choke on ground?
- Well, I think that's where economics
has something to contribute,
which is beyond what's right
and the moral aspect of it,
I think there are financial instruments.
We have to begin to think of monetizing
the gains from clean energy.
And someone has to pay for it.
We have to, therefore, come to the table.
We do have now, let's say,
the Global Solar Alliance.
You have innovations such as this
where the emerging markets
are taking leadership
in terms of getting countries
together to recognize
that, look, perhaps we can trade
out of this bad equilibrium.
And again, while you
mention emerging markets
are contributing, but again, you know,
in per capita terms, it's nothing.
You know, an average American pollutes
maybe thousand times more
than an average Indian.
At the end, we need to
be able to figure out
those terms of trade,
because these are global
public goods, right?
The clean air is a global public good
and we should be able to go
back to the coarse understanding
of public goods and pay
for it collectively.
- The question is what is that authority
that is able to demand and extract
at an international level
to make that system work?
Kate, Roger, both of you, you know,
Shamika's point was, to some extent,
if I have to oversimplify,
that some of these concerns
are quote-unquote first-world problems.
Your response.
- I would say a stable climate
is a global public good,
but clean, healthy air is a
very, very local public good.
Yes, there's been a very
significant reduction
in income and food and
educational poverty in India,
but India's got one of the most
polluted airs in the world,
massively degraded soil,
water, I mean, you know this,
water running out in many states,
so the ecological and social
are so deeply intertwined,
locally, the solutions have to be
both regenerative and distributive.
I would say, actually, the donut dynamics
that I'm putting forward
apply so profoundly
to many middle- and
lower-income countries today.
I would never call them developing.
I think we're all
developing countries now.
This is not a developed country,
this country lives way beyond its means,
and we need to transform.
So, I think that, I don't
understand why you would say
that what I'm showing
doesn't apply to India.
I think, actually, it
very significantly applies
to countries like India
and China and Kenya
that see that they massively
need to reduce people's poverty
but they're already, both
locally and globally,
putting pressure on the
fundamental Earth system resources
on which all well-being depends.
So, I think far ahead of
high-income countries,
they're going to recognize
the deep interdependence.
China talks about an
ecological civilization.
I would love to hear the European
Union or any OECD country
talk in such holistic terms
about what well-being is.
I think it's going to come from countries
actually recognizing
interdependence right now.
- I guess.
My thought is I think it's not an,
it can't be an either/or, right?
So, for me, the notion of democracy,
liberal democracy, is a fragile thing.
It hasn't been around for a long time
and it's one of the most
precious things on the planet
to guard, and so I worry,
in a Pareto distribution,
51% of people are not gonna vote
for whatever the system is.
They're gonna vote for something else.
And every time citizenry
has gotten discouraged
and vote for something else,
they don't end up liking
the something else
whether it is Communist Russia,
the National Socialist Party in Germany.
So, I sort of have a fear
of not having liberal democracy protected.
That's why I care as deeply
as I do about going Pareto.
That having been said, the
reduction of absolute poverty
is also critical to the world.
But if we say we're gonna
reduce absolute poverty
in a fashion that causes the
notion of liberal democracy
to wither in the most developed countries,
that's just not a choice
I could live with.
So, the question is, can you introduce
productive friction into the system
that keeps in the most,
the richest, the most advanced economies,
the beacon of liberal
democracy flourishing
while we see the fruits of that,
of whatever kind of efficiency we have
bringing poor people out of poverty.
That's the win-win case
and I'm just not willing
to give up the former
to get the latter,
because then what are you doing it for?
You're helping people get
out of absolute poverty
so they can live in a tyranny.
That's not a win.
- I'll exercise moderator's privilege
and ask one last question
and I'll ask everyone to
prepare questions or comments
'cause it comes back to you next.
Our conversation has focused of necessity,
even by the very framing of our topic,
at the big-picture level.
And a lot of the actions
would be very actionable
if any of us here were a
head of state, a legislator,
someone in control of the
kind of geopolitical system
in some ways.
We have entrepreneurs, we have activists,
we have innovators, we have
people who work in firms
and other things here in the room.
Any thoughts from any of you
around what your perspective
or how you would, what lens you'd bring
to how people at that level of action
should think about their activity?
Design features, other ways to think
about the way that they operate.
Kate, we'll start with you.
- Okay, I'll talk about business.
A lot of companies approach me and say,
oh, we like the donut, how do we make sure
that our company can be a company
that's bringing humanity into the donut?
And I say, we can talk about
your products, you know.
If you wanna talk about
how you made your phone
and how much the people who
made the phone were paid
or the resources that went to the phone,
you can talk about making,
like, this is an iPhone,
this is a fair phone.
This, I'd say, is degenerative
and divisive by design,
how the wages, people are
paid and the way it's made.
Fair phone, I would say
it's aiming absolutely
to be regenerative and distributive,
mining minerals without exploitative labor
and reusing the parts.
Totally different designs of the phone.
But I say to the company, I
don't actually wanna talk to you
only about the design of your products.
I want to talk about the design
of your organization itself.
Because the design of your organization
determines what you can
be and do in the world.
There are five design traits
that I use to understand,
like a detective, any
enterprise in the world.
First, its purpose.
What have you purposed yourself to do?
Secondly, how do you network?
Your relationship with your
customers, with your suppliers,
but also with your, you
may call them competitors,
they may turn out to be your
allies for transformation.
Thirdly, how you govern yourself.
The principles, the rules, the practices,
the incentives internally,
the metrics by which you judge success.
But now, let's get down
to the serious stuff.
How are you owned?
Because whether you're owned by a family
or entrepreneurs or venture
capital or shareholders
is going to profoundly
shape the ultimate driver
which is how you're financed.
And whether that finance is extractive,
20th-century financer says,
I want high returns fast,
or whether it's actually
generative, financers say,
I'm investing in you for social
and ecological transformation
with a fair financial return.
So, to me, those five
traits of purpose, networks,
governance, ownership, and finance
are the design traits
that we need to get right
for 21st-century enterprise,
if it is indeed going to be regenerative
and distributive by design
in what it does in the world.
- Oh, I guess I'd maybe,
we both philosophical about this.
I would say there's a tried-and-true path
that's been established ahead
of you of entrepreneurs,
which is to be entrepreneurial
which means to try and create something
that does not now exist,
even though nobody thinks it's doable
and there's no data to demonstrate it.
Correct, right?
And then when you succeed,
when you succeed as entrepreneurs,
you will start to believe
that you must be careful
and you must make your
decisions based on the data,
and if the data don't
show you that it's doable,
then you shouldn't do it.
That's the historical evolution
of virtually every
entrepreneur on the planet.
So, my admonition to you is don't do it.
Remember what made you successful
which is imagining something
that does not now exist
for which there is not data to prove it
and doing it anyway.
- Well, I think for social
enterprises specifically,
because there is a level
of activism and there's a,
the original motivation for
getting into this business,
and I will stick to the
business aspect of it,
I think it's about time we also
had a serious introspective
sort of a debate and
discussion amongst ourselves.
How much profit is too much profit?
I say this because, with
full responsibility,
there's a forthcoming report
on the impact investing space
in southern part of the
world, emerging markets,
and the returns are tremendous.
It's clearly market value
for certain enterprises
such as this is there.
There's great value and
there's willingness to pay
and so on, so forth.
But I think it's important
to realize that sometimes,
when we are fixing the
market imperfections
by coming up with a new model,
we are also in the
realm of what is broadly
supposed to be
responsibility of government.
You're thinking of
health, education, water,
public goods at large.
And that tussle requires for
us to be mindful of the fact
that the perception that we're
really making too much profit
out of people who might
have a willingness to pay
but that also reflects a certain lack of,
sort of deeper understanding
on behalf of the industry itself,
which we have seen in
the microfinance space.
When the successful IPOs were launched,
we had the champions
of financial inclusion
like Muhammad Yunus go
up and basically said,
you know, these are nothing
but modern moneylenders.
There's credibility and sort
of a right ring to that.
And yet, we are seeing that
the criticism of this nature
is not feeding well into the system.
We aren't really ready to
have deeper conversations
on the social indicators,
beyond the financial returns.
And this is not gonna happen from outside.
In fact, we do not want governments
to be setting social indicators
or quality councils and so on.
It should really be something
that should come out
from the industry and the activists
and the entrepreneurs themselves.
- Great, thank you.
Opening it up to all of you.
I'll take three questions or comments.
Try to keep them short and recognizable.
Either ask questions or comments.
We will go here, the
gentleman at the front,
the lady at the back,
and the lady over here.
So, we'll go one, two, three.
- Thank you very much.
This has been great.
My name is Rick Spence
and I'm covering the
conference for a magazine
called Corporate Knights in Toronto
which is also Roger's adopted hometown.
My question is for Roger
'cause I was really intrigued
in your notion of friction.
I was hoping you'd share
a few more examples
of what types of frictions
you need to impose,
maybe in a couple different
aspects of society,
to help keep that movement towards
more equal distribution.
And if any of the other
panelists wanted to comment
on any of the particular solutions
that you're talking about,
that would be great, too.
Thank you.
- Sure, sure.
Well, I mean, I do think--
- Shall we take the three
and then--
- Oh, oh, sure, sure.
- Yeah, great.
- Sure, sorry.
- Good morning and thank you all
for very stimulating presentations
in your opening remarks.
I'm Debra Dunn.
I am at the d.school at
Stanford on the faculty
and also on the board
of the Skoll Foundation.
Kate, I was particularly inspired
by your overall donut model,
which is very clear, specific,
measurable, actionable
as well as by your design principles.
Your design principles for business
particularly resonate with me,
in talking about the
need to shift governance,
metrics, ownership, finance.
My question for you is what
do you think it will take
to make rapid shifts on a broad basis
around business?
Because to me, what
we're not talking about
at a very fundamental level
are the values that are driving
our societies and business
that we buy into,
explicitly or implicitly,
that lead to a system
that's based around growth
and profit for business,
that doesn't really
embrace any human values
that are implied in the donut.
Thanks.
- Fantastic.
And the third question was right here.
- Okay, good afternoon.
Thank you so much for your insight.
I had a question more along the lines of,
we're talking more about
first-world economics,
globalization, and global economics
as the problem and issue,
and talking a little bit about solutions,
but there are trends that
are happening globally
in regards to the ecological limits
of growth and change
that have been referenced
in the discussion today.
There are also trends and changes
in technology and legal structures
in relation to giving
rights to nature themselves,
like giving personhood to rivers
and other natural elements
that we have, forests, mountains.
So, I'm just wondering, how do you think,
we're talking, what I'm
hearing is that economics
is being talked about
as a top-down approach,
as a human-centered approach,
but I think ecologically,
there are gonna be forces
that are going to change
the system inevitably
in really profound and
potentially devastating ways.
So, I'm just wondering how you factor that
into these current models and projections
that you're talking about.
- Fantastic.
So, frictions, how to
make the rapid shifts
in the way business thinks,
and really how do we rethink
the allocation of rights
beyond just humans and into
our broader ecological sphere.
Shall we just proceed in that direction,
Kate, starting with you?
- Sure, okay.
Thanks for the question
about how do we make
massive, rapid shifts.
I gave the five design traits of business,
purpose, networks, governance,
ownership, and finance.
I'm gonna go for the top and the bottom.
Purpose.
What are we doing?
I think we need to transform our purpose
and that, often, that comes
from a bigger understanding
of how the Earth system works,
what prosperity and thriving looks like
for people and for the planet.
If we don't understand planetary thriving,
how on Earth do we expect,
and that's the problem of economics,
we jump in and think we're
gonna manage the household,
as it were, that's the
meaning of economics,
without understanding diddly-squat
about how the planet actually thrives.
All economists should have to
understand the Earth system
if they're gonna have the gumption to say
we're gonna manage our planet.
Let's start with purpose.
What is thriving and
what on Earth am I doing
running an organization,
whether it's a university or
a business or a government,
that is not purposed for the 21st century?
But then I want to jump to
the bottom as well, finance.
To me, it comes back to
the design of finance.
I need a bit of hosepipe again.
Finance is designed with this expectation.
Capitalism has a system of finance
that, designed with compound interest,
expends endless accumulation.
So, the idea of endless growth
is at the heart of our financial system.
And to me, that's just incompatible
with thriving on a holistic,
regenerative planet.
I think we profoundly need to change
not the individual enterprise
but the underlying financial system.
So, unless we get finance that is aligned
with 21st-century thriving,
we're not gonna be able to do it.
Can I add one comment
on the person ahead of,
I think it's fascinating,
people so frustrated
by can we use the market mechanism
which is where economics, of
course, has told us to go,
use the market mechanism,
impose a price, a tax,
to protect rivers?
People are moving away from that,
saying I'm not going to
use a market mechanism,
treat a river as a market entity.
I'm going to actually move
to citizenry and personhood.
I'm going to respect the
river not as a commodity
but as a living being.
And so, I'm going to use the rights,
the legal framing of rights
to give personhood to rivers.
It's powerful but we
can't go around labeling,
it won't work to go labeling
one river at a time,
one tree, one ecosystem
at a time, personhood.
I like the notion of Polly Higgins,
who's a campaigner for many
years on right of ecocide,
recognizing ecocide as a crime
because we need to, again,
start with understanding
of the living planet on which we depend,
and protect that fundamentally
and not leave it at the,
at the vulnerability
of being managed through market mechanisms
which just don't respect living systems.
- Yeah, maybe I'd pick up a bit of that.
That is, to me, an
efficiency obsession point,
which is that if we're
obsessed with efficiency,
we can put a market price on everything
and make it run efficiently.
Last time I checked, we
don't put a market price
on love for our children,
love for our spouse,
duty to country.
There's no market for those
so why does there have to be a market
with an efficient equilibrium
price for everything?
So, I would concur.
And how you do it is the building
of a brand-new infrastructure
and building infrastructure is hard,
so being able to do that will be difficult
but it may well be the only way out
of the dilemma you pose.
Answering specifically
Rick Spence's question,
I guess the...
Another example of this
is just not having really
kind of lame proxies for efficiency.
This is what the business world has done.
It said, well, efficiency in
labor means low labor rates,
so it's more efficient
to get cheaper workers
than not, and efficiency
means very low slack,
so if you're a retailer,
you only have exactly the
number of person-hours
on the floor to serve the customers.
Those are measures of efficiency.
A great professor at MIT, Zeynep Ton,
has written this great book
called The Good Jobs Strategy,
which I recommend to everybody,
which says if you take a
different view of efficiency
and say those aren't good
metrics for efficiency,
you'll be like Costco and pay
dramatically above minimum wage,
it's like 20 bucks on average
for their floor people,
so they don't care about minimum wage
'cause it doesn't enter the equation,
and build in 20% slack.
They say his is how many
people we should have,
and we'll just have 20% more.
What that ends up producing
is a fantastic shopper experience
where they're served by
deliriously happy employees
who are having great careers,
staying there forever
'cause it's a great career,
and their sales per square
foot and profitability
are in excess of everybody
in their competitive set.
So, part of it is stepping
back from efficiency
and saying we have to think about it
in a more holistic way,
in what produces a great result,
not these sort of very,
very basic meat-ax views
of measures or proxies for efficiency.
- Shamika, any comments?
- Just to back off on, I'm
getting a bit uncomfortable
with this economist beating.
And I'll tell you why.
- You're good.
Get used to it.
We reached peak economist
about 10 years ago.
I'll tell you why.
You know, this is, I think,
one of the biggest myth of this century,
that we truly have free markets
in the places we believe there are.
No.
I think even most OECD countries,
they are captured markets.
We do have versions of cronyism.
I think we should go back to Hayek.
We should go back and read
the origins of free markets
and what Friedrich Hayek had to say
because we've come a long way from that
and we believe the
institutions that exist today
are what free markets
are meant to look like.
Basically, what I'm trying to get to is
if people value clean energy,
clean rivers, forests,
we have to figure out a way
to truly make it free market.
Meaning you really have
ways in which one can trade.
Now, of course, efficiency is very,
Roger's point is very deep,
that efficiency is being viewed
from a very narrow framework right now.
I think the attempt should be to go back
to truly liberal free economies
where we can actually elicit values
and preferences of buyers and sellers,
which we don't have today.
This myth is a self-perpetuating one,
which is the reason why I believe
that economies are not working.
They're not working
because they're structured
not the way it's meant to serve.
Free markets are meant to serve consumers.
And that's where the antitrust
points that he raised earlier
are also extremely deep,
that we've come to a point
where we think large tech firms,
they don't need to be regulated
because greater efficiency
for the economy as a whole is good.
No, that is not what
free markets were about.
Free markets are all about competition
because competition is what leads
to good outcomes for consumers.
- I did want to make one comment
and then Kate, we'll take yours,
and then we'll come to
the left side of the room.
Left from my perspective
which does not imply any view
on the ideological tilt of the room.
One thing that I was thinking
as you were speaking, Shamika,
is, you know, as an African in a continent
that should be on the,
advancing as a mainly agricultural hub
but is faced with the fact
that its most high-potential,
nearby market,
Europe, of which this location
is at least for the next,
well, anyway,
is a deliberately closed market
and a deliberately manipulated market,
and that a good chunk
of African rural poverty
is a direct consequence of
European rural prosperity.
Or artificially enhanced
European rural prosperity.
So, there is something to that point,
but I am sure Kate is gonna point out
that there are aspects of Pax Economica
that may not necessarily fully hold true.
- Well, I would so love
to have a longer conversation with you.
I respectfully but profoundly disagree
that we need to go back to Hayek
and that what we need are free markets.
I don't think there is such
a thing as a free market.
I've never been to any
country that has anything
that could be called a free market.
Markets are shaped, they're
embedded in regulation
and in social norms.
They're a space where you allow
market activity to take place
but always bounded by
what's acceptable legally
or culturally or socially.
And that's what makes them work.
They must have limits;
otherwise, they utterly undermine
social and human right values
and undermine the living world.
But we have the market
and we have the state.
The 20th century got obsessed
with this ideological battle.
We lost sight of the household
where we all begin every day,
except when you're in a conference
and you begin it in a hotel,
but when you're at home, you begin
with looking after
yourself and your partner
and your kids and your parents,
and this is a fundamental
of our well-being.
And we have the Commons,
that place where people come together
not through the market,
not through the state,
but as a community and cocreate value,
whether it's a garden on the corner
of your neighborhood block
or Wikipedia or Linux.
So much of the most creative innovation
is going on in the space of the Commons,
so I would never want to
start today's economics,
in fact, I insistently
started introducing students
to the idea that the economy is made up
of four forms of provisioning:
market, state, household, and commons.
They're all unique.
I wouldn't want to live in an economy
that lacked any one of them
but I would never give that
predominance to the market
that it gained in the 20th century
'cause I think it massively crowded out
other forms of organizing,
other social ways that humans
choose to come together.
- I shouldn't be so bad about economists.
I do believe that the only way
for economists to come back
from where they are today
is to stop with the all-else-being-equal.
Economists have gotten
narrower and narrower,
and you would know it from the academy,
which I've been playing
in for the last 21 years,
that the more you hold
all else to be equal,
the more likely you are
to able to get tenured
in the economist world.
And that's been a disservice
that economists have done to themselves.
Are there general
equilibrium economists; yes.
Are there broadly thinking ones; yes.
But they are few and far between,
so I think part of the problem we have
with the obsession with efficiency
is this narrow view
of we can look at efficiency this way
and if economists wanna make a comeback,
it's broadening, which
is going to be annoying
and difficult and challenging
because the fewer things you hold equal,
the more complicated your
economic analysis has to be
and the more tricky the modeling is.
And so, I'm trying to stick a sharp stick
in the back of economists to
say get your act together,
not you're useless, it's
get your act together.
- All right, let's hear from the lefties.
One.
We'll start here.
We will come to the center if
there are any hands up here.
We'll go one, two,
and actually the lady
at the very back there.
So, three.
- She's a centrist.
- Yes.
Well, we don't know.
- My name is Dorothy Stoneman.
I'm not an economist, I'm an organizer.
I'm curious as to why,
and I came in a few minutes
late so maybe I missed it,
why in talking about the
R-word, redistribution,
we didn't talk about progressive taxation.
I'd like somebody to speak to that.
I'm curious as to why, in
talking about the changes
in the last 40, 50 years,
we didn't talk about the fact
that the distribution of
increased productivity
has been unfair and has
gone primarily to the owners
and not to the workers,
and why I didn't hear mentioned
the issue of the single bottom line,
which, to me, is a fundamental rule
that needs to be changed for
the owners and the investors
that the single bottom line of profit
is the rule, the dominant.
I heard a lot of important good things
and I don't know why I
didn't hear any of that,
so could somebody speak to that?
- [Assistant] Thank you.
- My name's Simon Taylor.
I'm one of the founders of Global Witness.
We investigate the links between
environmental exploitation
and human rights abuse.
Very often, that brings us into collision
with what I would describe as
the predatory economic system
that seems to be the prevailing
norm that we have today,
which I see, over the
period of our existence,
as having manifestly got worse,
the concentration of
more power in the few,
the wealth asymmetry
and the power asymmetry
in the political space
that we see exercised
through our politicians
who, it seems to me, are
becoming increasingly corrupted.
Just as an observation, it strikes me
that we really don't want
to have more of Hayek
because, it seems to me,
the natural equilibrium
coming out of the Hayek model,
once you engage it in
the political system,
is precisely the system we have got.
So, I'm very encouraged
by what Kate was saying
about this balanced economy.
I have, I guess, two related questions.
One is, I'd love to hear from the panel
and anyone else in the room,
what we can do about this
predatory economic system
that concentrates power in boardrooms,
particularly in very predatory companies
like, for example, oil companies
that we often end up in fights with,
where the predominant model
to maximize wealth and value
is diametrically now,
given the climate crisis,
opposed to our collective public interest
or the biosphere's interest.
What do we do about that?
Because the board members are essentially,
in a sociopathic way, of oil companies,
continuing the status quo and
we can no longer afford this.
So, how do we change that business model
and, I think, based on my experience
of dealing with oil companies,
force them to go into managed decline?
That's one question.
Second really quick
one is a bit facetious,
but do you think economists
and others in the
sociopolitical, economic space,
through their academic careers,
before going into industry and so on,
should be required, as
part of their courses,
to understand or to take
ecology, basic ecology units?
Because if you had, as an
economist, in your training,
the ability to understand basic ecology,
a lot of all the hypotheses that we hear
which are sort of conveniently
excluding externalities,
it would seem to me,
would have to disappear.
- Noa Gafni from Trust Collab.
I was just wondering, you know,
80% of people today believe
that the system is not working for them.
How can we rebuild trust in the system
with the common man?
- Progressive taxation,
predatory economics,
and rebuilding trust.
Shamika, you take the first bite.
- We did talk about why...
There is a concept
and we should have a
deliberation internally
on how much profit is too much profit.
It basically is exactly
what you were referring to,
which is that there are limits to how much
even farms and stakeholders
must reward financial gains
out of any enterprise.
That's first.
On taxation, no, absolutely.
Those are conversations
which are happening.
I think they should happen a lot more.
Part of the problem is that
we are beginning to give up
on the fundamental lessons of economics
and we're looking for
solutions externally.
And Kate, I completely disagree with you
because, you know,
the property rights are not well-defined
when we think of Commons.
Today, most tribal societies,
including if in some of the OECDs,
for instance, in Canada,
where you have reservations
and so on, so forth,
property rights, the way Elinor Ostrom,
and I'm referring to now
most classical economists
because we've talked about solutions
to a lot of these problems,
and they are fundamentally,
they rest on property rights,
well-defined property rights,
and somehow, we seem to
accept the current system
as an outcome of free
markets, which it is not.
Because we've really never
pushed for institutions
to have better-defined property right,
and if you don't have
well-defined property rights,
the terms of trade will
be what we have today.
As you said, 80% feel left out, yes,
because we have not defined
their property rights well.
So, it's worth going back to
some of those discussions.
Externalities, actually, well,
we talk a great deal about externalities.
In fact, most government interventions,
in fact, the policy space
is all about externalities
because we believe markets do break down.
And when markets break
down, that's exactly,
in fact, that should be the only time
when governments really ought to come in.
But more on an optimistic, I
mean, the way I view things,
all of you who are in the
social enterprise space,
are here, you know, innovation happens,
new ideas come about,
exactly because of the
motivations that one foresees
from the markets or otherwise.
Recognition could be a value in itself.
There are all kinds of
outcomes that we put value to.
It is not necessarily only financial.
So, on a very positive note,
the presence of such a large
group of social entrepreneurs
at a forum like this is
exactly the kind of innovations
that we hope to see for
changes in the future.
- I would like to defend Shamika
and just ask people on this front,
what's happened here is
what's happening so much now
in modern dialogue.
She used the word Hayek
and focused on one tiny aspect of Hayek
that she found,
that she wanted to highlight
as being important,
and then she gets slammed for believing
that Hayek is right on everything.
Right?
And that's modern dialogue
and it's not helpful
to actually having it.
So, just a little point.
On the 80%, that's my concern.
My concern is, in a Pareto distribution,
80% ought to feel that
they're disenfranchised,
so we've gotta fix it.
On taxation, I think America has run
a 35-ish-year experiment
on unusually low marginal
effective tax rates
on the wealthy.
It was an experiment and it's played out
and the answer is obvious.
And I think that'll be fixed.
Your point about the difference
between productivity,
what she's pointing out,
Dorothy is pointing out,
for a long, long time in
America and most OECD countries,
productivity and wages, the
correlation was damn near 1.0,
and around 1975, '76, it's deviated,
and so the correlation
is almost nothing now.
Productivity goes up and
wages go the same way.
That, to me, is, again, the
problem that I'm looking at,
which is in this efficiency-driven world
where people are using short-term
metrics for efficiency,
companies believe that they can take
out of the hides of workers
all the productivity gains
and everything will be fine.
And it's not, right?
You get unhappy workers,
uncommitted workers,
you get this downward
spirals, social cohesion,
blah blah blah blah
blah, all of that stuff.
And so, it's a challenge.
Unfortunately, a whole lot of it
is a retail, not wholesale, challenge,
so companies have got to figure
out what Costco figured out
and fix that themselves.
It's going to be hard to figure out
an easy way to mandate that from on high.
Although I think there are some ways,
there are some ways to think about it
but it's a core problem.
- I have no critique of economists at all.
My critique is we can wick theory.
I cannot stand what
students are taught today
in universities like this
one and the world over
as Economics 101,
because it's the most
important language and ECON101
is the ubiquitous and most
powerful study of economics
'cause that's what most
people study a little bit of.
My beef is the idea that
economics starts with the market,
supply and demand.
If that's the reason,
because we start there,
that's why we call the
death of the living world
an externality, which
is absolutely insane.
It's a hundred years since Pigou came up
with the idea of externalities.
I sincerely believe if he
or Hayek or Keynes or Marx
or any of them were alive today,
they'd say, what are you doing?
We died hundreds of years ago.
Come up with ideas that are
fit for your own times.
And by the way, we were all
rich, white, Northern men,
and that meant we only had a rich, white,
Northern male perspective on the world,
and there's a lot of things
that other people see
that we didn't see, so bring
in more of a diversity.
That is my critique of turning back
to economists of the past.
I think we need to start now
with the far greater, richer
understanding of the world.
And I absolute agree,
economics means the art
of household management.
And today, the household we manage
is not a single status in Xenophon's time,
it's not a city, it's not the nation
that Adam Smith worried
about, it's the planet.
So, the art of household
management has to understand,
has to start with an
understanding of the household.
It has to start with Ecology 101.
Otherwise, how can we
have the hubris to say
we're gonna manage something
that we don't begin to even understand?
We have to understand the planet,
we have to understand
the nature of humanity,
not modeling rational, economic
man, but the richness of,
and the complexity
embedded in every human.
Yes, we're competitive
and we're collaborative.
How do we best harness this
strange dichotomous human being
to actually bring about
good collective ends?
So, to your point,
Dorothy, redistribution.
I want to dream higher.
I want to go for like
what James was describing
as sort of what is it entrepreneurs do,
they have a big idea that
they have no data for
and everyone says is impossible,
I wanna go for one of those
on the collective scale.
Rather than focusing on ways
on just the economic system
is what it is and it
throws up inequalities
and let's redistribute,
can't we go deeper and predistribute
the opportunities of wealth creation?
And that's why I bring this.
This invites us to
predistribute opportunity.
The most important predistribution
is the capacity of every human,
which is why we should
have good investments
in every country in health, in education,
so we can each have potential.
Let's predistribute the
ownership in land and housing.
London and a city like Oxford
is owned by a few landlords
which make it absolutely
prohibitively expensive
to live here.
It doesn't have to be
that way, it's a design.
Let's predistribute the
ownership of enterprise.
We had 20th-century corporations owned,
the returns going to their shareholders.
21st-century opportunity means we can have
far more small-scale, locally owned,
employee-owned, cooperatively
owned enterprises
reunite workers with
the means of production,
because they can have solar panels
on the roof of their factory,
they can have 3D printers.
We have the world's
knowledge at our fingertips.
This is my hope for much
of Africa and much of Asia,
that people can work locally
in small-scale, globally
connected organizations
because we've got technologies
that never existed before.
This is the amazing opportunity.
So, let's not just
redistribute the returns
of a deeply unequal
20th-century industrial economy;
let's redesign a
predistributed opportunity
that generates wealth far more widely.
That, I think, is an
opportunity we have to seize.
- I'm in!
- Thanks.
- Cool.
- James, can I just make
one comment on the training?
A comment of encouragement on
the should people be forced
to take an ecological course.
I was dean of a business
school for 15 years,
1998 to 2013,
and the single biggest
difference in the students
between the entering class in '98 and 2013
was, in 1998, environmental things
were just not a big issue.
By 2013, it was huge.
It was just huge.
There were clubs about it,
demand for courses and the like.
I was very encouraged by it.
It was a sea change in 15 years
from my first year to my last year.
So, I actually think we
don't have to ask them,
the students to do it now.
They are demanding it.
And if you don't give it to
them, then it's miserable,
as of course it is
when you don't give
students what they want.
And so, just a point of encouragement.
I think it's heading in a very good,
and this is business schools,
too, this isn't even,
which are arguably maybe
to the more business side
of what you'd see in economics,
the faculties and the like.
- I'm not going to try to summarize
the richness and diversity
of perspectives, and we are approaching,
or we're actually at the
end of our allotted time.
I will say that we set
out to have a conversation
about rewriting the rules
for an economic system
that serves all.
What it did is raise a few, I think,
pretty fundamental and
provocative questions.
Certain words that we use
without any judgment loaded
turned out to have deep
value judgments embedded.
Words like growth, words like efficiency,
words like friction.
At the same time, asking the question
is part of the problem with
our current economic system
the fact that we don't follow the rules
of the system we claim to
follow, to Shamika's point.
It did leave me with a
deeper question for myself
which is, very often, I talk
about the world of the future
as one that is characterized
by inclusive and sustainable growth,
and a lot of what was being
said in this conversation
suggested I can have two of those three.
So, I'm gonna have to ponder that
and maybe interrogate it a bit more.
But what does that mean then
if we have to choose among those three?
And depending on where you
are, living in Kenya, in India,
in the United Kingdom, in
Canada, or the United States,
the answers may be different,
and yet we live on one single ecosphere
with externalities that flow all across.
So, how do we come to
some sort of alignment
or an answer for all of
us as a human community?
Hopefully, you will agree with me
that it has been a tremendously
provocative conversation,
some really rich perspectives
from our three panelists.
Let's give them a round of applause.
Thank you, panelists.
- Thank you.
