good evening and welcome to this second nobel prize lecture of this festival josh tiglis doesn't need any introduction not only because he has been to previous edition of a festival he was with us in 2015 and that time he was in presence and we hope to have him back soon with us in trento but also because josh iglitz is one of the most influential economists in the world according to some rankings made by the syllabus project is among the five economists most widely cited in the discipline in the profession uh together with uh dara nasimoglu who was just presenting uh here in trenton and just before esther duflo and other person we know very well in trento because of their contribution to previous edition of the of of the festival but also is very well known also outside the profession i think if you were to ask uh the layman the person the lay person about uh famous economist i think that the name of josh stiglitz would be one of the first uh to be recalled um joe stiglitz has been working uh very much in understanding market failures uh he was awarded the nobel prize we were talking about this in 2015 because of his work on informational symmetries clearly this is a typical case where the private initiative the market fails and there is a need for a state intervention but there are many other clearly cases where this is needed and also he has been uh very important in uh looking at the natural policy making and also inspiring policy making having very important position uh first of all he was uh the president of the council of economic adviser under the clinton administration he was also senior vice president of the of the world bank and the chief economist that is very well known for his independent thinking in some areas he has been really a pioneering evolution of a way of thinking of economists on in presenting the limitation of globalization he was traveling with some 20 25 years in advance with many other people in the in the profession so tonight is going to talk about the return of the state which is also the title of this edition of the festival so it's perfectly on topic and the end of neo-liberalism so uh joe the floor is yours and thank you again for being with us well thank you and i'm really sorry i can't be with you in person uh i really enjoyed my my uh time last time in in trento um this is a a moment of of uh real reflection because it's to me at least it's clear that uh the neoliberal model that uh has prevailed for the last four decades uh has come to an end uh even in the united states uh the country uh most devoted to neoliberalism you might say both the left and the right both the democratic and the republican parties have rejected neo-liberalism uh different grounds different bases but uh you might say uh neoliberalism uh has fallen from the dominant position that it had uh before the 2008 crisis my talk today is about where we should be going in this post-neo-liberal order but to understand where we should be going in this post neoliberal order when asked to understand um the failure of markets um uh markets governed by profit making uh um private firms we have to understand better the role of government and we have to understand why the dichotomy often presented between private and public uh is too simplistic and that we ought to be looking for a richer what i would call ecology of institutional arrangements so i'm going to begin the discussion about uh with the critique of markets uh that central because neoliberalism put markets on a pedestal it basically said rely more or less unmarkets with a very small role for government to fill certain limited uh problems and i want to argue that both theory and evidence shows that markets on their own are neither efficient nor stable they produce uh too little of some things uh too little research and too much of other things too much pollution too much risky investments of the kind that led to the financial crisis in 2008. uh the externalities that we've repeatedly confronted uh are areas where markets are very important and today we realize that externalities are not a second order phenomena they are first order climate change is existential uh the future of the planet is at risk and climate change is the result of an externality the fact that each individual and as he goes about his business produces uh too much carbon uh too much carbon dioxide methane all the other greenhouse gases and that has put the planet at risk uh the externalities were at the center of the pandemic one individual's decision not to wear a mask and i'm pleased to see that most of you are wearing masks or not to get vaccinated puts others at risk and so uh you need a government intervention now just as an aside one of the uh problems of leaving this uh to the market leaving it to individuals has been in the united states a lot of people are saying uh you're infringing on my freedom to require me to wear a mask or require me to get a vaccine but one person's freedom is another person's unfreedom your decision not to wear a mask imperils the lives of others so a slight inconvenience to you can lead to a situation where you put at risk the life of somebody else and that's why society as a whole has to make judgments of how do you balance these and it's clear in this particular case that the sliding convenience of a mass is totally outweighed by the risk of public health the risk of death the risk of disease to the rest of society and that's why correctly in my view governments have mandated masks and it's why i think governments should mandate vaccines and in many areas they have so these externalities are at the center of our society in 2008 the world saw a major economic top downturn again it was caused by externalities it was caused by the fact that our banks undertook excessive risk and when those risks didn't pay off the entire global financial system experienced a meltdown jobs were lost and there was an enormous amount of economic suffering and that's why we need regulations to prevent that kind of excess risk taking to make sure that banks have adequate balance sheets right now there's another uh example of a debate going on again involving the banks the banks want to continue to lend to fossil fuel they want to continue to provide capital that will put at risk the entire planet financial risk was one thing but now we're talking about planetary environmental risk and they don't want to be circumscribed from engaging in this extraordinarily risky lending risky for the financial market because when the reality uh comes in prices of carbon reflect that reality the value of the carbon assets will go down they'll be stranded assets there'll be a risk at least of a significant risk of a financial crisis and they're resisting the central banks engaging in the kind of regulations that would prevent this kind of disaster um so uh these are all example examples of uh externalities that are front and center they're not second order things uh if you took a standard economics course you might discuss the externalities in one small chapter often at the end of the course you may not have had time to do it the point i want to emphasize these are first order effects but there's another set of problems with markets markets pay no attention to social justice the distribution of income and uh that uh is explicit in the multiple uh power grabs uh that uh private profit maximizing firms are engaged in there are two ways of getting rich one is by contributing to social welfare by making intervention innovation by working hard but there's another way of getting rich and that is by exploiting others uh exploiting market power exploiting human vulnerabilities unfortunately too many of those who become very rich have done it through the latter through exploitation in one form or another rather than through social contributions uh there are two alternative theories that have competed with each other for a very long time one says views of economic relations as basically harmonious and inequalities is basically arising from differences in individuals social contributions the other view views things as much more contentious much more conflict much more a matter of power and power leading to some groups exploiting others in recent years the evidence has become overwhelming that the second view provides a better description of what is going on in today's economy in today's society if you look at where the agree the the the the the enormous inequalities that have grown for instance in the united states a very large fraction of those at the top not all have gained a very large fraction of their wealth through exercise of market power and uh uh abuse uh exploitation of others uh in a way the president of the united states before biden uh was emblematic of this kind of exploitation trump university excel like many of the other uh for-profit universities excelled in uh trying to figure out how to take advantage of other individuals and fighting against regulations that would circumscribe their ability to take advantage of others we we've seen a recent battle uh in the united states uh over these power relationships let me just give you a couple uh examples and these have to do with the rules of the economic game the rules of the economic game are not just incidentals they really define how things play out so one important area is the rules that allow workers to get together collect a bargaining unionize do they facilitate workers coming together and bargaining together or do they hamper it the employers for the last 40 years have been engaged in a strategy of weakening the bargaining rights of workers making it more difficult for them to unionize it's a matter you might say of increasing transaction costs that makes it sound innocuous but outcomes can really be affected by these kinds of transaction costs the question is are uber workers employees or are they self-employed you might say what difference does it make well it turns out it makes a great deal of difference because if there are employees we pass the laws that help protect them against exploitation but uber and the other platforms don't want that kind of protection they know that that protection changes the balance of power and helps workers so that they can get a barely decent standard of living that they get paid at least a minimum wage and that's why uber has fought uh hard to make sure that they're treated as self-employed so they aren't given these kinds of protections another example something that should be obvious that those advising investors old age people thinking people who are vesting for their old age retirement accounts should be held to a fiduciary standard in other words they're acting on behalf of those that they're supposed to be advising there shouldn't be conflicts of interest but when the obama administration passed a regulation that said that investor advisors should not have conflicts of interest and should be held to a fiduciary standard the investment community the banks the other investment community rose up in arms he said we can't operate if we don't exploit those who are putting their funds with us we have to have conflicts of interest to take advantage of them well you can see i get a little bit worked up about this because i think it's outrageous that somebody that you go to trusting them can have those conflicts of interest and not even disclose them well these are the rules of the game right now we've been going through another example in the context of climate change as all of you know the big corporations are make decisions by boards of directors the boards of directors are elected by their shareholders and in the united states there have been advisory services that have advised the shareholders how to vote they advise them about for instance the environmental position of boards of members of the boards of directors in oil companies like exxon well if you're the president ceo of exxon or if you're uh the leader of one of these oil companies uh you don't want that you want to appoint your friends to be on the board of directors and so you don't want these advisory services telling the public who which directors are good for the environment and which directors are bad and so under the trump administration they passed a regulation circumscribing these advisory services well as many of you may know in spite of that there was a contested election to the board of director directors of exxon and uh the uh old board three of the old board of directors were replaced by uh a new slate that uh seems to be more committed to dealing uh with the environment uh absolutely necessary to save the planet and also for the future profits because uh like it or not uh those investments they're making in oil are going to be stranded assets in the not too distant future well uh the uh uh the good news is that the head of the securities and exchange commission which is charged with protecting ordinary investors the newly appointed uh had gary gensler has announced that he's not going to enforce this uh despicable regulation from the trump administration and will revisit the regulation it wasn't even clear whether it was legally enforceable well globally we also see uh power being exercised in a whole variety of ways power was exercised in colonialism the more generally we recognize we should recognize that the idea that markets are competitive at least sufficiently competitive that the standard neoliberal model is applicable uh that is a myth um there is some competition but not sufficient to curb the exploitations the market power that i've described and that's precisely why this has become such a political battle the third issue i want to talk about is why government the role of government is particularly important in the 21st century uh the model neoliberal model never made any sense uh my own work showing that markets on their own are not efficient uh work showing is not stable uh should have made it clear that there was an important role for government intervention to deal with externalities public goods uh problems of social justice but in the 21st century the role of government is likely to be even more important and that's because we're moving into the knowledge-based economy and knowledge is what economists refer to as a public good we mean in a technical sense that the marginal cost of production of disseminating the good to another person is zero uh if i know something and i tell you so tell it to you uh you still know it i it hasn't subtracted uh what i know thomas jefferson the third president of the united states put it much more poetically than economists do when he said knowledge is like a candle when one candle likes another it doesn't diminish from the light of the first candle and because knowledge is a public good if it's privately produced it won't there won't be enough production and when it's privately produced those who produce it try to hoard that knowledge to restrict the dissemination so they can benefit from the market from the the market power that that knowledge uh produces and as not only as we move more and more into knowledge economy this becomes more and more important because more and more important for uh government to play an important role in the production of knowledge we've just seen that in the context of government 19. why was it that we were able to produce vaccines mrna vaccines so quickly well because government act supported the basic research dna mrna and it was at the university of pennsylvania that they actually began the research that led to the rna vaccines so yes the private sector played a very important role in going the last mile but that last mile was based on an enormous amount of publicly funded research but in the case of the vaccines of course not only did the government provide the funding for the basic research it also provided a vast amount of funding for the development of these vaccines and their production so government has a very important role in the knowledge economy it is the reason why standards of living today are so much higher than they are where 200 and 250 years ago it's because of advances in knowledge and uh that is really at the core of a modern economy and increasingly so we also need regulation as we live in closer borders we become a more urban society we interact more and those externalities urban externalities become so much more important climate change which i've emphasized over and over again is a quintessential example of an externality a problem that we didn't face a hundred years ago to the center of our society of our economy today as inequalities have increased over the last 40 years the issues of social justice have moved center and again they can't be addressed alone by the market economy so all these things which are at the center of the problems that we face today the climate crisis the public health crisis um the structural transformation of our economy the inequality crisis all of these require a larger role for government than it's had in the past and a much larger role than that provided by the neoliberal liberal vision of what a good society is like so uh that brings me to uh perhaps the uh one of the most important issues which i'll come back to uh in the end um and that is the nature of the economy helps shape the nature of our society uh it's an issue that that we as economists uh began to face when uh we looked at what was happening in the 2008 financial crisis how did the financial sector the bankers become so greedy so selfish a few years before they became bankers they had been our students and as students they didn't seem that different but the longer they stayed in the financial sector the longer they focused on money the greedier the more materialistic the more selfish they became and that raises the fundament another fundamental flaw in the conception of economics that's been dominant for the last 50 years or more and that is that individuals enter life with well-defined preferences shaped by nature rather than shaped by their experiences and by society but in fact we know that as parents we try we work very hard to try to uh affect what our children are going to be like we want them to be honest we want them to be compassionate we want them to care for others not to be selfish so we work very hard at shaping our children but we as a society have forgotten that the workplace is where we spend a very large fraction of our time and how we organize that workplace affects who we are and what we value if we spend a lot of time thinking just about material goods maximizing profits if that is the dominant thing that we think about we become more selfish we become more materialistic but there are other ways of or other parts of our life and other ways of organizing production around the world in many countries cooperatives have played a very important role in the united states the only part of our financial system that functioned well before during and after the financial crisis of 2008 where were our cooperatives called our credit unions they didn't engage in the same kind of exploitation because the members of the credit union were the people who would have been exploited they didn't engage in reckless risk-taking because it would have affected the members of the co-op of the credit union after the crisis they continued lending to small and medium-sized businesses when the big banks withdrew their lending contributing to the magnitude of the economic downturn in italy in certain parts of italy cooperatives have played a very important role produced many of these are producer cooperatives they're also consumer cooperatives in spain uh one of the largest enterprise is is a cooperative and it too has functioned well so what i want to emphasize here is that we need to think about more broadly i brought a range of social institutions not just for-profit profit maximizing institutions when i reflect on on this in terms of united states i also think about the fact that one of our most successful set of institutions one of the things that gives us our technological leadership are our universities and none none of our major universities or any significant university is a for-profit institution most of them are not-for-profit foundations some of them are state universities like university of california and berkeley but no one would think that a for-profit institution is a good way of organizing the production and dissemination of knowledge in fact the example i gave before of trump university is emblematic of what happens when you have a profit-making institution it excels in one thing figuring out how to exploit others so um the point is that i try to emphasize that as we move into the post neoliberal world we want to think about a rich ecology of institutions not just profit mexico maximizing institutions not just uh government at the central level but governments at local level and regional levels various forms of collective action unions and and uh uh people engaged in in uh collective um uh protection uh redress of uh some litigation uh when uh there's been uh harms done uh we call uh class action suits um as we think about this broader range of institutions and the balance among them that we should be striving for uh as we construct this post neoliberal economy and society the natural question that we want to ask is what kind of society and what kind of people do we want to be and that bring brings us back to basically a fundamental question uh what makes for a good society what we know from neoliberalism is that it didn't make for a good society it did just the opposite well it pretended to model a harmonious society it actually it would uh society would bring people together it actually digests the opposite and created huge divides between various groups and engaged in a whole variety of exploitations that i haven't had time to fully described if what we've seen over the last recent uh decade years how the neoliberal agenda unleashed um an ugliness that is uh hard to fathom as exemplified in the vaccine protectionism uh and the uh selfishness uh that we've seen in the private sectors a reluctance to grant the waiver on the vaccines uh intellectual property at the wto so as we reflect on how the neoliberal order failed they would not just economically but failed in a way that was far deeper in reshaping our society in a way that i think many of us think is not what we would have wanted uh would not want uh our children to be the uh uh reflect uh the values that have been exemplified by the bankers and uh some of the drug companies uh in recent years so this is a real opportunity to reflect on uh where we've been why things didn't work out and uh where we want to go it's an opportunity which i hope we seize and i'm so pleased that you've had uh this uh opportunity to share these views with you uh here in france thank you so much really for this uh very well thought and inspiring lecture of yours also for the way you clarified and the notion of externality which is indeed a crucial notion but i think we i mean also been learning very much also during the abv pandemic i'm sure there are a lot of questions that one would like to to ask let's see before i i i do it myself i wonder whether here in the room which is the nice thing about this edition of the festival is that we do have again people in in in the room so we can take some questions from the floor here is already one question coming so i think someone should bring the microphone here okay thank you thank you really my name is alberto viano i'm managing director of this plan in italy so a multinational company and the question i pose you is is an amazing lesson really the point to us is how far a single government could go in put together rules and a minimum set of rules to encourage or or fight certain certain misbehavior of of this last neo neoliberal model how far a single state could go before the other one take advantage of it i mean what we see actually is that if you try to do something then the result is that you lose the companies we used to say in italy we have our major local companies which have their headquarters in london the headquarters in amsterdam that quarters abroad exactly because it's not that convenient to stay here so the point is how or what idea we can share in order to to be able to to have a common set of minimal rules of good rules for making healthy business thank you that's an absolutely great question and uh it's it's a a question that that has been probably an awful lot of people and i'll give you a couple examples where where it's particularly troubling there are some areas where fortunately we're beginning to get what you described as a minimal set of rules the biden administration has for instance proposed a minimum corporate income tax so you don't have ireland or luxembourg trying to have a race to the bottom to steal your firms uh by uh uh advantaging uh uh the the taxes um the uh uh they proposed a 21 uh uh uh minimum uh global corporate income tax um for some reason europe has been reluctant but i believe on friday uh that's uh i guess that's tomorrow uh i am very hopeful that they will agree uh to a uh 15 uh better than the 12 and a half percent that was on the table before uh and hopefully it will be a comprehensive so that's one example of of working globally towards achieving a a minimum standard as you say a minimum standard of rules and i think that's going to help a lot in curbing the kind of race to the bottom uh that we saw from luxembourg and and and a lot of the safe havens uh around the world an example uh where uh we are going to be confronting uh this kind of where do we determine the basic rules is going to be an a.i where uh europe the united states and china have very different views on privacy of data and uh data is the critical input to ai and uh china and the united states uh have uh very different views us worries about public uh access to knowledge uh europe worries about large corporations having access to all our knowledge and using it as they have done uh to exploit uh individuals we well both of these uh are uh created a surveilling state one a private one a public surveillance state but it's still a surveillance state and i happen to be much more sympathetic with uh europe's perspective which is not wanting to go to a surveillance state either public or private but in the end i think your standard of living sense of well-being is going to depend on saying we there's more than material well-being we have to protect our citizens and that may mean that those who've engaged in surveillance in their own country giving them a competitive advantage won't be allowed free access to europe so that's the kind of of uh it may be that one has to uh engage in those cross-border regulations so that post-neo-liberal era isn't going to have as free and easy go of goods going across borders let me give an even more uh important example or more rel present example and that is environment uh i think europe is absolutely right to be advocating cross-border taxes for against those who produce goods uh that are uh uh excessively uh uh endanger the planet uh through uh carbon emissions um uh it's necessary uh uh for them to do it and it's totally consistent with uh the wto so i think in the end it's going to be what what matters is the standards of living broadly defined and when i say broadly defined including our sense of security our our uh environment uh and uh when you do that it may be that uh there will be a sacrifice it to some extent in material standards of living but what is really important is not the material standard living but overall standards of living but to respond to your particular question about how do you manage this in a world of globalization i think one has to try to negotiate common standards and when you can't achieve those common standards when some country refuses to like america under trump refuses to have adequate environmental standards then you have to impose uh trade barriers joe one thing that you said i think about the the role of europe and the position of europe visa vivi proposal by the biden administration to have this minimum corporate income tax is that commissioner gentiloni the commissioner for economy said that the festival we had this this morning but in his view it is an important proposal and he thinks that things will move ahead in that respect although there is one issue that is important and notably what we are going to do with the proceeds of this taxes in other words uh where also they should be collected um you know the idea is that they should not be the headquarters of this giant corporation to be the locus where this taxes and the government in a way get the proceed of his taxes but should be where the profits are being made would you agree on this on this on this position very much so um ascertaining where the profits are made turns out to be a more complicated issue because of what economists would call joint production uh the the uh production process involves uh a platform that may the the research may have occurred in the united states data that is used may come from all over the world the sales may occur in another country and uh one has a difficult task in trying to allocate uh where the profits originated uh that's a problem that we faced in the united states a very very long time corporations do business across the states and uh the the uh uh it's very difficult there's a challenge of how do you allocate where does the income originate and uh what i've been advocating is an approach which is called a formulaic approach where you have a formula that looks at sales looks at production looks at employment capital and uh on the basis of that allocates uh the profits uh um to uh various jurisdictions now the particular formula may differ from one industry to another so in the case of the internet sales obviously uh where what they're doing is equivalent to what would be basically a retail store sales may be a much more important fraction uh than it would be in uh some other uh case when you're making steel where the production the locus of production is much more uh important so those are some of the subtleties and complexities let me just say for those who've been following the negotiations at the oecd on this matter uh this issue of the allocation of profits is called pillar one and the proposal at the oecd uh is is totally inadequate um they are trying to allocate uh just a small fraction of the profits uh it needs to be all the profits has to be allocated and there has to be a lot more subtlety uh in in how do you do this and uh i think one of the good news is that the binding administration seems much more willing to open up or discussion what was called digital taxation to make sure that the digital giants pay a fair share of taxes in the countries where they're raising advertising revenues where they're making sales um and and uh that is absolutely essential and finally let me say uh what i worry of radio about as we rethink where the money goes make sure that the voice of developing countries the emerging markets are heard the discussions are are largely going on at the oecd which is the club of the bank's countries and uh there is some concern that uh the the developing countries in emerging markets are going to come out short in those bargains very good thank you i think there is another question from the floor now that we want to take the micro you should go there please yes si si po farlen good evening with the end of neo-liberalism we had a lot of populism as well inequalities related to the dissemination of populism both in the u.s and in europe do you think that that can be a vicious circle how can we interrupt this vicious circle whereby again we trigger in a way populism should we fight against inequalities perhaps to break this vicious circle yes very much so i i think this is absolutely pretty critical and uh what we've seen uh as an example is what uh president biden has done in his first hundred days uh his 1.9 trillion dollar rescue package uh designed to help the u.s economy recover and it seems to be working but also was very concerned about inequality and uh the colleagues of mine at columbia university estimate in one year it will reduce childhood poverty in half from about 20 to 10 percent uh that's an enormous achievement in one year and of course it has enormous long-run economic benefits because if a child grows up with inadequate nutrition and poverty with inadequate health he's not going to be living up to his potential as a productive member of our society so i view it as a long run uh growth strategy but it's also uh very important in breaking the cycle of inequality an important uh part of that is also in the agenda in the united states which is uh restoring progressive taxes uh many of you may know that one of the things that happened december 2017 is president trump uh passed a tax bill which uh will lead when it were to be fully implemented would lead a majority of those in the bottom to actually pay more taxes but those at the top to pay less taxes and uh so much so that those at the very top will be paying less taxes than those as a percentage of their income than those below in other words a regressive uh federal income tax system uh biden has proposed reversing this now let me emphasize how contentious this is because uh obviously those at the top who who are enjoying that high income are going to and have the resources to affect politics are going to use that money to affect that politics and america our democracy is tainted by money we have a system that is more described by one dollar when vote then one person would vote and they are now uh the republican party is now openly openly engaged in a process of taking away denying the right to vote to uh or maybe more accurately making it more difficult for uh ordinary working people the poor to vote and when they do vote engaging in gerrymandering to make sure that their vote doesn't count as much so american democracy is very much at risk and that's why what happens in the next few years is going to be very very critical uh if we are able to uh address some of these problems of inequality if we're able to reverse this cycle we'll replace a vicious downward cycle of a greater inequality and uh less democracy with more equality and a stronger democracy we are going to talk about fiscal fairness also in our discussion at this festival tomorrow evening i'm saying this because it is not in the printed version of the program but we are going to have a presentation of of a book by kenneth sheeve and david cevestage on uh taxing the reach and on you know fiscal fairness especially after big events like wars and and a pandemic um i think we are close to the end so let me play if i may a bit of a of a devil role because i think is needed sometimes also in this type of discussions so i would say that you've been extremely effective in showing and documenting market failures from externalities exploitation over exploitation of of workers under provision of public goods like knowledge but there are also government failures and we have been talking about government failures before in the lecture by michael cramer cramer for instance with self-fulfilling shortages in the production of vaccines so nationalist attitudes whereby government have been not closing all the expert banning experts of vaccines and also sanitarian and help to to to other countries and that has created a situation where the pandemic has been going on so even democratically elected governments sometimes fail and fail not by a minor margin so you know this is this is also an important issue to be to be taken into account not the public is not the monolith and sometimes also the public sector may fail um can i can i comment yes please so anybody uh who has lived in america for the last 20 years knows about government failure we have president bush and we thought that was bad enough and then we had president trump so we know we can talk about government failure up and down uh better than any other country uh uh i think so uh yes we are very aware of that i emphasized in my talk having a rich ecology of institutions a system of checks and balances so that we aren't relying on any one single set of institutions but let me i'm commenting on the government failure let me also emphasize that was not an accident 40 years of neoliberalism 40 years beginning with reagan and thatcher 40 years of denigrating the role of government succeeded in weakening government so if you if you wage a war against an institution like government for 40 years it's going to be a weaker institution and we saw that let me talk about it the united states we saw that in the case of the copen 19. uh under obama uh obama set up we saw sars we saw murs so we set up a white house office to respond to a pandemic that's what governments are supposed to do they're supposed to look into the future see what are the risks and try to manage them and they created that within the national security council recognizing that it was a risk to our security and of course no nobody outside could have done as much damage to our economy as kovac 19 so it was a security issue what did trump do he disbanded the white house office on pandemic we had a very very good institution to deal with infectious disease the centers for disease control cdc it trained people all over the world created institutions all over the world to monitor and manage infectious disease what did president trump do he defunded it he defunded even that particular part of that which was concerned about diseases that originated in animals and jumped to humans which is what copen 19 is so it was a conscious attempt to destroy government and to weaken it and he succeeded and that's why government wasn't capable but uh we all have to be aware that our institutions you know humans are available to uh shakespeare's said to to aries to be human uh all our human institutions are valuable we have to recognize that that's why we have to have systems of checks and balances and that's why we have to have strong democracies to make sure that all of our institutions work and so that's why what i'm calling for is this richer ecology which recognizes the weaknesses in all of our institutions and hopefully working together these institutions can create not a perfect society that's beyond our uh should be beyond our ambition but but a better society uh and uh certainly a better society than we've had for the last 40 years thank you thank you so much joe i think it is a applause if you can hear unfortunately we also in this country we have some several examples of uh government failures no uh anyhow so i'm sure there are many other questions from the floor and people following us on live streaming would have many questions but unfortunately the time is is over but just igles will be again with us on saturday at uh at 8 p.m and we very much look forward also to to this and let me thank you again also and we know that that you when you work here you have been doing so many things following many other debates so your presence here for us is is a wonderful memory i also would like to remind that you were also rewarding and the students who made the the competition last time and uh so also this year we are going to do that and uh uh you know next time you we hope to have you with us so thank you again joe for for this wonderful lecture and thank you all for being with us you