good evening we are here for the last lecture at our festival the festival economy and the new mayor of trento whom i would like to welcome for being here with us today this is the final event of a festival of the economy which has been certainly different from the previous editions this is the 15th edition taking place in an emergency period but we strongly wanted the festival to take place no matter which difficulties we had to overcome well this is because we believe that the festival has a capability of providing information and being innovative in relation to the economic topics at the present time and we believe that it was necessary to do it exactly in this period so in the coming days we will make a few evaluations we will monitor results but we believe that results have been good because we had approximately 6 million contacts visits not only from italy but also internationally so these were the visits to the festival website and then of course we have all the contacts on the social media that makes the message of the festival even stronger well i believe that we have touched upon very important topics yesterday we had minister amendola with us and mr conte the head of the italian government we have focused on topics that are relevant for our country so the festival has brought information about national economy national politics so we have been glad to have trentino as the stage for all these themes so i would like to thank all those who have believed in the festival thank you very much to all the people who are here with me on the stage who from the very beginning supported this initiative fully aware of the fact that the festival notwithstanding the difficulties would have provided a significant added value so i would like to thank all those who have worked in the backstage because after all the work of the backstage has been amazing because we were able to pass the message beyond these walls communication the press office large events all the journalists who have taken part in the festival helping us manage our debates so this is the last contribution and i would like to leave you with the hope to have your hole in flesh and bones at the next festival the festival is important for trento for the trentino region for our city we want our squares and streets to fill up again with all the supporters and friends of our festival that's my wish for next year and we're going to work hard on that but we believe that once more we were able to demonstrate that the trentino and the festival economy want to hold the central position regarding the topics we have debated here thank you very much and enjoy your evening thank you very much president right we are here for the final event of our festival which is angus deaton's lecture that is the perfect closure to this festival the first the opening lecture was by esther du flohrin who in 2019 was awarded the nobel prize because her experimental method has significantly contributed to appropriate measures to contrast poverty in developing countries well five years before angus deaton had received the nobel prize for contributing to the analysis and the definition of appropriate economic measures to reduce inequality and fight poverty in developed countries so from developing to developed countries well the methodological contribution provided by professor deaton resides in the understanding of the behavior and choices of consumers and amongst the motivations of the nobel prize we one could actually read that to fight poverty to reduce poverty it is necessary to have an excellent knowledge of the decisions and the choices made by consumers this research field has always been pursued by angus deaton some of his writings such as economics and consumer behavior have become a reference for all those who study economy i remember the text with john mulbauer angus didn't scientific career has continued on these topics so it is a dream to have him here with us today years and years for years and years we have tried to invite him to the festival he's here today only virtually but hopefully he'll be able to come in person very soon whenever these restrictions are eliminated and whenever traveling is allowed and possible again i'm not going to list all the awards angus dayton has been bestowed during his highly productive career since 1983 at princeton university he received fresh medal of the economic society he was president of the american economic association he has been a member of the american philosophical association as well and at the academy of science sciences to testify his fruitful exchange with different disciplines angus dayton has published very influential books such as the great escape and last but not least the book death of despair written together with then case presented about one hour ago here at the festival a highly significant book focusing on an alarming evidence about inequality in the united states i.e the increase in mortality in some areas of the united states affecting predominantly people with a low education level white americans so we're not talking about other ethnic groups that had a high mortality rate in the past and most likely related to despair and isolation as well as social marginalization in his lecture today angus deaton is going to explain to us how economic inequalities interact with inequalities that are associated to pandemics to the health care crisis so how economic inequalities overlap with health inequalities talking about what is actually happening today in the united states on the eve of the american elections i believe this is going to be very interesting so i do not want to steal any more time away from angus thank you very much once more for being here with us you have the floor thank angus so much that's a very generous um introduction i'm so sorry that hannah and i are not there um spending time in italy is one of the most favorite things we like to do and as you know we've tried to come to trento before and it's never really worked out and i'm so looking forward to it this year and like you i hope very much that we'll be there next year i'm also um hoping that that will i i'm also extremely grateful to you and the organizers for inviting us to come and talk about our book and i'm going to talk about what's happened cobit in the light of the work that we did in the book so let me share my screen um and bring up my um my thing somewhere um there we go okay um i hope that's visible um what i'm gonna do is is talk a little bit about pandemics and inequalities in a general way and then i want to go back and pick up where am left off and talk about the divisions that we see before coving came along and then see how those interact with covid when i've been talking about this i find the following four quotes um really useful to settler stage one is by the great rudolph verchow who is the cell biologist who in fact invented cell biology a great doctor but who also spent time thinking about inequalities in health and this quote says that medical statistics are our standard of measurement we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker among the workers are among the privileged you can see why he's a sort of hero to the social determinants of health literature paul farmer the one of the founders of partners in health says that inequalities have powerfully sculpted not only the distribution of infectious diseases but the course of outcomes outcomes among the afflicted that was written nearly 20 years ago it could have been written about the epidemic today um walter scheidel the classical historian writes four different kinds of violent ruptures of platinum inequalities mass mobilization warfare transformative revolution state failure and lethal pandemics though i think he like everybody else has been writing and noting that if this pandemic is going to flatten inequality it certainly isn't happening yet and then a more contemporary television quote situation like this it highlights the problems that already exist in society people haven't noticed suddenly you see things it's like an x-ray machine it's from anderson cooper so pandemics often expose and often exaggerate the long-standing inequalities between people and groups and we'll see some of that so all the inequalities that we've known about for a long time are salient in new ways and become starkly visible there's also new inequalities of hair that we haven't really thought of and which are to do with the specific circumstances of the pandemic and that's true in earnings in jobs and in education there's also inequalities between people in different countries between rich and poor countries and even within rich countries and one of the things that we've been very interested in is whether what will be the public change of attitudes towards the inequalities that we've studied and will the inequalities that we've put up with for a long time become completely intolerable um in the new circumstances and what can policy do to help that of course the cynic would say well all that happens is the world gets more and more unequal and we just revise our idea of what is or is not tolerable so i'm going to start with the american party of the ways of my inequalities before the pandemics and the ones that ann just talked about in our book that's of despair i particularly want to focus on the inequality around the four-year college degree ba degree in labor force participation in earnings and the quality of jobs in marriage child bearing church going in experiences of pain and of disability and socializing across all these areas of life all of which are important to life there's becoming an increasing division between those who have this four-year degree and those who don't and as that noted about one-third of americans who have a four-year college degree two-thirds do not so we're not talking about a majority is doing fine we're talking about a minority who's doing fine and as we'll see in life itself in our book we trace the roots of this destruction to the destruction of the labor market for less educated workers um michael standell the harvard political philosopher is a new book i had last week called the tyranny of the marriage doctor's seat and he has this phrase that the college degree has become a condition for dignified work and of social esteem and that without the college degree you risk indignity and humiliation and even life spans are diverging so the next slide this shows life expectancy at age 25 you can't really look at life expectancy at birth by education because you don't know whether people go to college or not and the left-hand picture here shows men and women the left-hand the scale is goes from 45 to age 60. remember these people are 25 already so if you have 60 years left you expect died around age 85 which is sort of what you would expect so the blue line is for men sorry the blue line is for people with the whole country um with or without a ba the red line is for people with the ba and the darker red line at the bottom is for people without a va and of course we're running from 1990 through to 2019 2018 um here and what you can see is this thing that anne referred to that if you look at the blue line life expectancy has been rising but then it reached its peak in about 2 20 10 to 2012 and that it's never returned to that value it fell for three years and then a slight uptick in 2018 um but all of that is due to bad things happening to people without a va whereas people without a ba even though there's been some slowing in the rate of increase um are still just doing fine thank you very much you can see the same is true for women where it's the people without a ba were suffering less slowing among women and also not so much progress among women at all um from 1990 through to 2012 2018 so i'm not going to go through this in detail but this the left-hand side is man the right-hand side is women again this is a narrower definition of life expectancy which is how many years can you expect to live at age 25 until you get to your 74th 75th year um so it's there's 50 years between 25 and 75 there was no mortality at all um you would live 50 years so this number can't be bigger than 50. um and as they say men and women the red lines are for whites um the blue the green lines are for blacks and men and women again and what you see here is pretty extraordinary i mean if you take the whites without a ba men and women there's been really no progress at all um over the last 30 years for women it's actually declined over that period for people with the ba you see the progress again and also there's been an incredible whitening for blacks too so that blacks without a ba and blacks with the ba are diverging rapidly the same is true for women and this you know much of the discussion in america is about class versus race and the class is measured by education you're in a situation here where blacks and whites with the ba are now much closer to one another than blacks with the ba blacks without a ba the other thing that's worth noticing is blacks being catching up with whites much faster slopes for these lines than for whites until about 2013 and then bad things began to happen to blacks too after 2013. most of that is associated with drugs um getting into the black communities so you've got this very complicated picture of widening gaps whiting inequalities around the ba degree and the va degree becoming almost as important as race in determining um what's happening to lives now as hans said along with this there are widening gaps in marriage and labor force participation in earnings and disability and in pain and taken together many aspects of well-being are coming part in america along this educational divide and once again it you know we often call this the more and less educated but that makes it sound much more equal than it is the more educated here are only a third of the population who have dnas all right so what's causing this what smoking-related disease especially for white women who started later and quit later deaths of despair suicides alcohol drugs all the self-inflicted components of which drug doses are the most important of these drug overdoses but it's not just a drug epidemic people tend to say well you know what's all this what does it despair it's just a drug epidemic well i don't know what just means in that context but the important thing to note is that only people are dying from drug overdoses the increase in cardiovascular doses is only among the people who do not have the va degree so one way of putting it is the va's in fact it's a sort of vaccine against the despair that is killing those without a pa again the labor market is a key part of the story here and then comes covet 19. so first of all there's a widening of pre-existing inequalities so the less skilled poorer more deprived they're suffering more in both risk of life and in earnings those are the people in retail those are people in health care those are people in transportation and essential workers people at meat packing plants and so on and so the bas get to stay home and do you know do tele telework or whatever um zoom calls like this um whereas the less educated are predominantly among those who can't so this is widening this gradient of health between low and high income and widening income inequality at the same time so it comes in as a wedge that makes differences in disease works and differences in income source as if they were not bad enough already the other thing happens is that pre-existing conditions and you know this from the experience in italy too make death much more lightly the sick suffer even more health care appears to really matter for this disease lower quality health care to start with widens the gaps even further and a lot of this is to do with segregation and transportation the way that blacks in america are very segregated and the people who live in multi-generational families much more likely to spread this disease of course there's also huge concerns about children in schooling the rich and the poor these already wide educational gaps between wealthier and less wealthy kids families will whiten and perhaps last for many years um you can also see that anne talked about the employment population ratio this is for men and for the whole population the other point every time there's a recession people drop out of the labor force and they come back but never quite the same peak again and you can see what's happened in this um with this pandemic a huge decrease in the employment population ratio it's picking up again now still far away so here are some new inequalities as you saw in the graphs the deaths of despair at least until 2013 spared african americans but african americans have been more likely to be infected and more likely to die so here's cdc data as of september 22nd it's 82 percent of data have the data and the 143 000 deaths in all this is the time when there were nearly 200 000 so that it's it's not a full record because not all states are reporting and i would do want to put a big warning here because these numbers are controversial they keep changing every time i look at them they look different and the pandemic is not done yet it's still spreading but if you look at these numbers these the usual divisions hispanic latino aian or american indian alaskan natives asian black non-hispanic native hawaiian white non-hispanic and other and you can see that these numbers and brackets here are the proportion of the population um 60 percent white non-hispanics 12 percent latino non-hispanics and 18.5 percent um hispanic and if you look at the dallas you can see that black non-hispanics have almost twice um the number of deaths the fraction of the population um whereas everybody else is doing relatively okay points is less there's been a lot of dispute a lot of assumptions that hispanics are doing badly too um but um that's in fact not the case on these data of course let me iterate again these data are not complete and the lots of parts of america not covered here and the final total might be quite different but this the key takeaway here is the blacks who've been doing relatively well catching up with whites that's being taken away from them um in this and then um say more about ethnicity and race pre-coveted black mortality rates were higher than white mortality rates pre-coveted hispanic mortality rates were lower than white rates in the u.s um and that's concordant with the pandemic data i've just shown you in the uk by contrast blanks up higher covered mortality rates than whites during the pandemic but had lower pre-coveted mortality which is interesting contrast and when i first started looking these early in the pandemic native americans were hit very hard especially at navajo in new mexico and arizona that's no longer true they clearly got their act together into the appropriate public health measures so the mortality rates are changing around the world as it moves outwards from international trading centers and to other cities and to rural areas let me say a few words about political inequality in the us um you know the us has done very badly but then a lot of other countries have done very badly too so i don't want to say too much about the you know beat up on the us too much though there is a lot to beat up on um but one particular thing is the unequal democracy that we have that power in the senate is unequally distributed so each state creates two seats um in the senate um so if you take big population states california texas florida new york they have a third of the u.s population but they only have eight percent of the senate seats they're even more unequal for covet deaths um 22 percent of copa dust this is of late september recent data in two states new york and new jersey and they only have four percent of the senate 68 percent of covert deaths in ten states and they have only twenty percent of the senate so the rural states where people who don't know anyone who's died haven't seen anyone who's died have blocking power over states with many deaths the house of representatives is better because its feats are related to population but as the deaths have spread from blue cities and states democratic cities and states to red cities and states i thought this would then lead to more assistance as a higher percentage of the senate had constituents who were hurting it actually didn't happen and i was wrong my guess is i'm very cynical about this is that as long as the stock market stays up it's hard to get people to vote for large-scale assistance and when the stock market crashes people tend to do things but the stock market stayed up but the general point here is the geographical concentration of the epidemic actually matters let me say a few words about international inequality um and you know america was coming apart before cove and america is trying to part more with tobit is the rest of the world coming apart um too well let me start with um something that i'm sure is familiar to many people listening that the standard pattern is the gdp per capita high gdp per capita countries have good health so that life expectancy goes with gdp per capita to those who have will be given that's been true for at least a century um sam preston in 1975 took the data back into the 1920s um and some economists have even argued that wealth itself let countries grow and health will look after itself and indeed here's the latest care from the oxford wonderful group the our world and data group this was taken from their website a couple of days ago and each you have life expectancy on the vertical axis on the horizontal axis you have a log scale of gdp per capita and the countries are shown there as dots um and the area of the dots is proportional to the population of the people but the main point i just want to make here is this enormous strongly positive correlation um between life expectancy on the one hand and gdp per capita on the other hand now what is strange during this epidemic is we'd surely expect it to continue that rich countries have all the advantages you have better health care we have better health care there's more money more infrastructure healthier populations to start with we have better doctors a lot more of them better hospitals more of them all of those sort of things so what you would expect is that the richer countries would do much better say in terms of deaths per head but here's the graph again from the oxford group and again i pulled this just a few days ago this looks like the other graph here's the log scale along the bottom here and here's the um confirmed coveted 19 deaths per million people but the thing about this is it looks the same but it's exactly the wrong way run right so what's happening is there are fewer deaths per capita in the poor countries and many many more deaths per capita in ireland the us switzerland sweden spain um and not at all in very few in uganda togo central african republic you say okay those are different but if you look at just europe and north america um you've still got a strong positive correlation even without 80 as an outlier you could regard haiti is really part of african something um but here you've got still strong positive correlation um within europe and north america it's very puzzling so why might this happen um first of all it's early days in the pandemic and the pattern will reverse over time and a lot of people think that's going to happen so rich countries have the trading hubs um which are early spreaders the same with individuals it spreads from the rich first and then to the poor from the global elite to those who have limited measure of control there's no standardization of reporting of covered deaths across countries even within europe some countries count a much larger number of people than others um and there's possible massive undercounting in poor countries it's also true um should be on this slide but it's not the poorer countries particularly in africa are much younger than richer countries and that accounts for some of the differences in death rates because kids get this disease but don't die from it that itself is is a little bit puzzling because respiratory disease is perhaps the most common cause of infant mortality in the poor country so you've got a lot of kids who die from respiratory infections even without covered and you'd expect them to be prime targets and we're not really seeing that happening so this slowing of globalization might compress income inequalities within countries if the loss of income is proportional to the number of coveted deaths per person we might get a compression of income inequalities however my guess is that this is a genuine phenomenon i'm not very sure about that guess but it seems like the pandemic's gone on long enough now but i would not be surprised to be wrong and if so this pattern of international health inequalities may be the only place where kobe makes the world more equal so thank you very much that's all i have to say lecture while you were talking i already said i'm sorry i was looking at my ipad this is simply because i'm receiving unfortunately given that the audience is not here in presence i'm receiving questions on my ipad so i've received already several questions for you and i will just forward them to you and then i have some questions myself but italiano very well the first question we have received is by eugenio loprete who claims pandemics has increased inequality what about a carbon tax so far so about carbon tax so far so carbon taxes so a carbon text to contrast climate change will probably further increase inequality so perhaps some claim that um heritage tax should be increased what do you think of this how can we can trust this trend towards inequality qualities and the inheritance taxes and inevitable so yes i mean i i think that it depends very much what you do with the proceeds of the carbon tax and that seems to be an extremely important thing that's not always adequately discussed so that you know you could imagine a carbon tax um which was levied on you know all uses of carbon and then the revenue from that carbon tax is given equally to everybody in the whole population or it could be given in a way that favored the relatively um not to well off so within countries the carbon tax could be an important source of reduction of inequality i think in france that was tried but it was a disaster because they used it to reduce the wealth tax instead of using it to make the tax system more progressive so that's a major source in which the carbon tax can be used positively across countries it's a little less clear the biggest pair of an international carbon tax would be china which is sort of in the middle of the income distribution um but it's also true a lot of poor countries could benefit from that so another variant you could have of this would be that um the international carbon tax would be levied on carbon and would be used to build global public goods for instance to improve international health systems um to research into diseases that are only a problem for poor countries so i don't think there's any necessity that a carbon tax would make the world more unequal it depends very much on how it's used that's a similar question so i'm not repeating it now we have a question which is related to the international scenario and the relationship between the us and china it's a little bit of a digression but i would like to ask you the question prior to the pandemics trade tensions between us and china have slowed down the international economic cycle which scenario can we hypothesize in the relationship between china and the u.s after the elections on the 3rd of november well um yes um the future is always hard to predict and we don't know which way the election is going to come out but let me say a couple of things i mean one is the globalization was um the hyper globalization um that peaked in the early years of this century was already declining um a bit um after the world fight after the financial crisis in 2008 so it's not just pandemic related it's not just donald trump and american policy related so i would expect that trend to go on that i think a lot of people have seen the negative consequences of globalization as well as the positive ones and i think there will be some continuing backing away from that the pandemic has certainly accelerated that i don't think it i think almost everyone in the united states whatever political stripe does not think it's a good idea that we should depend on um you know many of our essential drugs come from india and china um and you know that was probably not a good idea you know when i learned about international trade theory many many years ago there was always an exception for national security and national security would um include um pandemics but you know that said it's very important to realize that um you know blocking off international trade and trying to become autonomous is not good for many sorts of disasters and remember a pandemic is a very unusual sort of disaster because hitting all countries at the same time if you um compare that with a tsunami or with a hurricane um being able to get help from abroad is really really important so we have to be careful there but i guess to come back to china um i think that one of the things that certainly changed during president trump's presidency is many americans are much much more skeptical of china than was the case before and you know the jobs going to china and holding you know pulling back from that relationship is something that's been more associated with the democrats in the past than with the republicans and i think on that apart from the rhetoric and the terrible rhetoric i don't think there's a huge difference between um donald trump and joe biden when it comes to the way forward on chinese policy the word is that the chinese want to abide in to win the election and they say that's because trump is unpredictable not because they think that biden's policies will be any more favorable towards china i i don't really think they will be i'm not sure that answers your question but it tells you about all i know on this so thank you thank you very much angus then we have another question it is necessary to understand and you have rightly stressed that there are many caveats regarding international inequality first of all the collection of data or the standardization of data the timing the pandemics has developed in the most developed countries first and then has moved to other countries and we still have to see whether this distribution of mortality in relation to per capita income will continue in time however inequalities in each single country is pretty worrisome and you have stressed that rural areas are the ones that seem to be more um that seems to be against more care and more health spending since the pandemics has actually concentrated in large cities and not so much in rural areas however it also seems and this is what we're actually witnessing in europe it seems that the pandemics in the end also reaches rural areas and rural areas usually have a lower quality of health service compared to cities so it is true that you have a lower number of cases but these cases can be leading to higher mortality rates so it is necessary to revolutionize the healthcare system in italy there is a huge difference from region to region there are regions like lombardy that have performed very poorly during the crisis other regions had a completely different model they had some large hospitals located in the main cities other regions like the veneto region there was a more diffused type of health care maybe this type of problem could also persuade the rural areas in the united states where you have a lower density of population but probably also a lower quality of health care well this could persuade them to support a program to re-launch a better healthcare system in the united states what do you think of this um there's a lot of really good questions in that question and they're not i think all the same um one of the things i think it's hard to generalize across europe and the united states because our health care system is so different um you know we have this crazy system of tying health care down to employment and so during the pandemic when people lost their jobs a lot of people lost their health care we don't actually know yet how many of those 20 million or so actually picked up healthcare somewhere else or just went without it but not having health care not having insurance in the middle of a pandemic is obviously a terrible idea and anna and i certainly hope that what will happen post-pandemic is that the poor performance of the health care system um will make it easier um to have sensible reforms but you know there's a lot of health care that's paid for um one way or another in the us and in europe healthcare is not funded through employment or not directly and it's much more funded through you know an equal or proportional burden on people's incomes rather than us where it's like a poll tax and that's one of the things we emphasize in our book the other thing that you have to say is that rural areas are always going to be harder to have health care just because the lack of population density you can't have a hospital in every village and you know anna and i in summers where there's not a pandemic um spend our time in montana um which is only a million people and it's a huge huge area and you know a lot of people can't get health care because there's only one or two hospitals in the whole state and you know that's part of the geography we're never gonna equalize that the other thing that's really important in america which is not so important in europe thank goodness is the issue of race and one of the things that stops america having a fully developed welfare state and good health care is that people don't want to pay for health care or they don't want to pay for benefits for people who don't look like them which means that white people many white people are resistant to paying taxes that would um help the african-american community and of course rural america is largely white and many many fewer african-americans in rural america so all of that goes into the mix um i do think one thing that will be true everywhere including in europe um is that you know we've not had a large-scale pandemic like this for a century and so we're going to have to rethink a lot of things a lot of adjustments to healthcare that will make it possible to deal with recurrent pandemics if that's what we're in for and also a lot of more infection proofing of work and transportation and so on um which will make it um you know easier to deal with just one final thing um it was when you said about lombardy having done really badly um well lumberjane did really badly because you know milan is a large trading hub and milan was open to the virus in a way that a lot of areas in rural italy was not and the same is true in new york i've noticed that republican politicians in the u.s have started blaming new york for the large number of deaths and said you know it just shows how badly run democratic states are and that seems to be just absurd so i'm sure that healthcare everywhere will change as a result of this pandemic exactly how it's pretty hard to predict uh affecting also republican states and that would be interesting to monitor during the elections will have the mail vote most probably done in places where the pandemic is more widespread we have another question there are many but there is one which i think is very interesting during your lecture you stated that differences in education are key to understand the widening of the gap in terms of mortality rates what can we do to improve the equality and the opportunities for u.s students some said that the debt of u.s students to fund their studies would have caused the uh blasting of another uh uh maybe the universities in the us are too expensive i don't know but the blasting of the babel i mean can you comment on the impact of education on mortality rates and life expectancies okay i think the two effects here that are important one is any possible direct effect of education on health and better educated people are different in many cases and they may be more forward-looking and they may learn things in school or in college which make them more healthy but actually i don't think that's the biggest effect i think the biggest effect is that education and qualifies you for a job and that's one of the reasons i read the sendel quote that if you don't get a good job you don't get the social esteem you don't get the dignity in your life and the lack of good jobs has undermined what was a efficient uh long-lasting white working-class culture in the united states and the automation um the globalization and also the american government gives huge tax incentives to replace people with remarks which is crazy and also the health care system by being funded through employment means its very employers tend to shed um less educated workers so that you know large firms in the united states they used to have their own drivers and cleaners and mail delivery people security none of these firms have those people anymore they hire them from contractors from the outside and that converts what were good jobs even if they were relatively menial jobs in large firms to really bad jobs and many cases really bad jobs with outside contractors you know most of the people who work in amazon warehouses don't work for amazon they work for contractors who provide to amazon so the educational qualification and it may just be the qualification it may not be who you are many of these jobs may be perfectly doable by other people but we built a society in which you only have access to these good jobs or increasingly only have access to these good jobs um if you've actually been to college so i think more people should go to college um i think that would be a good thing but i don't think everybody has to go to college and i think one of the things we're very bad at in the us and many european countries are better at is having alternative lines to good jobs that don't depend um on having a four-year college degree we have a very odd system here that all the money that's spent on education is laser focused on getting kids to college but only a third of them get there so what why don't the other two-thirds of any claim on those resources and we need a much better range of training so that would be a really good thing and then finally i agree with you i think our universities are much too expensive um i think i am not retired but when i was teaching at princeton i got paid which as a young man i would have thought was an absolutely absurd salary and i think it's because the universities like many other professions aggressive who are very good at rent seeking and increasing their incomes at the expense of everybody else one final thing remind you what ann said that state universities which used to be very cheap are not cheap anymore so their prices have gone up a lot too and at least some of that is due to the extraordinary amount of money that states have to pay for health care very a final question which i have just received you said that one of the reasons why people with a low education are more at risk of contamination is due to the fact that they cannot work remotely they have to go to the workplace in in particular in certain uh very inhabited areas they are at risk of contamination but also for workers uh working remotely from home there might be new inequalities adding up to the former inequalities because working from home can be very different there are people leaving very small houses with many other people maybe they have disabled persons or people who should be cared for others who live in large houses and can work comfortably and happily so is this a source of inequality on which we should be investigate more in the future uh should we be concerned of the potential new inner qualities connected with remote working which is called smart working but it is not always so smart i agree most of us are very tired of remote working but we're also very glad that we don't have to go out and take risks with ourselves but the point you make is a really really important one and it is it goes with something i said at the very beginning about um old inequalities that we didn't we didn't pay much attention to become incredibly important so you know having high speed internet at your house um that's a good thing yeah and it's become an essential thing so that inequality that was there but didn't seem so consequential has now become extremely consequential and you know sending your kids to school um when you have a legacy internet connection or no internet connection at all um you know i don't know many people here probably you know once upon a time or have had to use the internet connection in the hotel while many of the poorest americans often women with kids are put up by authorities and hotels and their kids have to try and use the internet in the hotels which is just not good enough to support learning so that's an exactly a good example but another example is my favorite one is you know we have a big garden um sort of behind me as i said there's a lovely garden where we spent a lot of time this summer now some people have big gardens some people have no gardens at all some people have apartments with no gardens that can only be got to buy elevators so that's an inequality a difference between people that we thought was just part of you know having more money or less money or people who choose to live in the city and are happy to go on elevators and then the pandemic comes along and it's a really bad thing to be 30 floors out and to have to wait because the restrictions that only two people are alive in the elevator every time we have friends it takes them an hour to get out of their apartment every time so these are you know differences between people that we probably wouldn't even probably have labeled as inequalities before but have suddenly become really really consequential um it may just be for this pandemic we may pay more attention to those but absolutely um you know the inequity pandemic does open up these craps that we you were there but didn't pay a lot of attention to and now we're falling into those cracks so that's just a great question to end on so thank you dear uh the skyscraper and using the elevator is a good one thank you very much for your brilliant lecture for answering so kindly to all our questions uh uh well uh i i think people there are not many people here but i i think that we could join hands on behalf of the people who are present virtually this is the uh last event of the festival so allow me to conclude uh the the between the gamble we took was to reach a very high number of people online since they could not attend physically and we indeed i think were able to win that bet and the outcome is very encouraging 100 000 people followed the lectures entirely the number of events this year is limited because there were not many venues available that had to be sanitized we had a 30 events this year there used to be 120 on average in the past notwithstanding this the number of followers is nearly the same so they were a real crowd they uh attended online on average every event had a 30 sorry 3 000 visitors uh um six million people were connected to see uh bits and bits of the lectures but there were three thousand people following who the whole event with some differences and we will be able to identify the subjects of the topics which are of great interest for the people that's encouraging for the future because we will combine the physical presence of people we will never give up the idea of having crowds in the conference hall we love the questions directly we love to have a discussion in the squares in trento well at the same time would love to reach the highest number of people uh online so this is a a an experience that we will repeat in the next years so thank you all i in particular would like to thank the engineers the sound engineers who made this possible we had no major technical problems maybe some delays but it was not our fault uh yesterday well uh the prime minister started very late but not because of technical problems here and all during all other events uh the quality uh was extremely good uh at the height of such an important event and as i told you at the beginning today we have a very well structured archive so you will be able to download i'm sure that the number of visitors will increase in the coming days and will continue to do so because we will have the opportunity to listen again to the lectures last but not least i'd like to remind you that we have uh decided to uh reveal this festival of economics to alberto alessina very important economist who passed away last may and you can follow his lectures five of them delivered at the festival and you can watch them in our account thank you very much and i hope to meet you again in presence next year you