good evening and welcome to the final lecture of the 2021 festival of economics in the past three days and a half of meetings we discussed at length about the role of the state in being a protagonist of the economic and civil life of various countries after the pandemic three visions mainly were put forward the view of the state as a regulator so the state fixes rules and commits to enforce them then the state as a facilitator as a sort of coach as somebody said meaning that the state promotes initiatives and gives an initial thrust and impulse so that things happen and then private entities come to the fore and follow suit and then the state as an entrepreneur which directly acts in the economic setting clearly different visions were put forward but i believe that we generally acknowledge the fact that if we have these two additional functions of a facilitator and entrepreneur there are moments when the state also in an emergency situation has to intervene in a strong way into the economic life of a country so we see these two roles of the state as something which is temporary limited to specific situations and very specific cases in general there has been and there is a consensus on the fact that the state has to act as a regulator well tonight we have a lecture by jean tirol who is the economist who possibly contributed at best to the vision of the state of of um regulate state as a regulator and he received in 2014 these various ricks bank prize in economic sciences in memory of alfred nobel for that he was here in person and in virtually so it was back in 2009 if i'm not mistaken uh he took the floor as a sort of prosecutor in a trial in a court trial against economists and then if i'm not mistaken he came back in 2015 so we all know him and everybody knows the many things that he has done and the major recognitions that he received if i may i would like to underline three aspects that i believe are extremely significant first and foremost his attention for the other disciplines he has worked extensively with psychologists and also with experts in legal matters jurists there is a different terminology which is used and often times everybody looks at his or her own discipline more than other things but this was not the case with ajanti role who has always been very good at working with people from other domains and then the elegance and of the models that he um produces to reason about very complex things of course they are elegantly simple you know sometimes economists follow into fall sorry into the trap of the models and do things which are not always very easy to understand or very conducive this is not the case with the work by zhantiro his models are extremely useful extremely clear and useful again and then he has always been engaged from a civil and social viewpoint starting back in universities supporting research and also in terms of political uh choices last week he organized a meeting on the common good that was uh opened by pres by president macron so very high level of course and they discussed about many topics which we also discussed in the past days tonight he will address us on many aspects that we touched upon it especially one element which is the digital transition we spoke a lot about the national recovery and resilience plan which also includes of course a digital part and we talked about transition towards a digital era and what that entails gentile is working extensively on that on the regulation aspect because of course a transition to the digital domain so to say means regulating it was said yesterday that multinationals for instance have uh to be better regulated and this is a juridical need specifically uh gentile will address the aspect of privacy or privacy and i think that that is very important i am an economist myself and as such and also due to my experience in the administration of this country i often time had to sort of discuss with the authority for privacy issues because sometimes i felt that they made my institutional work more difficult it was difficult for instance to collect information about people which is something which we need to enforce or devise policies of course this is one side and you see there are always pros and cons it's also a question of striking a balance and finding a trade-off between the needs that do exist on the one side to know more about people and on the other side the fact of protecting people's privacy and also guaranteeing the right to oblivion so without further ado i would like to give the floor to jean tyrol and we thank you so much gente roll for being with us tonight so you have the floor professor okay well first of all thanks so much tito for those very kind words and also for inviting me it's a great honor to be giving this final lecture it's also a pleasure to be with you in the teatro and uh and also virtually so i'm very pleased to do that uh the festival in my view is a whole model it's a whole model because it succeeds in actually making new knowledge available to a wide audience at the same time keeping scientific rigor and i'm a big fan of the festival it's it's very nice to be back um let me share my slides so sorry let me just make sure i share my okay after more than a year of coffee i still i'm still very slow at trying my slides but here we are so privacy in the digital age i'm starting from the concerns we all have about our loss of agency about the rise of surveillance society so the most extreme case is of course a chinese social critic system but there are a lot of other concerns so recently with kovid we were worried about the state and the platforms collaborating closely rightly or wrongly but you know that was a concern we should be concerned about artificial intelligence coming of age the platform subversions of democracy and fostering polarization the technological expansion of the public sphere with the smartphones artificial intelligence facial recognition social networks and also the changing social norms so for example it has become more and more common to dogs out or chase people now in this context it's interesting to see that there's been a number of regulatory development and this in this area the european union actually is a leader there was a right to of the oblivion decision of the european court of justice there was a general data protection regulation and more recently there was the artificial intelligence act in april so that connects very closely to the theme of this festival of this year's festival which is a return of the state because for many years we have had basically less affair many many years of less affair in the internet and now you see this regulation and there's some kind of tattoo no now how do you analyze this and that's what i would like to do and my view will be very much an economic view i have to warn you but i think it will connect to many other views as well um so here is the outline first i will talk about the right to know about what's being done without data then i will make the case for transparency then i will make a case against transparency infill of privacy and the dangers it creates for the individual and also for society at large and finally i will deal with the social score which is expanding right now so there will be a trade-off between transparency and privacy and you know typically the economies will be on the side of transparency and the fields are first more on the side of privacy but you know the economies also you know bring a broader view nowadays and it will be somewhere between transparency and privacy depending on the application so let me start with a right to know so we're all concerned about what's being done by platforms with our data and about who is our data so there are at least four issues the first is that platforms may share data without our consent that's one thing i think the biggest thing actually the biggest thing is actually because that you can mostly regulate is what i call uninformed consent which is i go on the web dozens of times a day i click and i click and i click without knowing what i'm doing i don't know what the terms mean exactly i don't know the partners are you know because they're sharing with partners and so on and i don't know what their exact policies will be third issue uh there is unavoidable sharing it's hard to escape so even if i don't go on the web or i go on the web but i don't grant my consent still it's the case that platforms know a lot about me for two reasons the first is that my social graph my friends my family my colleagues are going to put information about me in their emails on social network and also there will be facial recognition and there will be lots of stuff which will be known about me about my politics about my health about my taste even if i don't ever give my concept the other issue is that people like me are going to reveal stuff about me because we have called it this so it's more like indirect disclosure you know they directly disclose about themselves but indirectly about me and finally there's the issue of insufficient investment in security so even if for example the platform has pledged not to share my data then you know there might be a breach of security now let me just make the case that transparency upright is not quite an individual choice um let's start with the privacy paradox so the privacy paradox already mentioned is a disconnect between the user of steady preferences and the actual behavior so i just look at myself i'm very concerned about my privacy but at the same time 50 times a day i click without knowing so the question is where why does the market fall pricey fail the first issue is data externalities so that's just jargon of economist about the fact that other people in my social graph give information about me the second one is my bounded rationality or i would tend to think my rationality because i view you know giving consent as involving very high transaction costs um you know just understanding privacy policy and reading the pricing policy of hundreds of websites and platforms every day and really understanding what they mean is they are on top of that they're unboundedly irrational in the sense i'm impulsive so i i want to have um the information about a soccer game which is being played and you know i want to know and i don't want to read privacy policy and i just go and read it and finally there's the issue of unraveling um so imagine that your prospective employer says you legally don't have to give me access to your facebook private page okay i don't request that of you but you can well that's enough to force me to do it because if i don't do it then there's something fishy something suspicious and then there's what economy is called unraveling so in the end everybody has to give you information so i will say this it's very important to have a strong legal framework so gdpr has tried to do exactly that and in my view it's very well into intention it's welcomed by this real first attempt i certainly haven't changed my behaviors in gdpr because it doesn't quite solve the previous issues it's much too complex for the user uh there is no real change in what really matters the other issues which i'm not going to talk about which is competition and policy issues i'm going to forget about that that's something that we need to think about actually i'm doing a little bit of work with patrick round on exactly this issue and trying to think about you know gdpr 2.0 but yeah it's ongoing work it's too early to tell and but let me try to convince you we need something more than gdpr so i'm sure all of you have a bank account and it doesn't come to your mind you know to spend all your nights looking at the balance sheet and of balance sheet activities the previous day of your bank um assuming you have the data assuming that you have the expertise to do so um you know you might say okay we could have short-term deposits that are not insured and you know the next day you know at 9 00 am you can withdraw your money if you are not happy with the way the bank is is is it is run and you fear about your deposits um that will not be efficient let's assume it's doable and it's not obviously not doable but it will not be a vision for of us to spend all our nights you know overseeing our banks similarly after this um this festival after this session you'll be going on to the main square one of the main squares in toronto another dinner um i hope you can do that it's it's it's doable now in france um and um you'll be wondering of course you know is a food safe in that restaurant um now you're not going to look at the supply chain of the restaurants you're going you're going to tonight um it will be a huge amount of work even if you have the data so in the end you need a regulator to do the job for you where do you place a cursor between transparency and privacy so you know there is a view which has transparency is optimal and even fostner with a remarkable lawyer said at some point non-disclosure becomes fraud um at the same time you know we all know about what lack of christ he means i mean you all we all read science science fiction books and and movies watch movies but it's not only science fiction let me just think about uh east chairman is glazer on the bench you know the the transparent the glass uh glass man um this is serious so let me first make the case for transparency it's very much of an economic case in a sense and it's a good case it's fine uh the first is about incentives uh the transparency transparency is going to create accountability so if we perform well as workers we get better jobs because future employers will know about our performance same thing for suppliers if there are ratings if they are reviews then they will be a better incentive to perform well same thing politicians will have less incentive to be corrupt if their corruption is exposed to a wider public and according to the social scoring proponent people who are subject to social core will drive slower in the city they will supply more public goods they will behave in a greener fashion and so on and so forth they will commit less crime and there is something to be said in favor of that there is a huge lab and field experimental literature showing that the people behave more prosperously when they observe bowsers i mean just by introspection when we're observed we also always give better that's true i mean the experiments have done that with charitable contribution probably good provision voting blood donation and so forth so there's no question this is the right point the second point of economics i will say is about allocating efficiency so try to make sure that you get the right matches so you you must facilitate good matches and avoid wrong ones so you want to avoid matching with sexual predators or coral politicians so you don't want you want people not to vote for corrupt politician and you want people to stay away from sexual predators and conversely you know if you have more information that may be good actually to facilitated trade because if there is a lot of symmetric information it's easy for example to lend to someone and actually that what happened for example with the ai which is used by alibaba on financial which allowed trade and lending of lending to millions of small enterprises because it created trust in the system it's not completely true as as many of you know of course is that when one of the concerns about making stress tests in banking public is that sure it can reassure markets but it also also may create a bankrupt so it's a little bit more complicated than that now the case against transparency is manifold okay the first thing is that transparency is going to induce posturing um transparency creates accountability but it also may create too much accountability so let's start with a more minor thing a consensual issue with small anxieties very small anxiety so consensual means we'll agree about what's right and what's wrong or more or less so we all agree for example that politeness is nice at the same time wishing happy birthday to all your facebook friends i mean i'm sure tito must have you know tens of thousands of friends you know many of those friends you don't even know them so you know you may not want to to to wish happy birthday to people you hardly know who are not your friends you know that doesn't make any sense but more generally there's the issue of excessive attention to self-presentation and you know if you have seen some episode of of black mirror for example uh you know what this means now the most serious issue is really about devising issues so divisive issues are issues where um you know if there is no people don't agree what about what's right and wrong you know people on the left and people on the right um so we can differ in our views about religion about politics about sexuality about soft drugs about social roles and so on those are issues which are very important issues because they divide society and of course that uh when you have divisive issues you may be afraid um if you have transparency on acting taking a stance or you may defer to the majority in view and that's one of the reasons or actually the two reasons of excess fostering basically determine many philosophers for you that pricey foster emancipation and authenticity so sart for example talk about privacy the need for privacy for authenticity of behavior alberta williams for example said to act morally is to act autonomously not as a result of social pressure okay other costs of transparency self-restraint and there are two costs the first i will discuss later on is you keep on maintaining maintaining the same behavior but you are in a safe space so you reduce your use of public spaces so for example a reproof sexual minority may not enjoy the public speaks of streets for example together another example is that you may have drug users or aborting women results will result to untrustworthy providers the other possibility in terms of creating a safe space is to select your social graph in a specific way so you focus your social graph on like-minded people with a similarity but in that case of course there is a loss of diversity and opportunities therefore some of your friends you don't cultivate anymore um you just focus on your own group of people who think like you or behave like you and those are social costs of course and they are priced you know they are social they are cause for the individuals the other possibilities that you change your behavior all together so starting with the last bullet you may not check into drug rehab center or share information with a physician if you are not guaranteed privacy there was an economics paper on that a cheating effect of uh of public spaces so people don't dare to speak their mind um if there is some correlation between the stance and some socially undesirable type of perceived socially and undesirable type so for example let's assume i'm in favor of drug liberalization i may still not argue in favor of drug legalization because i might be concerned that you think actually i'm a drug addict whether i'm i'm an artist there may be some correlation between the two third cost which has been studied at youtube by economies is discrimination so there is price discrimination and the concern about surplus extraction so the platforms nowadays have so much the data about you that they know more or less your willingness to pay for goods and services i make sure trading a little bit but they know a lot more about you than they used to and therefore they can tell us that prices are terms and conditions so as to extract to to extract your behavioral surplus they may also unload layman's on consumer with search pattern shows they don't have a clue or their emails and there is the issue of algorithmic fairness as well now the other thing which has been emphasized actually that that was 50 years ago now in economics by hash life is a breakdown of insurance so if you have too much information insurance might be destroyed so for example if you have a system of pride insurance in which there is no regulation on discrimination then the people who are known to have a big future in terms of their health won't get you you won't get coverage and we need universal coverage because we are not responsible for health more or less and for for especially for our genes but that's broader than that it's not only health it might be the amplification of mistakes um it might be the consequences of uh of a mistake for one's personal life being of becoming a social power it could be the reduced access to a labor market it could be the stigmatization of the poor fourth item which was mentioned by tito already is a violation of the right to be forgotten a very fundamental principle in law is that we should be paying for our misdeed but then once we have paid for the misdeed we will restart as a clean slate we have a second chance and actually this is not in law actually most collisions have this uh principle now this is also actually an incentive perspective because the idea is that if you start with a clean slate you will behave better now you often have that in bankruptcy you often have that for young people for good reason okay and you have that for most crimes okay now this i think is a pretty good principle not all of them and you don't want politician who has been incredibly corrupt for example to come back uh 15 years later and and you know and be elected again but you know it's on average it's a pretty good uh policy and the problem with the digital record is is that it's going to last forever and that's really an issue i think because the stigma is still around devices so let me return to divisive issues i remind you there might be sexual orientation politics religion vegan and mutators abortion blah blah blah i mean there are many many of them and the problem with them is that we don't agree on necessarily agree on what's right and wrong and that may trigger discrimination a fuel hatred that may trigger violence okay and therefore there's a very high pride and social cost this is something i'm doing uh some work on which is the preliminary but what i do is to look at a demand for partial transparency under divisive issues so we don't want to be fully transparent actually what we want to do is to let our behavior known to our in-group our in-group is like-minded individuals who choose the same behavior that's in a sense a safe space but it's a safe space if the behavior is not known to the out group people who behave differently who are different from us because if we have full transparency which include transparency to the outgroup that makes people try to act so that's why in practice we have often retreat in a safe space it can be physical that can be a home behavior and home in a pride club in a church in lodge you know in full right bullfighter ring another controversial uh conflictual uh issue uh a political party and so on and so forth or it can be virtual actually facebook for a long time has been using that you know selling you to face safe space of like-minded people and of course the benefit is that it generates less hostility but it doesn't generate authenticity i mean this is not it doesn't vindicate the point of view of staff and others um and actually you know it it creates a lot of signaling um there is a lot of social pressure and actually the people who don't take sides for the left or the right thing they are kind of neutral agent that are viewed suspiciously by both sides if in a safe space equilibrium because you might be one of those bad guys who thinks very different and we sing face differently from me and that as i mentioned creation of a safe space comes with sprite cost which is a reduced use of the public space and the foregoing of desirable relationship and the limited diversity of one's social graph there are many interesting things to look at and let me ignore the first pillar bullets which is what happens when the course is in terms of altering the social graph but something which comes on top of the social cost are of the prior outside of the cost for the individual is a social cost once you are in a safe space then there is an incentive for onenotemanship you you keep on signaling you want to show that castle is on the port um and that can be either voluntary or it could be enforced by the sponsor of the same space because they can threaten to out you by the way outing is a consequence of one of those uh of the theory because you know you have chosen a safe space for a good reason so you don't want to be out it from this fair space oh exclude you so it can be this extra signaling can be either voluntary or enforced by the sponsors of the safe space and that means that there will be one-sided narratives there will be hate speech there will be conspiracy series there will be facebook facebook groups and finally um and i still i think i still have a couple of minutes tito is that all right yes please yes so let me just finish with the issue of social scores so that's something which um which is and i want to turn further is not not solely chinese chinese is an in a advanced technologically and as a conducive political situation um but this is going to happen in many countries if we don't pay attention so the china's social credit system which was due to be rolled out in 2020 of course was committed as it has changed a little bit that is going to aggregate for each person and also each business as well but each person um is going to aggregate various behavior into a single criterium some you might think are reasonable like did i pay my debts did i pay my taxes am i polluting do i drive too fast in the streets of toulouse or toronto whatever okay um in principle fake news belongs to that also we have to be uh to be aware of the definition of fake news because of course in in some countries the notion of fake news is basically anything which has any disagreement with the government um and then there are some clearly unappealing ones uh like a social graph who are my friends for example my personal traits my political or religious opinions so here we we get back in part to divisive issues now what is it going to be used for in china the first is public stigmatization so you know being being on unleashed on on billboards in the street and all those things um and also you you love it on your phone and your card um but also there will be more economic-like restrictions to employment transportation visa abroad even access to the best school or universities okay now um in a paper i've written on that and the next step for me and my colleagues will be actually to test it out directly but the individuals are engaged in stable relationships so we all are engaged in some kind of private sphere if you want a family of friends the inhabitants of our village but also in in there is a public sphere um of people we have more transient relationship with on platforms some large cities in large cities and so on and we care about our social image and that's that's a very important ingredient and as i said there's a lot of evidence that's the case we care about what people think about us and therefore that means that disclosure of any information like a social core will have an impact it's important whether it's good or bad it's a different issue but it's going to have an impact and it's going to discipline people in some way now in the theoretical framework i've developed you know my past behavior may be known to others in two ways either you have been interacting directly with me or you learn from my previous behavior through social score which embodies um which summarize in a sense my previous behaviors so in china you have like in some pilots you have like 1 000 different dimensions and it's aggregated with some weights into a single social score so for example you might be blacklisted or not i might be blacklisted or not but in china it's much finer than that actually it's a it's a three-digit number it's uh it's very fine grading um the release of a social score of course is going to boost image concern and affect behavior it's going to impact the reputation and extend it to new partners but also the stable partners of the bright sphere will get a better assessment of my behavior okay um if you have if you have consensual issues and sizable extra energies it's rather a good thing because it's going to improve behavior but what i show is that the state and in the paper our social platforms and religious organizations can exploit agents interests in each other's social score to do something else which is to instead of promoting pro socialities to promote political compliance so the idea is bundling so the social score aggregates into a single score um both microsocial behavior or anti-social behavior but also whether i told the line politically uh political clients of compliance okay and the other thing that i i study is a guilt by association but i'll come back to that so what i show is that the state will want to bundle the truth so pro-sociality and compliance with the political science policies if and only if it's sufficiently autocratic autocritic means that it puts way a lot of weight on staying power on you know suppressing descent compared to um to process welfare of the people and the ability to affect behaviors through bonding is much so social control by the government is going to be much stronger in a society of strangers and a society with more stable relationships simply because you know when you have a stable society um people know each other so they cannot be influenced too much but what the government says okay and there are a bunch of other interesting issues since i'm getting late let me um finish with enlisting the social graph guild by association is about coloring a person's perception by the company she keeps um sorry tito you're my friend and because i'm blacklisted you are going to be blacklisted as well okay um so the relationship with someone a blacklist is going to obtain the reputation of those who are prior it will not be the consequence of the concern is the destruction of the social fabric nobody wants to be seen in the streets or in a cafe or in a theater communicating with a low rating person so basically you destroy the social fabric so embroiding individual social crash into a social score is going to destroy the social fabric people cut beneficial ties with others and we know that from eastern germany of course and it's going for that reason to apply mainly towards the category regimes because on the other end they strengthen the state's old on society because it makes a punishment for non-compliance non-political compliance harsher and as i say it's a very ancient strategy you know with very rudimentary means um the stasi managed to break the social fabric but nowadays a marginal cost of knowing your social graph has has gone down to zero almost zero because you have cameras everywhere you have facial recognition which is really very good nowadays you have ai applied to communication social network emails phone calls and so on it's very easy to understand what your social graph is just like your opinions as well so some servers suffice actually to perform tasks which were very labor intensive in the past okay let me have been too long let me conclude here of course i'm a big fan of digital future it's it's going to promote our living standards our health our inclusiveness if we use it well but it's full of dangers so the idea is not to renounce it's impossible anywhere digital future but really to address those social societal challenges for that we need to use economic and social science analysis and confront all the ethical dilemma to start building smart regulations of privacy and we it comes back to the theme of of the festival which is the return of the state because we really need a smart return of the state here thank you very much for your attention thank you thank you for your wonderful lecture i told you earlier on that gently rolls models are extremely elegant and indeed these elegance lies in the fact of naming exactly what issues are and what are the relevant trade-offs uh and this was extremely clear in this contribution about this very difficult aspect we have time for a couple of questions from the audience i wonder whether we have a jurist in in the audience who wish to ask a question i i actually have a question about current issues because we went through the pandemic so i wonder whether these uh that you told us also applies to these the privacy authority in italy recently established that an employer cannot ask an employee whether he or she got vaccinated or not in addition the employer cannot declare not even on a voluntary basis whether he or she received a vaccine so the only way by which an employer can know something about the vaccination of employees is addressing the the local health authority and he or she will receive an aggregate data about the percentage of workers who got vaccinated this is a divisive issue of course because vaccination is controversial and we know that there is also an aspect of externality which is very strong and which we touched upon over this period in terms of the risk of contagion and then we have an aspect which pertains to sensitive information because of course being vaccinated something which is absolutely sensitive as a piece of data so i wonder how that relates to the overall conceptual framework that you proposed well as you say uh very clearly this is a divisive issue i tend to be on one side of the debate i'm afraid i'm a bit of an ayatollah for vaccination but um so yeah i mean in all countries there are issues in france for example we um you know we cannot force a doctor or nurse to be vaccinated and i think i'm feeling very uneasy about it because i understand the point that uh we have to respect opinion and so on but at the same time those people are in contact with patients all the time and i guess you are making a little bit the same point with employees in the firm uh there is a huge extent of um infecting someone so i i will say um you know i i just really received an email from my teachers uh you know because i i usually go there in july uh not this year but uh you know the the policy uh at mit will be actually to ask for planning pass so if you want to go to mit you have to show that you have been vaccinated um and you know there is a trade-off between privacy and and efficiency and the efficiency is clearly everybody should be vaccinated in my view they accept those for which which have some reason not to some good reason uh health reason not to but you know by and large we all have to be vaccinated and you know what i don't understand is that in school it's a no-brainer and you know you can if you want to to put your children in a school in france you have to your children have to be vaccinated period and i think it's a good policy um so that's difficult because yeah i mean i really i realize i'm i'm relying on on one side of the debate and not everybody should be agreeing with me but at the same time i have a tendency to think that we now i understand the concern that employers should not be knowing everything about the health of their employees but the question is you know is that a bad thing you know covet for example i don't think there is such a stigma i think of it much less um on having some other illnesses which might lead you to be fired or at least not promoted um on the cover there is not that much of a stigma because it's a it's something you may you may be catching you know involuntarily and it's a short-term thing anyway i mean unless you have long-covered of course zlonkovic might be another issue i agree um now the pandemic has revealed lots of ethical dilemmas and what i'm what i'm complaining about is really that we were not prepared it's just like with the supplies in a sense we were not prepared for the pandemics even so it's pretty clear that the pandemics was going to happen at some point you know not only viruses but you know this antibiotic resistance there is a melting of the permafrost there is a biological warfare and so i mean it's very clear that that's something that could have happened and will happen again and we were totally unprepared not only in terms of the healthcare system but we were also on prepare in terms of the overall debate on what we should be doing in that case so an example of course was you know that happened in italy and france who should have the priority if there are not enough bets or respirators um you know that was an example of the trolley de la mars that philosophers have been working on for centuries i would say exaggerating a little bit but you know you know and the value of life okay so there there were choices which were made but uh they were made more for the first time actually they were not completely implicit they were discussed but then the pandemic paths and all those things or whether people should be vaccinated haven't been discussed and i think it's a pity so what we should be doing is collectively basically uh say ah the other benefits the other cost and let's try to think about next time what do we want to do what are we how can we prevent abuses of of transparency you know um how are we going to react to all those things and and you know my view is that at this stage we still won't be prepared um that's a pity i think i think we need to have this kind of discussion well what you said is very important so the uh need to discuss about these issues i'm afraid that the time available uh has ended i would like to draw some conclusions about the festival but before doing that uh well we carried out a survey during the festival among the speakers we raised two questions for them on the topics discussed here the first it's about their consensus about vaccines whether they agree or not on the following statement that is that a temporary weaver on vaccine could enable less developed countries to accelerate their vaccines campaigns and the score was from one to five five perfectly agree i perfectly agree i don't agree and halfway is a neutral position and we had as a result of this survey well about 60 speakers out of 100 have answered and the score was four so 60 speakers agree on the need to have a vaccine patent weaver and then we differentiated between economists and non-economists so we know you know that at the festival we don't only have economies but other professionals and here the score was slightly lower 3.7 the second question that we raised was about the distribution of the vaccines and the statement was in order to face the consequences of the pandemic on public data and income distribution oecd countries should increase wealth taxes the same rule one i don't agree five i agree and the average score was 4.8 so a relative agreement on this statement there is something about economists that i would like to underline so economists are less in agreement with this statement well together with the answer we asked people to tell us what was the level of confidence about their statement and what's interesting is that economists tend to be less sure about their answer as compared to non-economists well this is indicative of a way of thinking of economists who often tend to look at pros and cons and understand uh details uh so go in depth so very often these problems do not have simple answers and then each problem requires a specific knowledge you cannot know everything and also in the area of economics you may be an expert in one issue but not in many other issues there is another pointer that i would like to make with reference to economists there is an aspect about the answers of economists where i uh do not really agree i dare not to be agree and all the answers are available in the um website of the festival some of them also left explanations uh wrote explanations so you can read them well there are several of my colleagues that in terms of the distribution well they wrote that they didn't feel like giving an answer because these are aspects which relate to moral or ideal situations which are independent of their profession and their being an economist well i'm not so convinced about that also in the light of the discussions that we have had in this day the task of a state is not that of setting rules only but to be sure that these rules are understood implemented and that there is a widespread awareness about the rightness of these rules otherwise such rules will not be applied well during the pandemics we had several levels of application of the rules about masks for example well a state which i cannot convince about the need to do something so we'll hardly be able to implement other regulations so it's not enough to establish what are the good rules and the bad rules you also have to think about a civic sense and how people react to the introduction of these rules well to get a long story short let's say that on such fundamental issues above all after such a severe crisis which has hit very vulnerable people i think that we should have a discussion about fiscal equality also involving economists who want to remain as scientists who look at things scientifically because if we look at surveys carried out in the u.s and other countries after the pandemic we see that there is a greater awareness about the fact that there is a serious problem of fiscal equality uh because probably weaker citizens have paid the highest cost not only in terms of debts but also in terms of economic losses are people who got richer including big companies this raises a question of equality that we need to face well we spoke about the national plan of resilience and recovery and that will entail a reallocation of jobs uh transition to the digital economy and cost for many people unless we tackle the issue of fairness and equity we will have many difficulties in enforcing that plan and i'm sorry for speaking at length about this i would like to tell you a few figures about the festival we are going back to business as usual of course we are not there yet but we have uh filled all the uh rooms for the many meetings the dozens of meetings we had over these days you see we had a limited number of people that could enter but we had for one person in presence dozens of others uh using the streaming facility to follow proceedings 1.3 million views is what we had today the people who visited the website to see what was going on at the festival we know that the festival needs people crowded halls and theaters and people in the streets squares talking with the speakers and speaking among each other i'm sure we are sure that we will go back to that and the hope is really that next year we have again an addition which is fully in person i would also like to add that we had a strong impact at the media level an index of that is the fact that despite the restrictions despite the fact that journalists could only remain outside and so on and so forth so we go back to the pre pre-covered levels of accredited journalists so this is the right direction we are very happy about all the things that i told you about having said that now i would like to call on stage the uh governor of the province of trento um the mayor janice elli the director of the university of trento de floriana pelaterza and enzo chipoleta whom i do not need to introduce within the context of this festival so that we can formally conclude the festival and close the festival thank you so much for being with us i i uh actually let you there following also the final part of the of the festival but i know that you're happy to be with us so thank you thank you so much for being with us tonight thank you thank you really it's a fantastic festival congratulations hmm with these final event we close this edition of the festival of economics i would like to thank all participants all attendants all speakers all journalists who participated and attended the various events i would like to ask tito thank you very much mr la terza thank you for creating this edition and version of the festival and thank you for believing in this festival as tito said today we can now say that there has been a lot of interest for the festival a strong participation and a strong sentiment in favor of the festival economics this was not something that we could take for granted when we started planning it now that we know how things have gone we said it would have been a mistake not to organize it in this way but deciding to do so one month one month ago was not an easy decision now we are all happy and this is you see trentino that tries to lead others and do something which was not to be taken for granted and i would also like to and to stress the fact that we did so in a moment which is a very moment a very important moment to relaunch trentino and the country at large i would like to thank people working behind the scenes those who stand for organizing things and then the press of course communication i would like to thank marilena de francesco i thank her in the name of the entire organizing team she has worked so much for this festival also in terms of managing the arrival of ministers who of course had to be taken care of with a lot of care and i would also like to thank the law enforcement forces thank you to the fire brigade i see them in in the theater so this is a general thank you to all those who made the festival possible of course we will see each other again next year if we managed this year to do the festival we're sure that we will even so even more so be able to do so next year so see you next year on my part you