 I'm very honored and pleased to introduce the Honorable Joe Biden, the Vice President of the United States. I'm so pleased to see you back here in Davos because I remember before you assumed your position as Vice President of the United States, you came here as a senator, you came here as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, and I have to say in my memory, you were one of the most engaged and hardest working participants here at the annual meeting. I watched you in the morning up to midnight sometimes, one engagement after the other one. Of course, we welcome you now as the Vice President of the United States, as someone who has shown leadership, as someone who has had a privileged position to observe and to shape our global destiny. So, we are very eager to hear from you, and I should maybe add one personal remark. I know, Mr. Vice President, you are sometimes called the leader or the Vice President who represents the middle of society. And just to make reference to the book, which you all have, and also to our discussion, which we had at dinner two days ago. So, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has one big challenge. It is the holding out of the middle class, which is a pill of our democracies. So, without further ado, please give a big hand to the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, and I should say his wife, Jill Biden, a Dr. Biden. I have great admiration for you, what you are doing to keep education alive, also for those who need it most. I think it's most remarkable. Thank you. Mr. President, I want to thank you again for your hospitality. When I landed at the airport, you were kind enough to be there, and we got a chance to speak. And I want to again publicly thank you for the incredible help your government has been in getting our people out of Iran, and we owe you a debt of gratitude. Thank you. And Christine, before you leave, I may have to borrow some money if you're available. Every time I see Christine, excuse me, President IMF, every time I see her, she looks at me and says, I know, Greece, I know Ukraine. And I'm always calling her. But this time for a personal loan. We can talk about it later. But you're doing a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous job. I really mean it. Thank you so much. You've never had more in your plate. The IMF had never had more in its plate than it does right now. And I think you're doing a presumptuous mean to say, but I think you're doing a fabulous job. And Dr. Schwab, when we had dinner the other night, you and your wife, I asked you whether you ever anticipated 22 years ago, when you started this group, that it would ever grow as large and as consequential as it's become. I have made nine, I think nine other trips to participate. And I've really resented the hell out of the fact Barack wouldn't let me come until tonight. I'm only joking about that. That's a joke. But I think this is, quite frankly, a more convenient four than the United Nations to meet with world leaders and business leaders. It's a great opportunity to get an awful lot done. I've been asked to speak about this year's topic. Dr. Schwab, I'm flattered you'd asked me to keynote. There's an expression in my old neighborhood back in the United States. This may be above my pay grade. It's not above yours, though. You've written extensively on the topic that you've asked me to speak to, mastering the fourth industrial revolution. This fora defines that as a change fueled by a digital revolution. Technology is emerging and intersecting at exponential speed and scale dramatically, dramatically increasing and improving productivity and economic growth and creating, God willing, better jobs and an entirely new industries. But there are two questions it seems to me that we have to address forthrightly at the outset. First, will this revolution actually transform the global economy? And secondly, if it does, will it be for the better or for worse for humanity as a whole? On the first question, there are some serious experts, some of you in the audience, who say that the technological advances we see are impressive but mostly inconsequential to the overall economy. Some of you argue that they won't lead to greater productivity or better jobs or wages for workers. For developed countries, the argument goes the sluggish economic growth will be the new normal and so get used to it. But I think those who have that view are mistaken. I think we're already seeing how digital advances are not only impressive but also consequential for all of our economies. Automated warehouses and assembly lines drastically improve productivity. Ridesharing companies employ tens of thousands of new people. I met with the CEO today of one of those companies saying he's going to add two million new jobs this year, allowing them freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their own lives as they wish. Yesterday I met with the world's leading cancer specialist, assembled here at Davos to talk about how we're at, we all agreed we're at an inflection point in the fight against cancer. We're in the cusp of many new and anticipated breakthroughs enabled by enormous advances in computing power, big data sharing in real time, a billion-billion calculations per second that allow for early diagnoses, vaccines on the horizon to potentially prevent cancer, personalized life-saving treatments, bringing us one step closer to ending cancer as we know it. On the second question, I believe on balance these transformations are changes for the good for average people around the world. They bring exciting new choices to consumers, new kinds of jobs, hopefully, hopefully, that are good pain for workers. Market makes services more affordable. Astounding breakthroughs in science that are going to save lives in physical sciences and unleash entire new industries. But these changes come with real peril, and they require us to be proactive at the front end of this. For how well that the warehouse worker used to ship your order, or the salesman who used to take it, now make a living when he or she is no longer needed in that venture? Does greater work flexibility mean fewer worker protections? What are the consequences? Practical and moral of scientific advances allow us to manipulate the building blocks of life itself to cure defects and diseases in utero, and will that medical science and capability be available to all people because the cost is consequential? Will we end up creating more of a two-tiered society than exists today? The point I'd like to make tonight is that these perils exist regardless of what we call this digital revolution, and regardless of whether you think it will be on the whole transformative for the economy or not. For I believe the underlying question for world leaders, civil society, academia, the media for all of us, goes to what President Obama and I referred was referenced by Klaus a moment ago to what we believe is the defining challenge of our time, and that is how do we ensure wide access to middle class, which is being hollowed out in the 21st century. It is true, as some of the American presser know, in the United States I'm referred to as middle-class Joe. In Washington that's not meant as a compliment, it means I'm not sophisticated, but I'm not making a populist case. This is not about class warfare, it's about the shared economic well-being and global security. It's something we should all care about and then we can all do something about. Let me start by defining what I believe to be middle class. I have a number of really bright economists who work for me. When I first got to the White House, I'd say middle class, they'd say in American terms, $50,240 or $51,500. It's not a number, it's a value set, it's an idea, it's a belief in possibilities. I've spent a lot of time with President Xi of China because of he and President, President Hu and President Obama early on when he was Vice President suggested we should get to know one another. So according to our staff, I've had 24-25 hours of private dinners with him. He's a very bright and determined guy. We were sitting in Chengdu two years ago and he looked at me and said, can you define for me America? And I said yes, I can do it in one word, but I can actually define middle class in one word. Possibilities, it's about possibilities. The possibility of achieving a decent life and the dignity and respect that comes with a good job that is possible for anyone willing to work hard to achieve it. My dad who is a gracious gentleman having been displaced in the 50s after World War II because industry died where we were living in northeast Pennsylvania and it was growing in southeast Pennsylvania and Delaware. I had to go looking for a better job and my siblings and I heard from our entire years of growing up he would say Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It's about your dignity. It's about your self-worth. It's about your place in the community. And it matters. It matters because he believed as most of you do that every single human being is entitled to be treated with dignity and be given an opportunity. There used to be a basic bargain in industrial countries for the last 100 years or so. If you contributed to the success and profitability of the enterprise with which you worked, you got to share in the profitability. You got to share in the benefits. That bargain has been broken through no fault of any single enterprise or any segment of society, but it has been broken. There's a gap the last four decades is growing between productivity and wages. That's real. Resulting at least in my country and some of yours in stagnation. And the reason I talk so much about the middle class is I firmly believe that a thriving and growing middle class has been the main reason for economic stability, political stability, and social stability in our democracies. It is the fiber that holds us together. When the middle class does well, the wealthy do very well. And the poor have a ladder up. That's been the case not only in my country but all around the world for generations. And in those societies where there has been no worker protections, no access to education, no rule of law to confront corruption, no courts of law to adjudicate contract disputes, it has been very difficult to generate a thriving middle class and therefore difficult to generate a thriving middle class and therefore they have not generated thriving economies. I'll mention this a little bit later, but it all comes back to countries and companies giving people a fighting chance to get into the middle class, to still believe in possibilities. Many of you believe that the reason for a Halloween out of the middle class has been the rapid globalization and skilled-based change, which is true. It's contributed. Both of which have resulted in declines of organized labor, bargaining capability, and quite frankly, changes in corporate governance. In the United States, I come from the corporate capital of the world, Delaware. More corporations are incorporated in my state than any other state in the United States of America. I've watched the change. There's nothing benevolent about it, but there's real change in corporate culture. The fundamental change that's been taking place over the last four decades is the divergence between productivity and wages, at least in my country. For after World War II to the mid-70s, productivity and wages moved in lock step that began to change in the mid-70s. Over the last four decades we've seen wages not keep up with productivity. The result is paychecks have stagnated despite rising national income and advances in technology, and I would argue in all of our countries has generated some political unrest and given voice to political elements that here to for had not had much credence. So I say to all of you tonight that the digital revolution has the potential to exacerbate this breakdown and further hollow out the middle class, not just in America, but around the world. Automation might mean higher paying jobs for the manager of the trucking company with driverless trucks, but tens of thousands of truckers will be without a job. Where are the new enterprises? And I'm here to flatly state that I think I hope what you all believe that it's our responsibility, like those who've gone before us, like what's been done in every previous revolution, to bend these changes to the benefit of society, to make sure that digital revolution creates far more winners than losers. And that's not self-evident at this moment, at least in my view. That's what we've done in previous areas of technological change, but it's my instinct that may be harder in this fourth revolution. We've seen technological advances before, steam engine assembly lines computing so many I could name in the three previous industrial revolutions. In each of these revolutions produced displaced workers and produced demands for new worker protections and fundamentally rewrote the rules in the marketplace. But out of each of these revolutions, there was an overall net economic positive impact on societies. Hand loom weavers whose livelihoods are destroyed by factories and the loom eventually ended up working in those factories, often earning hiring wages, and because of societal invention with greater protections, environmentally and on work conditions. The blacksmith who used to mold horseshoes began to mold frames for automobiles. Tractors made agriculture more efficient, the kid who grew up on the farm went to work in the local automobile assembly line or to college or moved to the city, became a doctor or a lawyer, teacher, small business owner. And as industries grew in my country at least, what I can speak to with more authority, we made a commitment to universal high school education and improved access to college at the turn of the 20th century. They've had profound impacts on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship. They all soared the public's moral outrage against child labor, toxic working conditions, also led government to act to set up prohibitions against child labor, protections for fair labor standards, workplace safety, minimum hours, or maximum hours, you could work. That's how government played a role in molding these technological chains into a higher standard of living for a vast majority of people around the world. Yet there were disruptions, dislocations, but on the whole, people who lost their jobs found new ones in industries, new industries with protections that hadn't existed before. What are those industries going to be in 2020? What are they going to be in 2025? Will they absorb all the dislocated workers that you write about in the book, your new book class? Will they be absorbed? One area I think we can pretty well count on, there'll be absorption. That's similar or higher wages will be in the energy industry. We're in the midst of a clean energy and technological revolution. It's increased solar electricity generation 30-fold, created just in my country 170,000 new jobs, more to come. We tripled wind, electrical power, energy enough for 16 million homes. Now we have coal, we have wind and solar reaching the kilowatt cost for coal and oil. It's going to generate a whole new demand for several million new workers in my country and around the world with high wages and protections. But what else? What are the other new industries that will be spawned by this fourth revolution? I'm just a plain old politician. I run for public office. I try very hard to keep contact with my constituencies for real. And people who are much less sophisticated than those assembled in this room, they worry about the answer to that question. They worry. It's true, all of us in this room are probably going to be fine. But while we'll be fine, we need an environment in the wake of this revolution where everyone has a chance to be part of the mix. And it's not so self-evident exactly how to do that. So we're faced with the same question. How do we guarantee there's net benefit to humanity with an increase and an increase in standard of living as a consequence of the changes that some of you, maybe this is a room this comment wouldn't apply, but where most people can't even imagine, we're going to be flying subsonically at 22,000 miles an hour before long. We're going to be seeing breakthroughs that were absolutely, totally, thoroughly unimaginable a year ago. My guess is that this revolution is going to require governments to refocus on core obligations and international corporations to take a hard look at their corporate culture. But the recognition that their obligation goes beyond their shareholders, to workers and to communities like it used to. In my country, there's been an emergence about six, eight years ago of a phrase, job creators. The job creators today are thought many of my country as the stockholders. What about the woman on the assembly line making the product? What about the salesperson who sells the automobile or the refrigerator or the product made? What about all those people on the chain? They used to be job creators and viewed that way. There used to be, Mr. President, a sense of obligation to communities. It's not that corporate America or international corporations are bad. They're not. Things have changed. Short-termism is the order of the day. As I said, I know, like many of you assembled here, a significant number of presidents of the Fortune 500 companies. I remember standing on a platform taking the train from my home constituency in Wilmington, Delaware in 2008, and the chairman of the board of one of the major corporations in America on the platform going to New York. The same moment, the trains were within two minutes of one another. And I know this gentleman. I don't want to embarrass him because I haven't gotten permission to use his name. But I said, how are you, John? He said, fine. I said, where are you going? I said, I'm going to New York. I'm going to meet with some snivelly little guy on Wall Street who's going to tell me that I have to increase profitability in the next quarter, or I will be downgraded. So it's going to require me to make any then-started naming short-term decisions that were not in the interest of the long-term interest of his company. And a lot of you corporate leaders don't like me saying that. But you know it's true. It's not the sole problem. It may not even be the major problem. I'm going to be somewhat presumptuous. And I think there are at least five guideposts, five things we should be preparing to do now followed through on to take control of this revolution. There are many more that I'm going to name I expect and some of you may have better ideas. But in order to expand middle-class opportunities for workers, I think it's going to require governments, corporations, and civil societies to make some of these changes. First, there is a need worldwide for an increase in access to affordable education and job training. It is more needed today than ever in our history. Cognitive capability, as opposed to brawn, is the means by which you can climb that ladder into the middle class. When I say education, I'm talking about education that is early, lifelong, affordable, and accessible. Today's economy, there's going to be a constant requirement for workers to retool or retrain, for even for the very jobs they possess, because the technology that they're engaged with is moving far beyond the ability to keep up with whatever the basic education they have is. The jobs they possess, particularly in areas of IT, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, energy, are going to need lifelong education. And this education and training is not only, in my view, the obligation of our governments. It's also the responsibility and opportunity for our businesses. To put it simply, again, presumptuous of me, I'd like to make a call to action to business leaders here to invest in your workers. Make upskilling part of your business model. That means both the public and private sector supporting apprenticeships. You do that so much better in Europe than we do in the United States. To deal with government, partnerships with industry and entrepreneurs, to expose and to train young people to the jobs of the future. In my country alone, there's 100,000 high-skill manufacturing jobs going unfilled. We find that a major new company generating photovoltaic shingles needed a thousand workers. Very bright people in the upper Midwest. But they found no one had any knowledge of photovoltaic technology. Through the help of my wife and community colleges and the president's leadership, we partnered with these industries. Said, bring your plan into the community college. Bring your machines in. Tell us what needs to be taught. And now there's a 19-week course that's created a conveyor belt. For people who have the capacity to do this, they don't like the capacity. They lack the skill. And their average jobs are $55,000 a year. And my country alone, like yours, at a request of the president, we're working with our secretary who's here today, Penny Pritzker. We decided to look at what are the jobs of the future in my country. We need, by 2020, 1,400,000 new IT jobs in America. This is basic as being able to learn a new language, coding. In Detroit, Michigan, there was on its back in bankruptcy, just climbing to its knees. Most of the middle class having left the city, an overwhelmingly minority city. Global IT, who provides IT jobs for IT companies, concluded they needed 1,000 IT jobs in the city of Detroit to make it run to one of the neighborhoods. And we say in the states in the hood, they picked, I believe it was 37 women in the first class. All African-American, none with more than a high school education, most with what we call a GED, not having completed high school, trained them for 18 weeks. Everyone had a job, the lowest paying job, $58,000, the highest, $108,000. So education, retraining, to keep pace. It's not that the guy who used to shovel coal into a steel burner doesn't have the mental capacity to be able to promote these functions. It's training, and you know, and you're better than we know, the value of apprenticeships. Secondly, we need to continue to ensure basic protection for workers as these changes take place. I mean a living wage, payment of overtime, childcare, sick leave, the right to unionize, to collectively bargain. Governments have in my view an obligation to strengthen these core protections. But so do companies. I don't have to tell anyone in this room that over the last few decades there's been a real change in the culture. A lot of you have written and spoken about short-termism that undermine the long-term growth of company and stifle workers. Another change in the corporate culture that's happened over the last two decades, for example, a study done by publishing the Harvard Business Journal about eight months ago by distinguished professors pointed out in the last decade, 449 companies in the S&P 500 over a 10-year period from 2003 to 2012 made $2.4 trillion in profit. That's good, obviously. But it was different than what happened 20 years ago. The difference is the way they invested that profit. 54% of you bought back your own stock. 37% of that profit went to shareholders, the job creators, leaving 9% for research, development, cash reserves, raises in training for employees. It worked because money was cheap to borrow, essentially zero interest rates. But it hasn't grown much. As a consequence, it added to the problem of stagnant wages, reduced productivity for workers, and less investment in the future. Again, I'm not being romantic about the good old days, but just when President Reagan was president, we didn't allow companies to buy back all that stock under our security exchange commission rules. Corporate executives aren't bad guys, they're good. But markets and the rules of the marketplace induce behaviors. In the last decade, there's been an emergence, at least in my country, as I said, of this notion of job creators. But what's starting to happen, I think, is we're beginning to understand that it's a lot bigger than that. It's a lot bigger than just shareholders. Companies are beginning to, again, reinvest in their companies. They're beginning slowly to increase wages and increase investment in research. When we used to do that regularly, we grew a lot faster and we grew together. So my call to action here is simple, embrace the obligation to your workers as well as your shareholders. It's good for workers, it's good for your business, it's good for your productivity, and it's good for society. And there's nothing about it that doesn't recognize and support and reinforce the capital markets. Thirdly, we have to modernize our infrastructure. In the United States, the reason for the exponential growth in the 1800s and early 1900s was the massive investment we made in technology. From the Transcontinental Railroad, the Erie Canal, a thousand things we did. And the government, the government, as a consequence of this infrastructure, opened up vast opportunities. As you know, better than I, companies locate where they can get their raw materials the quickest to the factory floor and their product quickest to market in the cheapest way. World-class infrastructure attracts businesses and workers. These investments create a virtuous cycle, decent, good-paying, middle-class jobs, generating new jobs. Yet in far too many of our countries, we've not invested enough in infrastructure. Let me be parochial for a moment and speak to my country. For 90 percent of Americans, one out of every seven dollars they spend in their income goes to transportation costs. Yet our economy loses $120 billion year in fuel costs to lost productivity due to traffic jams amounting to $118 per U.S. consumer. The American Society of Engineers estimates that there's a need to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020, which we're not going to do, to modernize and upgrade our infrastructure. Some of you who travel to my country may remember I got in a lot of trouble when I said on a program I have a problem. No one ever doubts I say what I mean. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean, as I said. And I was talking about LaGuardia Airport, one of the great cities in the world. And I said, if I took you blindfold in the middle of the night to the airport in Beijing and the airport in New York, blindfolded you and then took the blindfold off and let you look around and said where are you in a developing country or developed country? Not a joke. I was harshly criticized for criticizing the fact that there was a sign if you were in not LaGuardia and it said escalator broken, repaired in two months, literally. The United States of America. Everybody thought I was crazy except the mayor, the governor and the people of New York. When I landed in Air Force Two the first time after I made this comment that we got widely publicized as a Biden gaffe, my Air Force Two pilot said, are you sure you can guarantee our safety, Senator? Or Mr. Vice President, Senator, too long. And as I came back to the Air Force Two to approach the steps, there were nine workers in brown jackets with the yellow stripes around them who work at the airport. And I wasn't sure what they were agreeing was going to be. And everyone shook my hand and said, thank you. We're now making a four and a half billion dollar investment in making a world-class city have world-class transportation. Look, governments have fundamental responsibilities to build roads, bridges, railways, ports, broadband. And all of us can have profound impact on economic growth, generating good paying jobs and bringing opportunity areas where it does not exist now. But in addition to taxpayer investment, what's emerging in my country is really reassuring. There's an emergence of private public partnerships to deal with things like stormwater overflow, sewer systems, because the companies are being affected badly by the lack of the investment. So we're creating new mechanisms whereby that can be financed. I've traveled now as vice president about a million, 200,000 miles around the world. It's not profoundly different in most of your countries. So my call to you is forge some of these public-private partnerships. Lend capital to modernize roads, railways, build new water systems, lay down miles of broadband around the world. Our government has made the largest investment in the Recovery Act that's been done in our history in those things. The president of leadership of my good friend, Secretary of State Kerry, launched Global Connect Initiative to work with countries, industries, NGOs, networking engineers, and development banks to bring an additional 1.5 billion people online in the next by 2020. That's as profound as what happened in our country in the 30s and the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electricity to vast stretches of my country. Only it's more profound because there's access to education despite turning on your smartphone. Think about the immense opportunities this provides for people to get an education, to sell their products in new markets, to build a better life, connect with the world around them. This is the kind of thing we can absolutely do together. I'm often asked, can we afford it? My arguments, we cannot fail. We cannot afford not to do this. The fourth point I'd make, and it's going to make some of you not happy with me, is we need not only my country but in other countries a more progressive tax code, not confiscatory policy, not socialism, a tax code. Everybody pays proportionally a fair share. This is not meant to penalize anybody. I kid with my wife Jill, I say I've dreamed that someday one of my kids would grow up to be a billionaire. Instead one became an attorney general, the other is in the refugee camps outside of Amman, working for World Food Program, and the other one is a social worker. I should have had one enterprise young republican who became made a lot of money so when they put me in a home I'd at least have a window with a view, you know? But all kidding aside, in my country when we talk about this you hear this about wealth envy, there is no wealth envy. But the president and I have worked to make sure that everyone pays their fair share so that we can invest in the things that will grow the economy that benefit everyone. As was shown in Paris no matter how wealthy you are you cannot protect yourself from an environment that is being degraded, education, training, infrastructure, and all that benefits workers and businesses like, but in the private sector has to play a role too. As we were flying into Davos this week the Oxfam report made a lot of headlines. It pointed out that 62 of the wealthiest people in the world, and I'm sure they're all good people, have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people in the world combined. If you read past the headline the report explains that inequity is driven in large part due to tax avoidance and tax shelters. It's not just about tax equity, it's about economic growth. I don't have to tell Christine this, I don't want to, she is no part of my speech, I don't want to implicate her in that regard. It's not just Joe Biden saying this, the IMF saying this. It's standard and poor. Not liberal think tanks in the United States of America, both say growing inequity is a threat to economic growth. She may not like hearing it, but keeping billions of dollars in offshore tax havens might be good for your shareholders, but it robs your home country. So bring it back, invest it in the communities in which you live, the enterprises, the communities allow your enterprise to thrive. Lastly, we need to expand access to capital. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of experiments many of you have been involved in, microcapital that has generated some real growth in areas that have changed people's lives. And I'm calling on all of you to help make existing capital with tools that support entrepreneurship more widely available, more widely available to people who haven't had access to it before. I know this is not simple, I know it's a complicated subject, worn a full day discussion, but we've got to figure out how to make more capital available. These degrade innovation and the type of innovation that will be necessary to develop new industries and create those new jobs. In the United States, the federal government backs loans to entrepreneurs of all backgrounds. Loans are repaid in full as solar power entrepreneurs take their ideas from paper to prototype to production. Some fail, some succeed. Opportunities to take risks have to be more widely available. Having that risk rewarded cannot be the sole province of a small sector of our society. Folks, in a strange sense, it's really all not that complicated. Education and job training infrastructure and worker protections, fair progressive tax code access to capital. The president and I have been laser focused on each of these issues because we know they're among the surest pathways of the middle class in advanced economies and to generate advanced economies. They've been the foundation of our road from economic crisis to recovery to hopefully permanent resurgence. For developing nations, they're part of other critical factors in building strong economies and societies like protecting basic liberties to think and speak freely, upholding the rule of law, ensuring access to healthcare. One of the best quotes of Steve Jobs ever when asked, what can there be more like you, Mr. Jobs, at Stanford University, a student asked, he looked down and he said, think different. You can only think different where you can breathe free, where you can challenge orthodoxy without any fear of reprisal. And while we may disagree in the details, I hope that some of what I talked about is element for some consensus around which we can move forward to bring more people along instead of leaving them behind in this era of technological change. I think that's how we built the basic bargain in the first place, an obligation of government and business, civil society, to workers, to communities, to our countries. I think we have to get back to more of the basics. No fundamental radical change, but get back to some of the basics. If it sounds like I'm making a moral case, in part I am, Pope Francis got it right in my view, it was in sickly when he wrote, never has humanity had such power over itself yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely. He went on to say, we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, and more integral. And I would argue it's really good for business too. It seems to me that's our charge. Rebuilding pathways in the middle class, I think it's an economic imperative. And ladies and gentlemen, the unraveling of the middle class is not only threatens our share of economic growth, but I would argue it threatens our shared global security. I'll conclude with this point. When people feel that their shot at a decent life is dashed, is eliminated, the inevitable human reaction is anxiety, frustration, and anger. Providing fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues, peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views, and it begins to shred our social fabric in each of our countries. It stirs instability. We see in the United States, this most unusual political campaign I've been engaged in, and I was elected to the United States, I was 29 years old and I ran for president myself. I've never quite seen it this way, and you see it here in Europe in the emergence of third parties that heretofore had no fertile soil to grow in. You see it around the world. You see, and this is the extreme example, how people become attracted to terrorist groups like ISIL, anarchist groups, left-wing, right-wing extremist movements, who offer a violent fantasy of tearing down the entire system. And ironically, while these cowards capitalize on the grievances stemming from the disruptions caused in part by significant advances in technology, these same advances make it easier for them to do more damage to society than ever before. Put simply, if we get this wrong, we don't protect the opportunity to join in advance. We don't protect the notion of possibilities. We'll see more people motivated to do harm with ever greater potential to do it. The result, European unity and cooperation, and I hope no one, no leaders in community are offended because we're going through a similar thing. That unity and cooperation, in some cases being called into question, great step forward, the master's treaty all is done in the European Union. I think it's sustained that it's being challenged. Cooperation could falter. Political progress in fragile and failing states could be doomed if we don't change. That's why this matters to all of us. If we say we care about humanity, then we have to care about real people. My dad used to kid, I'm allegedly an American parlance of liberal. He said, Joe, liberals love humanity and don't like individuals. He said, conservatives like individuals and aren't crazy about humanity. I'm not sure he's right, but it gets down to real people, real hopes, real dreams, real anxieties. In a polarized, fractured economy is not inevitable. Neither is the economy that grows from the bottom up or the middle class out inevitable. It's a choice. It's a practical choice. Just like we did last month in Paris, where 200 countries pledged a unified fight against climate change, countries where businesses and civil society stepped up to forge a political and public consensus that something had to be done. We can argue more had to be done. But if I had said to you five years ago, if this forum that was likely to happen, I think there would have been a lot of skeptics, including me. Earlier today, I met with the CEOs from some of the world's top companies that are leading the way for protecting the rights of their LGBT workers, no matter where they are in the world. It puts countries on notice to step up if you want their businesses and millions of dollars in economic benefits. Ladies and gentlemen, all of us in this room, leaders in government, industry, civil society, academia, excuse me, academia, can forge the same kind of consensus when it comes to rebuilding pathways in the middle class. For in this changing world, it will be up to us to translate unprecedented capabilities in the greater measures of happiness and meaning, opportunity, and freedom, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. That's how we keep alive the sense of possibilities, because if we ever lose that, we've lost something really, really special, the soul of our common humanity that no machine can replace. I know we won't let it happen. I've been doing this work for a long time. I've met almost, Mr. President, almost every world leader in the last 40 years, not because I'm important, just because of the nature of my job in our government. And I can honestly tell you, I've never been more optimistic about the future of the world than I am today, because more is potentially within our power than ever before to make positive changes, never before we have had so much power in our hands to do better, and never before have I felt more strongly that we can. And just being here two days, meeting with many of you, has reinforced my sense of optimism. It's not going to be easy, but it's possible. And we're all about the possible. We're all about possibilities. Thank you all for indulging me. I appreciate it very much.