want to say that good evening good afternoon my name is massimo garcia i'm a journalist with the corriere de la sierra and i've been working in the past 15 years from the united states for the italian daily i was asked to coordinate this meeting with professor darren asimoglu who will speak to us from boston and in introducing him i would like i would like very briefly to talk about the world in which he works and also of the topic that we are going to address this year's festival is about the return of the state and the intent is not that of considering the aspect of the conflict with the private entities but rather focusing on possible cooperation between public and private entities this might be or seem obvious to consider here in europe especially after the pandemic it was more difficult to address this topic though years ago in the years of absolute liberalism and especially so in the united states which after the first decade after the world war witnessed a certain development there was a strong state intervention and i think of eisenhower's and also nixon's policies but then starting at the end of the 70s the situation changed and there was a lot of hostility in a way and also mistrust vis-a-vis those policies and i think of reagan and president reagan and his words over defining the state a problem and not a solution professor assimoglo and i will be very brief in terms of telling you about his biography of course you find full details in the booklet of the festival anyway professor assamo assamoglo is an institute professor in america born in istanbul of armenian background and after studying in london he has taught for 30 years especially at mit in boston and professor assamar glue over the past decade has developed an economic thought and a theory that has been developed in hundreds of academic papers and in a number of very successful books on political aspects and political economic aspects already back in years when it was not so that everybody talked about this topic and he has always stressed also the need to put constraints and limits to the market so that we have a state with a certain uh regulatory power and this is something that he considered in his books also books for the general public not only in his academic papers and i would like to mention the fact that in 2006 he focused about the economic origins of dictatorships and there specifically he focused on the need to have a strong role of a civil uh society as the basis for democracy and then why nations fail written with uh mr robinson published in uh italy with the title berkeley tony felix well in that book uh he explained in a very significant way i believe the fact that there might be a need for disruption creative disruption as we call it which is so important in technology which is important in order to renew society and technology and that is also conducive to the development of economy and that works only if there is a strong presence of the state which has to be solid well-defined and transparent and certain as well so as as i said he addressed all these topics and put forward his opinions in years when it was not easy to do so and i think of reagan and then also other presidents and i think then what happened with the presidency of mr clinton and obama who also paid a lot of attention to the development of the market we have had many changes over the course of time of course in professor asamoglu's thought all this has to be clearly balanced you need to have a rules of course without creating too many constraints to the development of a creativity because you see in his a thought he makes it very clear that the increase in wealth and income derive from the development of market activities so you need to create a welfare system public services and help using at best of the tools and instruments of civil society within the framework of a dynamic approach which is of course an economic dynamic approach this is especially what we find in the narrow corridor book and the title has been directly translated into italian in a very explanatory way again we talk about a narrow corridor which means that you need to strike the right balance in a narrow space which of course requires a government and administrations to be highly skilled and competent especially in a time and at a time of technological development over the very past years something happened that altered in a way the economic and political equations that we have there are three factors that i would like to mention first and foremost the technology revolutions starting uh with the development of artificial intelligence that is giving us a huge opportunities and i also think in terms of development of the vaccines that we now have at our disposal which has been made possible by the technology development and i think of modernism pfizer vaccines especially but of course these technologies change and in a way also upset the labor market and also create monopolies and oligopolies in the economy in the economic system and then inequalities in terms of economic inequalities and professor smogler has always focused on that topic you see inequalities over the past years have increased incredibly and the third factor is the pandemic which in a way deteriorated the situation further meaning that it has exacerbated the speed of automation and the introduction of automatic technological processes and also increased inequalities but this also created an opportunity which is that of having the opportunity to start from scratch in a way with plans to construct and reconstruct which are similar to what we had after the world war so that you can start reconstructing um again from scratch i would like to mention a paper uh he wrote very recently about these specific aspects and the need to redesign artificial intelligence in order to give back civil society and politics and politicians as well the capability not only to govern but also to keep the development of technologies within the realm of a social usefulness approach so to say well the human factor is very important still without leaving everything in the hands of a limited number of people who can be extremely ingenious in terms of what they can develop from the viewpoint of technology but which of course have an interest in maintaining power in their own sector and on the other hand there is also the need to increase the capability of influencing positively political and social uh movements and elements certainly there are many questions that we might ask but we don't have so much time so i stopped here and i give him the floor and i published an interview with professor asamo glue in the career of today so you can also read their uh his contributions but of course we hope to have time for questions also at the end of the contribution and now professor asamolo you have the flaw thank you very much massimo it's my pleasure to be here uh remotely albeit so i'm going to share my screen uh can you see my slides yes perfect so i'm going to try to speak for about half hour so that we have time for q a at the end and i look forward to hearing your comments and questions uh i'm going to talk about the crisis plural engulfing the world especially the western world but to do that i'm going to start from the book that james robinson and i published in 2019 the narrow corridor we take a critical aspect of society to be its ability to support liberty but our notion of liberty here is not the narrow one like being let alone by the state it's more similar to uh what republican philosophers such as philip pettit new neuropal neo-republican define as dominance or the opposite of dominance dominance is a situation in which somebody somebody has arbitrary power over you that could be somebody outside of your family inside of your family your employer groups or institutions if you are living at the mercy of another in a situation that you are vulnerable to harm from them or threat of harm that undermines liberty so you can see that liberty requires many key elements of society that most of us not just in western modern societies but throughout history most of us find highly critical security safety autonomy and capabilities so you cannot have liberty if there is a great degree of inequality so that i am in a subservient situation and liberty when you look at this way is intimately linked with democracy you cannot have liberty in a situation like china where the communist party is supreme and whatever it decrees becomes law and you cannot have democracy or liberty in situations in which there is absolutely no law that rules the lives of most people now i think one way of understanding where we are at the moment is to look at how in recent past people have thought about this so there were many predictions related to this for example in the uh days following the follow berlin wall in 1989 political scientist francis fukuyama wrote the end of history essay and book in which he predicted an unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism and indeed in the 1990s we had many more countries become either democracies or improve the depths of their democracies but these predictions haven't fared very well here i'm showing data from uh one of the international organizations the freedom house that tracks democracy and what you see that way before the pandemic since 2006 in every year the number of countries that have gone back in democracy either big declines or small declines albeit that has co significantly exceeded the number of countries that have improved their democracy school so democracy is not faring well we don't know exactly why there's a debate on this but it's not failing really well but perhaps then we should go to another set of predictions just a few years after fukuyama political international scholar robert kaplan predicted the opposite that in some sense the violence would spread throughout the world coming of anarchy he called it this was a modern version of thomas hamza's poor nasty british and short lives because a powerful leviathan would increasingly become unable to keep up with the demands of an international world especially with many pockets of lawlessness well the in the decade before the pandemic you might have thought this was actually more likely to come true so these are scenes from syria and raqqa after the carnage that the islamic state wrecked when they took over similar situation in iraq mosul this is again under the rule of the islamic state it looks certainly scenes from a different age than the one we are used to and perhaps most symbolically and capturing really what thomas hobbes had the prelude to all of this was a complete collapse of the state institutions these are the helmets of iraqi soldiers they left it behind as they were fleeing islamic state a complete collapse of the law structure but even though the situation in syria and parts of libya mali have not much improved kaplan's predictions have not come true either in fact we have seen a very very different process in which the nature of the state society relations have changed much more in line with the sort of the picture i showed you of the retreat of democracy in that context the score israeli scholar yuval noah harari has made another prediction perhaps what we're going to have is a digital dictatorship you can recognize this in the spirit of new technologies ai but other digital technologies as well strengthening the hands of the state in the nature of marx's famous court the hen mill gives you society with the feudal lord the steamboat society with the industrial capitalist and in some sense you know you can think of harare and others saying ai and social media give you society with the digital big brother and again if you want to think about the world in these ways you can do so this is tiananmen square with face recognition cameras certainly no mass demonstration there over the last 30 years since the collapse of the tiananmen square protests in bloody massacre and the local and central government in china have made tremendous strides and now not much media coverage of this topic but tremendous strides towards setting up social credit system where every dimension of an individual life is now being monitored by either corporations or more worryingly by the state and of course the coronavirus has complicated all of these processes it has accelerated some of these trends many of the worst authoritarian governments putin modi erdogan in turkey as well as china have used this as an excuse for tightening the grips completely killing any semblance of free discourse not that much free media was left in these countries anyway and many are thinking that this is the end of democracy liberty perhaps globalization in fact the problems don't end there it wasn't just that the economy was highly inclusive using the language that james and i used and growth was fast and the only problem was this struggle over liberty and democracy in fact much of the west was suffering in the hands of a increasing grip tightening grip of inequality here let me show you a few more slides to motivate it before i come to the conceptual framework that i'm going to use for thinking about these issues this is real wages in the u.s for men with different education levels from red high school dropouts all the way to blue high school workers with post-graduate degrees and what you see is that in the 60s and the same is true in the 50s and 70s you have the period of rising tide lifting all boats all these groups are experiencing pretty similar growth in their real wages about two and a half percent a year in real terms but then since then a completely different picture a huge increase in inequality these red and the blue curves are going in different directions very lackluster wage growth for most people even college graduates who don't have postgraduate specialized degrees the light blue in the middle she doesn't show much real wage growth it's really remarkable you know we think of the importance of college degree in the us in the uk but workers with college degree aren't doing that well it's only these postgraduate workers who are growing and significant wage declines for workers with high school degree orange or high school without a high school degree even those with two year degree a very very different labor market even worse this has been associated with the collapse of the middle class occupations so if you look at what's constituted the backbone of the middle class during the 50s and the 60s it was these occupations i'm showing in yellow and dark orange yellow and light brown production workers assembly line workers blue collar workers clerical workers administrative workers and sales workers both among college and non-college workers those engaging these middle class occupations has tremendously declined in the 80s even more in the 1990s and continuing in the 2000s even worse while among college workers you've had some of those jobs being replaced by higher quality professional technical and managerial jobs among non-college workers these top occupations are not growing it's all at the bottom so we're creating a very polarized job market in which very little wage growth and very little middle class jobs available for workers with no college and even for workers with work colleges getting worse this is the us but these issues are not just a us phenomenon inequality has been increasing everywhere in europe sure the bottom of the wage distribution falling up falling down falling apart that's a u.s phenomenon because u.s does not have decent levels of minimum wages or labor market institutions but the overall inequality is true everywhere sweden germany italy uk u.s started more unequal and has become more unequal but it's very similar if you look at the genie coefficient to many countries even more tellingly the middle class going in south disappearing is also true throughout the developed world so here i'm showing you how the same occupations the middle third of the wage of the occupation distribution has changed in pretty much every country in europe as well as the us and you see that these red bars are all negative meaning that these jobs have been disappearing everywhere so we have political social and economic challenges where is the future going to be a dismal one growing inequality few people having decent jobs the rest either jobless or living on transfers at the same time liberty freedom uh freedom of expression and democracy falling foul of the powerful states be they chinese american or european well not nearly perhaps not it may be that there are these tremendously challenging forces but how they will affect the future how they will affect liberty state inequality pandemics will depend on how we use that technology but to be able to talk about these issues we need a framework well the framework i'm going to talk about is a new one but in some sense it's the same issues that people ever since they have been interacting with the state have been struggling with the first surviving writing is from the sumerian tablets from almost 4 500 years ago they tell the story of gilgamesh the king over rook the gilgamesh uh the sumerian tablets start by describing what a wonderful society city gilgamesh had created how its ramparts glean like copper in the sun palm trees the gardens the orchards the glorious palaces and the temples it looks like a happy society in the ancient world but not so fast fly in the ointment there's a problem of despotism the same sort of issue that i was talking about threatening liberty democracy the the tablets continue they say who is like gilgamesh what other king has inspired such ah who else can say i alone rule supreme his head raised high trampling his citizens like a wild bull he's king he does whatever he wants takes the sun from his farmer crushes him takes the girl from her mother and uses her no one dares to oppose him so if you go back to my definition of liberty from philip pettit's notion of dominance you'll see this is crushing liberty it's a complete dominance gilgamesh is like a wild bull does whatever he wants his arbitrary power is supreme well the tablets continue citizens are not happy they are not happy with just gleaming uh glorious buildings and ramparts they want freedom so they cry to the heavens to the king to the god of the sky anu they ask her to stop this despotism anu comes up with a solution to contain gilbert it is the first example in history of checks and balances create a double for gilgamesh his second self and one who equals his strength and courage a man who equals his stormy heart so he so and gilgamesh's double is created when gilgamesh is about to rape a bride and kido intervenes the two fight and perhaps that is the end of gilgamesh's despotism this would be very symbolic for many european countries and americans especially who believe in checks and balances separation of powers constitutions but actually this doppelganger solution is impractical who will control enkidu what if they will have to fight all the time when one of them wants to do something and the other one disagrees and in fact it doesn't work out a few uh tablets later now enkidu and gilgamesh team up and they start terrorizing everybody so in fact it isn't in the doppelganger collusions or the checks and balances that we have to look for the origins of liberty what we have to create is a more organic set of shackles on the leviathan this is the essence of what jim and i call shackled leviathan it has to come from society itself from the mobilization of society i think this is at once more difficult but also more hopeful here is the conceptual lenses by which we look at this situation simplify everything to two variables capacity of the state and the elite this is where gilgamesh was high capacity to do stuff like nice buildings and cobblestones but also repress people and the power of society to organize solve the collective action problem protest if it's institutionalized vote and participate in assemblies most pre-modern societies were here states were weak you did not have rule of law or anything like that and it was very difficult for hierarchy to emerge they were deeply egalitarian countries societies but even more common today are these despotic leviathans like china very powerful states but at the same time they extinguish liberty by weakening impairing civil society but things are a little bit more hopeful because when state and society are in balance then where then you are in this narrow corridor it is in this narrow corridor that you see a very different pattern so now these arrows show that it's not like in the despotic leviathan case where the state gets stronger and weakens society the two can get stronger at the same time this is what we call the red queen dynamic state and society running together in competition sometimes in cooperation it's not an easy process some societies like the us have been in the corridor for most of their existence but in a very powerful in a very in a very painful way they've had many problems many times come close to leaving the corridor other societies have left it and i'm not going to have time to talk about it but it emphasizes that it's a process to develop the institutional foundations of liberty inclusive economies democracy but interestingly if you believe this framework it suggests that ultimately even though this is difficult uncertain treacherous even if you succeed in remaining in the corridor the level of state capacity exceeds quite a bit what you can achieve even with the best despotic leviathans like china because you really need this competition and cooperation from society for information for working with the state for not undermining the state for not withdrawing from the state for the state capacity to build and to be exercised but a theme that i'm going to emphasize in throughout the rest of my talk these are all choices none of this is preordained this figure suggests there are historical processes that are at work if you start here you are more likely to remain in the corridor but there is no guarantee you can wear out as well if you start here you are more likely to go this way but you can engineer a change and go into the court so these are the choices now one question is if the leviathan is so bad as i've said it it crushes things like gilgamesh it is important to control it but there is another choice why remain without the leviathan that actually tells us a few things it's useful to understand it and the best way of understanding it is to actually look at one society that archaeology our anthropologists have studied a lot the tif in this tiv land here in part of nigeria which was a long established stateless society at the time europeans came into contact with them and a husband and a wife team of anthropologists paul and laura bahanon went and lived with them and wrote some paper books and papers by themselves and jointly describing the tip the key about the tiff that we now know apply to many of these societies is that they were highly egalitarian but this egalitarian wasn't just economic in what they didn't care so much about the economy it was political they did not want some people in society to end up with too much power and start bossing others so again this notion of dominance there i emphasize in fact they had such elaborate systems they banned certain types of goods from being traded they had political structures that discouraged hierarchy they even had this various witchcraft beliefs that were in essence ways of stripping people who are becoming too powerful it's the distrust of power that's at the root of the witchcraft it says it gives rise to the greater political institutions the one based on the lineage system and the principle of egalitarianism that's the way that they functioned but the way that they functioned also implied that political hierarchy and together with it state institutions never formed but it's not the only way of dealing with the fear of despotic leviathan a fear of loss of liberty one of the first examples of democratic societies athens and ancient police now more than 2 700 years ago also grappled with the same issues in fact if you look at the surviving knowledge about this society you see that they had a similar fear of the elites becoming powerful and dominating everything just like the tiff but they had a very different way of dealing with it they built institutions they built laws and norms to contain very powerful people one of those that's telling not the only one and that's the most important one but it's emblematic is the ostracism law uh under claistinus they passed a law in which every year the athenian assembly and they had an elected assembly a democratic assembly would vote whether there should be an ostracism and if there was an ostracism every athenian citizen would write the name of a person on a piece of bracken a broken shard which they called ostracon has the word ostracism and whosoever name was written most would be banished exiled from the city here is one of the surviving shards with the name of tammy stocklace listed on it temistoclas was the closest then athens had to a hero he single-handedly built the athenian navy then led it against the persians and then identified the spartan thread ahead of everybody else why would the athenians banish him because at some point they thought he was getting too big for his boots he was becoming too influential better to get rid of him than put up with him so he was exiled for 10 years so this institutionalized suspicion of power is very important and it is this essence of what i emphasize the red queen effect why the power of the state really grows bigger inside the corridor contested power is greater power but is that the only factor what about other social scientists who've thought about strong states after all dealing with things like the pandemic inequality international security threats migration we need strong states well actually when you look at history of thought it's full of different theories of what makes strong states some of them just like marx i pointed out emphasize technology others geographies others types of crops perhaps the most important one in social science is the threat of war that's associated with charles tilley charles tilley argued that modern states especially capable states come from war in a very pithy way he said states made war and war made the state is that right is that something we have to learn from yes it is something we have to learn from but not because it's right because it shows one way of thinking and i want to emphasize a different way of thinking and i want to use against this figure to show it and imagine now i try to make sense of tilly's point i think what tilly is saying is that or one way of thinking of what till he's saying is that when you have to deal with international war you need a strong state to field an army to tax and organize things to construct supply chains requisition lines that can push you into the corridor and in fact that's exactly what happened to switzerland starting from lawless custom tradition-based cantons they formed their confederation and became one of the strongest states in europe and the reason they did that is because they were worried about the holy roman empire being more aggressive and invading the cantons so that's an example that the need to build state institutions increases the power of the state and that pushes you into the corridor that would be an example of what i pointed out tilly-esque or other ideas that are based on structural factors but this framework immediately says well but there is no necessity there are choices montenegro also fought the ottomans all the time but they started with such clan-based such weak institutions just like the tiff that they never moved into the corridor the impetus wasn't strong enough or pressure it started with fairly elaborate assemblies and parliaments but at the time of the right after the 30 years world cup king frederick willem the first thought well i want to have a bigger state stronger state so that i don't feel fall prey to wars like another 30 years war and so he completely changed society but in the process he destroyed the narrow corridor for prussia as a result in the words of voltaire we came to a situation in prussia where other states have an army in prussia and our the army has a state of its own it became a completely militarized state outside of the corridor moving in a despotic direction and the reason why i'm going through this is because not because i want to talk about tilly's ideas those are interesting but about something more importantly what i want to argue is that actually it's not these impulses but it's the context in which these impulses are realized and the choices that we make in those contexts so what matters is first of all whether we have the institutional means an economic organization to create a broad corridor if you have a narrow corridor and many societies that pay that were based on a coercion for example had a narrow corridor it's very difficult to get into it it's very easy to get out of it if you have a wide corridor it's more easy to get into it and you have more room for maneuver which shocks polarization and difficulties inside the corridor so more important than the impulses is how we manage those impulses and even more important than the width of the corridor i would say are the choices that we make and the choices are really critical in today's context because today's challenges are very deep and wide-ranging we have to claim power back from the states and corporations the surveillance capacity that hariri talks about i think is very important many others have pointed out but i think it's incomplete if you just think of the states google knows much more about you than the russian state or the chinese states right now to reign in inequality but that is impossible as massimo said without redirecting technological change we cannot have broad-based prosperity if technology goes more and more in the direction of automation displacing workers that's why all those middle class jobs are disappearing because robots numerically controlled machinery increasingly ai is taking those jobs away but you cannot create anything but a two-tiered society unless you reverse that that means redirecting technological change all of these become important much more central in the age of covet which has accelerated these changes just like this picture that shows that a vertical move here does not put you inside the corner or outside the corner it's a choice it depends on where you are the same applies of the role of new technologies shocks like covet we have a variety of choices how we are going to use them but when it comes to those choices and i will conclude this is our two my last two slides i think the critical thing is to create a much better welfare state why because the level of inequality the level of uncertainty created by globalization new technologies cannot be handled without a robust welfare state but it has to be a better welfare state not the one like the one in italy or france a much more strong but also rational welfare state it must also do something else as i've pointed out at the center must be regulation of technology so the state must have a say in whether new technologies are going to increase the power of corporations automation displacement of workers but you see there are lots of problems here a bigger state a more powerful state a state now that says things about technology when we have a history of states sometimes blocking new technologies and causing poverty what about new totalitarianism that's exactly what hayek frederick hayek one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century worried about when as a recent immigrant he came across the beverage report in 1942 this was the document emblematic of the rise of the social welfare state which lord beveridge was chairing it came in the middle of the war and it was implemented right away and then much more comprehensively in the by the first labor government after the war one of the ministers of that government james griffith said one of the largest hours of the war the beverage report felt like mana from heaven but hayek disagreed because he thought this would be just a different type of totalitarianism he said this means among other things that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit so essentially in terms of my framework he's saying well we're going to destroy liberty because the state is becoming more powerful and more interventionist but at the end hayek was not right in many places actually even before hayek wrote in sweden once the workers party came to power in 1932. you saw an alternative path of the state's strengthening as the state got stronger a broader coalition in society formed in sweden for example it was workers farmers and business community that at the same time made democracy function better democracy deeper so i think moving forward we have to find a way of increasing the power of the state in a way that is consistent with deepening of democracy the state and society have to come together at a stronger level it's not cooperation it's both cooperation and competition it's the red queen effect and critical for this is a recognition of the new exigencies new challenges not shy away from the greater responsibilities of the state but at the same time recognize that state left to its own devices would become despotic so we have to deepen democracy and throughout we have to keep this balance of power between state and society between different groups in society between left and right balance of power rather than polarization okay i will stop now and i look forward to your comments and questions thank you thank you darren i understand you have the translation in italian so i'll continue to speak in italian and question now i have a series of questions of course that i would like to ask but if possible i would like to open the floor to questions from the audience so that they have the opportunity to ask questions if they wish to do so please tell your name say who you are i would like to ask the professor do you think that the return of the state in the economy will continue with good results over the next few years or do you think that the return of the state will be limited just to this period of pandemics thank you i think history suggests that once the taxation capacity and some of the responsibilities of the state are increased such as infrastructure investment investment education and health they are very difficult to reverse that doesn't imply however that the state will be more powerful in a good way it could happen in a bad way that's essentially what happened in some of the worst cases of state interventions the state gets bigger and then there's more loot for people to share among themselves you see that for example in venezuela the state increased tremendously but it really didn't help with poverty it became more and more of a criminal state under chavez and then worse under maduro so the question is can we have the increase of the state's responsibilities go in the right direction going to the right places i don't think that you know jacking up unemployment benefits is the main thing we need to do in the future i think unemployment benefits are very important that's what the us has done as a short-term fix that's what many european countries have done but much more we need a more adaptable social welfare state but also we need to have the state be engaged in ways that create jobs and earning potential for workers of different backgrounds and of course this is a much harder thing we know in italy for example you know a huge failure of state institutions not just in the south although south is is telling uh you know many of the state programs turn into patronage tools so we have to find ways of battling that if we want to build a better social safety net and a better state intervention mechanism so i think the glass is half full i think there is an opportunity there is a greater openness for some of these things i think taxes are going to increase as fraction of gdp everywhere within europe but how we're going to use that i'm not sure that we can be optimistic i think we can be cognizant that there are some good opportunities there whether we're going to be able to grasp them that's the question the domain i have a question for darren well in italy like in the u.s there is a certain good attitude and a positive surprise about what biden is doing there were not so many expectations for him in 2008 professor asimoglu criticized some interventions implemented by bush and then obama during the financial emergency and there have been interventions also by biden in this period when i interviewed him for the corer de la serra i had the impression that you are a bit critical about the policies of president biden so can you tell us more why do you think that biden's actions or initiatives are insufficient can you tell us something about that i think while we have to put into perspective i actually think that biden's policies are much better than the bush and uh and obama policies you know they both uh inherited well actually obama and biden let's say inherited a deep economic crisis they both needed to take some actions but obama explicitly targeted the biggest banks and bailed the banks out and didn't do anything for the regular people by and large the theory was if the banks functioned and there will be trickle down for the rest of society it wasn't completely wrong the economy came out of recession but it came out of the recession in a very slow and very very very unequal way and the criminal behavior of many bankers was completely condoned supported rather than being punished i think biden is doing something much more direct trying to help people with the infrastructure plan with the fiscal plan some of the details we can debate you know for example do we need such long unemployment benefits versus other ways of spending the money on education technology jobs but my main criticism would be that the real challenge moving forward is really one of creating jobs for the middle class and there i think the biden administration has not stepped up to the plate and confronted that challenge yet so i think the big agenda of regulation of technology dealing with ai automation finding new ways of structuring incentives for businesses so that they invest in workers not in machines to replace workers those are not on the agenda yet so i am quite uh pleasantly surprised about the activism of the biden administration but i think more is needed a very last question because we have to close because of kobe the restrictions so we cannot go further so a very final question about the role of the civil society above all in the u.s well it is bit more of a question for a sociologist for a social scientist but could you tell us something are you pessimistic or optimistic about the possibility for the civil society in the u.s to emerge again after a period of fights extremism no i think it's very difficult to be optimistic you know i did not have time to talk about this but in the book we devote a full chapter uh to how societies leave the corridor we talk for example of how italian city-states collapsed and in all of these cases polarization is a handmaiden of collapse of the corridor and today you your united states and there are some signs of the same thing in europe as well but the us has become hugely polarized different political groups left and right trump supporters versus non-trump supporters they're in their political bubbles and that's very very dangerous on the other hand if you want to look at the glasses quarter full rather than all empty you know if you look at the concerns of the left and right there are a lot of points of overlap so if you go uh wonderful books like for example uh by the sociologist arleigh russell host child you know who goes to you know communities that are big supporters of trump and their concerns are jobs low wages collapsing occupations and economic opportunities there's a lot of overlap between their concerns and those of the left but the solutions they come up are very different and there is a complete climate of distrust of the other and i think president trump now fortunately ex-president president trump made things much worse and he's continuing to make things much worse but if we can break trump and this extremist uh entrepreneurs gra grip over the republican voters who are also dissatisfied by the same things i think there are a lot of points of overlap at the end the new deal came from fdr but it was embraced by the whole society so the question is is that possible today i'm not going to say that it is possible but i'm not saying that it's impossible either in the interview the other day you made reference to uh environmental actions we're a bit behind lagging behind in terms of uh climate actions but there is a political consensus among companies which are reducing their environmental footprint for example and also single citizens are becoming more environmental friendly so to say so also within uh polarized societies in the end there can be a corridor which goes towards a certain change do you think that this is possible also in the area of technology and so that you know even on climate if you look at the republican voters they are becoming much more climate conscious essentially about young republican voters but then you know again you add trump you add other merchants of extremism like fox news or the radio show hosts and as soon as they have their effects then the conversation completely changes so i think this is where political coalition building and building bridges building trust becomes quite important but yes i think technology and climate are two of the most urgent challenges and both of them there are very similar solutions we have to redirect technological change in both of them we're not going to solve the climate problem by you know crazy geo engineering schemes or by cutting production in the world around the world by 20 we have to find ways of creating clean energy that's a technological problem and i think that's a technological process same thing in the area of jobs we have to find ways of finding human technology problems and the more we have these debates the more the debates cease to be partisan but become informative i think the more new paths are open to us thank you so much we are well in time thank you so much to the audience and hopefully we will see you in person next year thank you you