yes so welcome back this would be a session half in english and half in italian so um if you don't have your uh translation your ear um plugs please take them at the entrance if you're here and otherwise i will uh yes i'm i'm advising you to i'm i'm telling you that this will be in in two languages so because we are um uh minou shafiq is listening from london she is uh we will present her book uh this morning uh a wonderful book a very important book uh which is uh in some way uh very very uh fundamental for the discussion we have been uh conducted in the last years about it has to do with populism and with the some political uh consequences of a society which is changing everywhere very very quickly when we ask ourselves why populism has been so successful in last years we have like i mean it has expressed even a president of the united states of america we have to ask ourselves um um where where this comes from and uh if it has to do only with bad politics that has been before in the years before if if it has to do only with some elite who has been governing for too long um and minou shafiq who is director of the london school of economics but has been she is a very very successful economist she's a role model for many many women in the world because she has been number two of the international monetary fund she has worked the world bank she has had an extraordinary career so we are very proud to have her here and she has written a book about how we should redefine the uh social contract because this is a question we have to pose ourselves how has the surroundings changed hello hello minus shafiq she is uh in london and she i think she's hearing us yes i am i am excited to be with you it would be much better to be in trento yeah next time next year i hope uh and so uh mini shafiq has posed this question and said why are four out of five people in not only in western countries but everywhere in the world very unsatisfied with the systems they're living in um why has this infrastructure this this architecture of opportunities and guarantees failed and so i would give immediately the word to her so she could present her book and it's a very ambitious and a wonderful book and a very important book thank you so much tonya it's uh thank you for that kind introduction so let me start a little bit about why i wrote this book i started thinking about these issues in 2016 when as you said we saw populism rising around the world increasingly divided politics inequality culture wars climate strikes and i wanted to understand what was driving it what was the cause of this in some ways i think of this book sometimes as my anti-populist manifesto because i think the populists identified the right problems what were what was upsetting people but their solutions which are nationalism xenophobia anti-immigrant sentiment and protectionism are wrong and would not work and so i wanted to define a set of policies that would be real solutions to the problems that people were facing and increasingly i found the concept of a social contract a good way of understanding what had gone wrong what do i mean by the social contract by that i mean the norms and rules that define what we owe each other in a society and how we organize the delivery of those obligations for example are children raised at home by mothers or grandparents or does the state provide childcare centers or pay parental leave so that both parents can care for children how much of health care is the responsibility of individuals and how much do we pay for collectively through insurance or public funding do we expect employers to provide contracts with regular hours and benefits such as sick even pensions or do we provide do we expect workers and families to carry these risks of illness and old age in more traditional societies what we owe each other tended to be delivered by families in more modern societies the market and the state play a greater role but in every society people are expected to contribute to the common good when they're adults in exchange for being looked after when they're young and when they're old so why do i think the social contract is broken well until the late 20th century the social contract was built on the premise that families would have one male breadwinner and that women would take care of the young and the old for free there was a presumption that people would stay married until they died give birth to children only when they married they'd have steady employment with very few employers over a career and the education and skills that they accumulated in school between the age of about six to their early twenties would be enough to last a lifetime and most people would only live a few years after retirement and the support that they need in old age would be provided by families now as i've described that model you're probably thinking that's completely irrelevant to the world that we live in today today half of women are employed in the labor market in most advanced economies between a third and a half of marriages end in divorce in most developing countries the rates of divorce are also going up more children are being born outside of marriage the average worker has more jobs over the course of a lifetime and technology is increasing that over time and in informality in labor markets has become a feature in advanced economies where more workers are on temporary and flexible contracts and of course we have the the challenge of climate change which is in the background i would argue the two biggest things that broke our social contract was the changing role of women and technology the changing role of women because no longer were women available to look after the young and the old for free and technology because it fundamentally changed work let me just give you two examples and then maybe return to the discussion about how i think the social contract is broken and how i think it needs to change for modern societies let's take education the idea that you get all your education from age six to your early twenties to last a career that increasingly may be not thirty or 40 years but maybe 50 or 60 years in the future is very updated i believe the educational system the shape the system needs to change and we need to invest much more in the early years before children get to school say up until the age of three traditionally we thought of those years as purely the responsibility of families but the research shows so clearly now that if children don't get good nutrition and mental stimulation in those early years it has consequences for them for the rest of their lives in terms of their income and their health and their ability to contribute to society so more investment early but also much more investment later if people are going to have careers that last 50 years adult learning needs to be a part of all of our educational systems people have talked about it for years there has been very very poor delivery of high quality adult learning skills but we need an educational system that's a lot more comprehensive and and and has a different shape let me say a couple of words about employment one of the most striking things about labor markets today partly driven by technology is that the labor force is more diverse and and the labor market is much more flexible and that has had huge benefits for employers who are able to hire and fire more flexibly and for consumers because many goods that we buy are much cheaper as a result but it hasn't had a huge consequence for the insecurity of workers who often don't know what their income will be from week to week some very interesting work done in italy and the uk and the u.s has shown that flexible workers are willing to give up half of their income to have more job security and to have a permanent contract which shows you how much it costs them that insecurity i think we need to move to a world where we retain the benefits of flexibility but also address that huge insecurity by requiring employers to provide mandatory benefits to all flexible workers in proportion to how much they work and i think that would provide the right balance between allowing employers to change their workforce when they need it but at the same time providing a minimum level of security to all workers those are just two examples of where i think we need changes to our social contract but there are many others and i'd be happy to discuss those in our conversation thank you minou shafiq i will now switch to italian if it's okay for you check if you have a right translation i'm very happy to be here with linda laura sabadini who has been a pioneer in social studies especially about women and a major chapter of the minutia shafix book is devoted to the topic of children and women and we heard from shafiq that one of the major thrusts and inputs for social change is related to women and to the change in the role of women in all our societies i would like to start from there and i would also last like to ask you what you think of the book and laura sabanedi is the central director of instead which is the italian national institute of statistics and she is also a part of woman juvent g2020 this is a wonderful book it is a book written by a woman with a capital w it is impressive you see in the pages of this book not only due to the way by which it is written but also of course for what you read you manage to obtain a sort of summary of the fundamental aspects of uh the life of minus shafiq she tells as her memories about egyptian girls in the in her mother's village and then the fact that she describes these girls so much in detail and she manages to bring together two different things her own life and these major concepts these girls of course were doomed to force marriage and not to have an education and then she also tells us about what her father told her when they had to leave egypt egypt for the states and she he told her if you have an education they cannot take things away from you education is your capital and that is for sure the uh underlying element that has governed minutia fix life so the fact of bringing together personal one's personal story and concept and education and major issues makes this book so important and i believe that this is absolutely something which is typical of a woman and i wanted to say that because this impressed me very very much having said that what uh mino shafiq wrote hinnerbook is extraordinarily important and her presentation now was also very significant in that she told us the genesis of the book and why she had decided to write this book at the um at a moment when populism is on the rise and was on the rise and she has this extremely wide-ranging experience due to the fact that she has had positions in several international organizations so she has managed to to really get to know the policies at international level and in the various countries as a matter of fact what she does is to outline a pathway for democracies to come to the fore again she identifies those elements that have created a crisis for the very infrastructure of guarantees and opportunities and she pinpoints the various elements the role of women and technology and at the same time she underlines one fundamental aspect which is the interconnection the need to reconstruct reciprocal relations this is fundamental because democracies can flourish they nourish on everybody's contribution so much so that this applies to every phase in life and this approach is extremely beautiful and interesting as it is organized by uh life is from the moment you're a child then when you grow up and you experience health and health related problems and you come of age so um you become an elderly person and it's very nice that um investment is a key word investing before and after with investing in a very preliminary phase you have to invase invest since kids are very small so international research shows in fact that if you're capable of investing on children at an early stage they will have better results in school as well as in their work life and after after all they also continue to be successful in a world that is continuously and rapidly changing whereby upskilling and learning throughout your entire lifetime is important so a inadequate training level and upskilling level is important as flexibility is going to stay with us forever because we need people to be capable of adjusting to new times and therefore the role that minutia attaches to women is extremely important they are seen as a fundamental entity and the whole story in fact the social contract can be constructed on certain alliances and women as well as young people and the elderly people as well maybe the ones who redefine the rules they need it in the first place they need to redefine those rules in the first place so she goes back to the research of the international monetary fund when saying that the reduction of the general um gap increases economic production but not only that it also improves productivity which is something that is that goes unheard it increases productivity because the roles that are established at a point in time when women can do things on an equal basis are coupled with the possibility of choosing talents in a community that is much much broader right now women are not part of these circles and this approach breaks up with the traditional approach that would consider women's role as secondary or a role of women that could only partially contribute to remunerated solely because or only partially because they are also attending non-remunerated activities in the house and she goes on goes on to talk about the great civil passion from the very start until the very end you can perceive that passion those very warm feelings you have to be capable of stating that taking care of others is not something you remunerate so taking care of other people is a maximum competence and you have to break the rules by which it doesn't need to be remunerated so cultural resistance and to that is very very high special in governments especially in societies and within the economy so this is one of the most difficult points to for us to bring forward so we've seen this also in this country the battle that has been done on the resilience plan on for example kindergartens or crashes and the importance of care giving activities as remunerated or paid activities is very very important in italy is a very it's at a very low level in terms of services for infancy for children educational activities for children child care and the likes we see that 12 of our children go to public kindergartens and according to the law this public kindergartens were set up 25 years ago already now if we consider that there are many children little children that are being taken to private crashes well we see that those crashes can only be utilized by medium to high wages families so we're still at a very low level with the um recovery plan but the objective we have is to reach a level of 33 in six years uh which is also the objective of europe as a whole in the light of the lisbon goals and objectives so we should have actually attained the levels 17 years ago so much earlier than we can see now so given a resilience and plan where we invest 250 billion why haven't we considered adding three extra billion in order to increase this objective and make child care available for all children so there's still a cultural resistance we can't grasp how we could as you did consider all the faces of life and each and every one of the of our own life phases is connected to one another so interconnection amongst all the life phases is important therefore relying on the contribution given by workers by employers by the state by citizens by governments so the actual problem is that we can't simply think that in today's life in this very complex life we're experiencing today there can be economic priorities as opposed to social priorities so we can't just think that there are economic priorities part of which as an environmental impact and forget that this also impacts on social life so your book is very interesting is exceptionally interesting because it places in the very middle the concept of interconnection so thank you linda a for the translators yes okay and i will speak slowly i'll try all right so um of course minus now you have a lot of suggestions coming from linda laura she has um referred a lot to the italian recovery plan and it is true that there was a huge political discussion about the fact that uh the the the policies for for children are uh almost forgotten there is not much money for this and as she says i mean if you don't interconnect the whole system all or the chapters of your book you won't change society one aspect i would like you and linda laura also to talk about is health because we went through a very very traumatizing experience like a pandemic um and you argue in your book about um how important it is that health is public or private or um is it is it okay to leave it to free market so i would like you to explain us how health should be organized uh in this new social contract that you're imagining and my second question goes to refers to a passage in your book very interesting where you say what should we do with the people who live in an unhealthy way right so who eat too much who drink too much who smoke right so this is a basic question how should the government how should the state um treat these people should they uh pay for themselves uh the the health uh insurance um but as we went through the coronavirus pandemic i think this is also a question that goes if i'm not wrong a little bit uh and questions the novak's so what happens with people who don't want to be vaccinated and in a certain sense if they are too many they endanger uh the the the the attempt to to to hurt immunity you know or to to immunize a whole population what should happen to what how should we handle this problem okay now great question so i think first thank you linda laura for your kind kind remarks and your appreciation of of the book on the issue of health i think the virus the pandemic has taught us two very important lessons about health one that prevention is always cheaper than cure and so had we had better systems in place we could have avoided many of this much of this catastrophe if we had better systems to prevent pandemics and stop them early but second when you look at who suffered the most they tended to be people who were old who were frail or also people who were in jobs which made them particularly vulnerable and those people often tended to be people from minority groups who were poor and the social conditions in which you live have a huge impact on your health in every country in the world richer people live longer than older people that's a universal and it makes you appreciate that the wider social contract things like education and employment conditions are in many ways more important for health outcomes than the health system and that is often forgotten most of the gains that we've achieved in life expectancy have not come from medical better medical interventions they've come from things like nutrition environment improved air quality and all of those other things and so i think that's another big lesson of the coronavirus is that when we think about health we have to look at the wider economic and social conditions in which people live which brings me to your final question around what do we do with people who behave badly for their health and in the book i talk a little bit about what you could do about that one thing that's quite effective is taxes so taxing alcohol taxing cigarettes it is it is combined with other measures it's not the only thing you need to do but combined with other measures it has proven to be very effective for making people make healthier decisions including things like unhealthy sweet products and uh that that are very bad for obesity so i would i would advocate using taxes more second i think increasingly what are called nudges are being used effectively to get people to to make better health decisions uh everything from you know when you go in the supermarket the healthy foods are at eye level and the sweets are at the bottom uh can alter people's choices um you know having things that remind you to exercise or to take your medicines uh we now can get these very low cost uh you know health product you know machines that will will encourage people to do healthy behaviors and those should be very much encouraged what do you do with people who don't want to take care of their health i mean first some people argue that they should be free to be able to you know ride a motorbike or parachute from airplanes but if they take those risks and the health consequences are shared by society i think society has a right to say you know if you want to jump out of an airplane parachute you have to buy your own insurance to be able to do that it's not fair to ask the rest of society to pay for the costs second if um if you don't want to get vaccinated i think it's fair for society to say you can't pose a health risk to everyone else so if you don't want to get vaccinated you have to have a test let's say two or three times a week to make sure that you don't give the illness to other people and so i think it's okay to make it a little inconvenient for people who don't want to do things in the public interest uh if they are really adamant that they want to maintain their their freedom and i guess that would be how i would approach that problem thank you minus italiano i will switch to italian now i would like to i would like to ask the same question to linda laura because you see due to the pandemic we have questioned many commonplace assumptions so we thought in italy that lombardy was a model in terms of the healthcare system and that was proven wrong and then family practitioners who are different in different areas of of italy is so that much so that for instance i do not even know who my family practitioner is and in germany the situation was different family practitioners were very important general practitioners to intercept the problem in the very first phases of the pandemic so we understood that there is a better way and a worse way to get prepared before a pandemic of course in germany then things did not always go right the third wave was very bad in germany for instance but what do you think that we have learned in in italy because you see in recent years we have really reduced the spending in the health care system and that has had consequences in italy so what do we do in italy and europe vis-a-vis people who have a healthy unhealthy sorry unhealthy way of living and they do not want to get vaccinated despite scientific evidence i would like to start answering um from the last thing you said i absolutely agree with minutia shafiq about the fact that we should make in a way the life of these people uh more difficult if people adopt behaviors that then entail a burden for the overall community they have in a way to be responsible for that of course you are free to uh behave or take on bad habits if you want to do so but you shouldn't have an impact on the overall community due to that that is not acceptable and i think that one central aspect is the aspect of awareness being aware of things knowing things it is crucial to raise awareness and to have awareness and knowledge grow also in terms of really health education prevention this is what i'm talking about and this is something that has been underestimated massively in the past and uh then we were hit by this massive problem by the pandemic and it was not possible to start working on prevention then because we had the emergency but we have to do something about unhealthy ways of living which really are a burden on the health care system and on the community on the other citizens we need to invest very much in educating people in raising awareness among people i would like to make an example a statistical piece of data tells us that alcohol abuse is much higher among the elderly than in other age groups with the exception of young people where alcohol abuse is different it is more weakened alcohol binge drinking while the percentage of alcohol abuse among the elderly is much higher is it it is so because the elderly oftentimes do not know what that means they do not know general practitioners do not tell them they do not know that in in the age group 50 to 60 the number of alcohol units that you can afford in a way to absorb is much lower than it is in when you're in your 40s or even five years earlier the problem is that you carry on with the habit of drinking alcohol and it might be that it is not abuse but you do drink and you do not know what that means for your health so one of the very fundamental elements in our fight against alcohol abuse which does not mean that you are alcoholic but which you regularly drink a certain amount of alcohol unit which is not in line with your age that is something that has to be tackled by means of educating people and that i believe applies to health in general and to unhealthy living we need to have more awareness that means campaigning that means health education in schools that means raising awareness also among families that is fundamental i would say in order to shed light on those aspects and then you also talked about um italy and how italy did when compared to germany for instance uh during the pandemic of course the pandemic has unsettled as all because you see in the past 20 years we have had had already fought epidemics but in advanced countries those epidemics had not had such a huge impact as a consequence we did not actually realize that we were entering a phase of having to deal with pandemics and epidemics in general in the world we had not understood that our health care system the national health care system whose foundation was laid back in the 1970s is actually very good but the problem for italy was that we were the first in europe so to say to have to tackle the this pandemic germany saw what we did before it was hit by the wave and then we also paid the fact that we had disinvested in the health care system especially in terms of prevention and i'm talking again about italy so that the community services which are fundamental were lacking and we did not have this a sufficient number of hospital beds the number of hospital beds per head so to say in italy was much lower than than in in germany and also the number of nurses in italy has been a problem we do have a more or less the same number of physicians than in germany but we have half the number of nurses in italy than in germany and of course that has an impact on the resilience of of a country if you have an infrastructure which can also bear the the impact of a pandemic then you have a resilience and you know the icu bed the icu bets were also a problem so we were not sufficiently resilient and now we have to learn the lesson you ask me what we can learn from this pandemic well we have to learn that we cannot count spending in the health care system that we need to invest as minos rightly says in technology also in the healthcare system so that you can have this proximity to the patient also with remote technology devices why not but at the same time we need to invest in all those community services which really entail that you can have a very direct relationship with the citizens minutiae shafiq there tackles something which is not only limited to health care but which in general relates to care services for the elderly because she focuses on the fact of integrating care which goes beyond health care per se and that is something that unfortunately is strongly underestimated if not absent in our country in other countries we do have uh facilities which are very developed we have institutes we have homes for the elderly so that the elderly no longer live with their family of origin or in their own house and they live in homes for the elderly this is a model that has not developed in our country we do not have that type of setting to a limited extent they are present in in the north of italy but they are not widespread not even there so what happened is that we do have the burden so to say you're taking care of the elderly who are not autonomous and it is women again who have to take care of them as is the case with children the women employment rate in italy is ranked second last in europe for young women and we even rank after greece for women age 25 to 34 years old and so how can you ask women to have children if if it is so we are still imprisoned into an old style mentality which is not a modern one which is not what we should have now whereby these functions these care services have to be provided by the family within a family so nothing is invested there it is seen not an investment but as a cost to to spend for uh these services we need to have a proximity welfare and this is something that minosha shafiq addresses very clearly in her book she says that healthcare services are not sufficient we need services which bring together healthcare and care in general and that is not easy because taking care of an elderly person is something which is multi-dimensional we need there to meet needs which are highly diversified which means that you need professionals to take care of that thank you linda laura now one of the aspects that we focused on in past years is also challenges on the labor market whereby jobs increasingly are automated and row boats are used increasingly on the labor market immunosuffice does not believe in those extreme assumptions whereby automation will take away all jobs for human beings but things have already changed and you underline minority aspects flexibilization in a way that life has become more precarious for many workers and the conflict which we also find in a book by robert reich and the conflict between a worker and consumer because the price of cloves for instance have gone down in the past years due to lower labor costs but you see rent or purchasing a house has become much more costly so these are challenges for for society there again we have challenges in terms of a change of a social contract which has to go into a specific direction and certainly minus will talk about minimum wage for instance or universal minimum wage what are the hypotheses that and theories are to say or ways that we can explore so that the life for workers can become better minus you have the flaw thank you thank you i think the balance as you said uh tonya has shifted too far in favor of flexibility rather than security for workers and the pro the consequences have been severe it goes back also to to to the issue we started with which is populism people feel highly insecure in current labor markets what is the answer i think the answer is that first of all i actually believe in flexibility i think it's important for companies to be able to adjust their labor force as demand changes and as the market changes but what's important is that when people lose their jobs they need to very quickly be able to know that they will be looked after and retrained and found a neutral now if you look at the nordic countries denmark sweden finland norway they have very high levels of worker turnover people lose their jobs more than anywhere else in europe but it is not a social problem because when you lose your job you get unemployment insurance which is about say 80 percent of your previous wage so you maintain your standard of living they spend about 10 times more than other countries on reskilling workers and those workers very quickly get back into new work and if you don't find a job in a year you're placed in a job and so people continue to contribute to society through their labor so i think that sort of system which allows flexibility but gives workers more security is really important also what you described in terms of what's gotten more expensive and what's gotten cheaper if you think how many days do you have to work today to buy a television versus how many days do you have to work to buy a house it's completely changed the consequences have been particularly severe for young people many of whom particularly in in europe but also elsewhere are now returning to the family home unable to afford their own housing unable to set up as independent adults and i think until we rebalance this issue around precarious work they will they will face what now many people call prolonged adolescence because they don't have the opportunity to become full-fledged adults so i think this issue about the future of work is key i also just would add one more thing at the moment i think companies under-invest in re-skilling their workers because of flexibility why would you invest in someone if you think they might be leaving you shortly and so i think we need to think about who is responsible for investing in workers and i think being trained in the workplace is the best place to be trained because you will develop skills that are relevant to the market but who should pay for that i think needs to change and that needs to become a responsibility of society rather than of companies so we get the right amount of investment in workers so for example just like companies get tax credits for research and development they should also get tax credits for investing in their employees more than might be in their own narrow interests but it would be in society's interest that those workers keep their skills up to date and i think with that we can deal with the issue of automation may i ask you because you speak also about this there has been a in in the last years a lot of discussion even at davos at the world economic forum uh about the universal basic income no so you don't seem very convinced why yeah i'm not convinced for two reasons first of all in in in most advanced economies we are able to target benefits to poorer households with universal basic income you would have to raise the tax rate quite a lot let's just say by 20 of gdp to cycle a lot of money through the state and then distribute it to people many of whom don't need it that just seems incredibly inefficient to me if you have if you're able to have a system where you tax better off people and you transfer that income directly to the poorest households but the more fundamental sort of philosophical reason i don't agree with universal basic income is that i think it's a it's a violation of a social contract in every society people who are able-bodied are expected to work and contribute in exchange for being looked after when they're young and they're old and i think universal basic income is like giving up on people and saying you have nothing to contribute to society so we're just going to pay you to do nothing and i think that's a kind of failure actually i think everyone has something to contribute and if they if their contribution doesn't generate a very high wage i would rather them work and top up their wages so that they can maintain a decent standard of living but still work in order to feel that you're making a contribution to society the issue of the minimum wage as it was called here citizenship wages sort of a nincam integration or so there has been a long debate on the minimum wage here so minus traffic doesn't agree much what do you think about it and about chopping up salaries well it depends it depends on the specific situation menus has the idea that the social contract should then become adjusted to each single country in reality because every country has its own history and culture so you have to find a way to transpose this in the best possible manner according to the context so that you can attain certain objectives now if you are in a situation where the objectives that minus mentioned can't be guaranteed because we still cannot guarantee them we are trying to uh go towards the minus model but we find ourselves entrapped in a situation where we can't reach that level or those objectives so you have to establish certain transitional measures to get there so the idea situation it would be where you don't need all this as minus said but the problem is that very often you have to endow yourself with a tool with the instrument that makes it possible for you to resolve the problem and avoid that people fall or enormous layers of the population fall into poverty but this is not a strategic element because one should aim rather at having a society where this is not necessary where there's no need for it which doesn't mean that you are idealistic because minus view is very concrete very tangible based on fundamental pillars while at the same time you need to have certain instruments that will enable you to attain your objectives until you manage you know to steer the wheel you speak probably about the so-called soft pushes or is you know it's soft measures maybe i i don't think it's so they're so soft or gentle because i think that shafiq manages to profoundly um challenge certain things she provides a menu of things that you can do to attain a certain objective but of course it is a very ambitious view and in the end it's not all soft but for a certain phase of our life or until we manage to get things re-aligned or adjusted you need to have an instrument that enable you to qatar for a situation that is not working or right i want to talk about another very important um chapter of menu shafiq's book which is um called generations and it is about young people and um minou shafiq says that there are some pressures of course on the social contract now that there has been there have been pressures from coming from the the role of the women and the technology but in the future these pressures will come from from out of uh great challenges like climate change and this is about what we are um giving to young people and we are giving them the burden of climate change and the burden of debt which is also a great topic um that comes out of the pandemic because the debt has uh is is huge now is very very has grown a lot in in a lot of countries like italy for example so um um how will this affect uh the future how is this affecting already the you you know that there has been a very very revolutionary also um judgment of the of the german constitutional court recently i think this was really revolutionary because it says basically you can't give this burden to young people from 2030 on 2020 2030 on you must try to change things earlier because otherwise young people will have too much burden so i think this is already a sign of a revolutionary thinking and of a changing of of the social contract no from from the german judges i mean absolutely absolutely you know in every society the social contract is that each generation hopes to leave the next generation better off and i think we have to ask ourselves whether we are delivering on that social contract to future generations uh tonya you're absolutely right debt levels are high and we are certainly leaving the next generation a much diminished planet relative to what we inherited both in terms of climate change and biodiversity and so how do we set that right i think for one thing we definitely need to act immediately on climate change and also invest much more in conservation if you look at how much we already spend today on energy subsidies it is obscene that we are actually paying people to destroy the planet uh and so that you know that immediately needs to change but we also need a carbon tax and other measures to address climate change and that is an important uh legacy that we could leave for the next generation on the debt um you know i think one of the things that we owe young people is uh much more investment in their education for the rest of their lives it you know the only way they will be able to repay this debt is if they are highly productive and and one of the ways we can make sure the next generation is highly productive is to promise them that we will invest in their education not just when they're young but throughout their lives one of the suggestions i make in the book is that we look at providing a lifetime educational endowment uh to all young people so that they are guaranteed let's just call it 100 000 euros for the course of their lives to reskill and retrain so they're able to continue to contribute you have to remember i mean particularly in countries like italy where the demographics are very uh are very poor and aging is a huge issue we're going to need these young people to support a much larger older population and the only way they'll be able to do that is if they earn a great deal i think another thing we can do for the next generation is work longer uh to reduce the burden of having to pay for the health and pension costs of older people so in the book i also suggest that we link the eligibility for pensions to life expectancy today in most advanced economies people expect to spend a third of their adult life in retirement so and the years that we work are just out of balance with the years in retirement and so we have to get that into better balance and one way to do that is to keep working for longer and so that as people grow older if if your retirement age is linked to life expectancy your expectations adjust over time and so i think those are all ways in which we can do right by the next generation um linda laura concerning the debt and indebtedness yesterday uh i don't know if you've seen this minus might have seen it there was an article on the financial time of the former uh ministry of finance mr choible saying that one has to go back to the old rules of the pact so the father of austerity is going back to the old recipes whereas minus is saying something different she's saying that that can't be um eliminated through fiscal pressure but we have to go back to growing so growth is the response to it it is not a mechanicistic view because in fact minutiae's book is a recipe towards growth through education and other measures so what do you make of this part of the book devoted to the new generations i totally agree because the fundamental element in this turnaround that has been also induced by the carved pandemic i.e a european continent that is more that shows more solidarity versus austerity has been a major advantage and advancement in fact it responds to the general sense of insecurity for all of our citizens minou speaks about this topic by and large but european citizens need to know that at a point in time when there are very critical situations as we experience them in italy in spain um it may happen in other countries too nevertheless we have to be reliant on europe we have to know that europe is there to help us not to punish us or to adopt a uh severity or auster austerity politics policy so menu is also talking about pensions how can we pay pensions only by increasing the number of people that will contribute more to the pension funds so utilizing all the female forces the young people forces provided everybody's been trained since a very early life stage this is of course a fundamental element for you to tackle the debt issue in an entirely different way you can only eliminate debt through growth not through austerity austerity is a step back it does not allow you to progress neither as an economy nor as a society so as i totally share your approach and i also believe it is very concrete as it is based in every single chapter in the book is based on the experience made in each single country and menu is able to stress how you can resolve certain fundamental nodes in our world of course new generations as count less than the old generations this is clearly expressed in the book but they have a burden to bear that is not only linked to the natural capital that we live to them we know that this has that has been compromised and hampered in so many ways but we know that our country for example has a very high burden to pass on to the new generations and so we see that the demographic demographic trends show that the political weight or importance of our young people is what counts most when we were young we had many young people and the very strength of the proposals made by a young generation back in the 70s came from a broad basis in society and from a number of elderly people that were more imbalanced vis-a-vis the total population now they are instead a very limited portion of the population and they probably are not even aware that they can impact dramatically on these issues and this feeling also impacts on their awareness of being capable of fighting this battle and change the rules of the game so it is very right what uh mentions in the book that the early part of the population is a very strong element that limits you so the problem is very serious indeed and we have to be courageous we have to be capable of daring and she mentions a politician who said you should have six year olds vote so in order to be capable of rebalance the situation also in terms of voting voting is the highest moment of democratic participation and unfortunately the vote of young people does not count that much by the way we had millions of people going to the streets to demonstrate and that happened all over the world and they did not bring forward an ideology but science was in their hand and in the hands and that was extraordinary because seeing these young people extremely polite young people and well-behaved going to the streets and demonstrating and they know so much they are aged 13 and they know everything we have to be so proud of them because they are extraordinary i would like to thank so much minus shafiq for sharing with us her incredible experience of an economist she has been at the world bank and at the international monetary fund and based on that experience she has written an extraordinary book published in italy by mondadori what we owe each other and i thank you and usha fix so much for being with us this morning thank you and i hope that we all hope that your book is a great success and i also thank very much linda laura sabadini from g20 and from ista to the italian institute of statistics thank you for telling us what happens in italy and oftentimes what does not happen unfortunately in italy with women so thank you very much to these two extraordinary women and enjoy the rest of the festival thank you so much minos you