 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our session on what kind of growth do we need to sustain our future? I'm Vijay Vaithiswaran. I am the global energy and climate innovation editor of the Economist. It's my great pleasure to be your immoderate moderator for this session. I am delighted to have such a distinguished group of experts with us. We will be hearing today on this very, very important topic, really the central topic in a way that brings together all of the sessions, all of the topics that the different councils are working on through one lens. We have to my immediate right Masood Ahmed, president of the Center for Global Development. We have to my immediate left Kumi Kitamori, deputy director of the environment directorate at the OECD. We have in my far right Alex Edmonds, professor of finance at London Business School. And Sandor Maslow, who is a tenure professor at the Austral University of Chile. Please give them a warm round of applause to welcome them to our stage and for sharing their wisdom. I would like to also welcome not only the audience that's present here in this wonderful room, but also all of you joining us on the live stream. So thank you for being with us. If you are sharing about this event with your social channels, please use hashtag AMGFC23. We do appreciate that. This is an open session. Now growth has been one of the potent topics of discussion of late related to the topics we're here to discuss here in Dubai. The last time it was such a potent global topic was really back in the 1970s where we had a swirl of issues that the world considered. Population was considered to be out of control. There's questions of food scarcity that were being considered at that time. Environmental resources and degradation of course were also a huge concern, a group of thinkers known as the Club of Rome. Some of the most eminent thinkers, Nobel Prize winners, economists at that time argued that in fact there was a limit to growth. And there was a huge challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of growth at that time. And we saw this debate rumble on for a decade or more until we saw something of a breakthrough. The United Nations convened what came to be known as the Bruntlen Commission, which thought about how to think about the different challenges, the competing forces and proposed the concept of sustainable development with the following meaning. Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Now this important and carefully chosen set of words framed the dialogue that ultimately led to the landmark Rio summit, the UN Sustainable Development Goals process, which continues. And so there is a foundational work in this area. And yet here we are, we find ourselves as we come to grips with how to accelerate action on climate change, how to deal with questions of global inequity that persist in the need for development. And we think about other issues related to these that we'll talk about in just a moment. What is the role of growth? And so to help us dig into this I'd like to ask my panelists, maybe starting with you Masoud, we'll start with you. When you look at the sort of witch's brew of forces now that the devil thinking on the global stage, what is the right role for growth? Well look, the growth simply measures the change in the level of economic activity to any given year or over any given period. And it's important because for the vast majority of people in the world, you can't see an improvement in their human condition in their living standard unless that they have access to more economic resources. But you read out that quote from the Brentland Commission. And that's where we're failing because the way we still deliver that level of economic activity is not consistent with not compromising our future generations. And actually it compromises our present generations because we don't spread the benefits of the economic activity across the majority of people. Much of it is captured by a few. And also we don't manage the transitions well because as we change our economies, some people get left behind and we've not been very good at taking care of them. So we need to change the nature of growth but not give up on the concept of economic activity because that would be betraying the needs of a whole bunch of the majority of the world today. So we need to rethink on how we grow is really your argument. Absolutely. Absolutely. That we need to rethink how we grow and we need to rethink how we distribute the benefits of growth. Right. Which goes to the equity question. Absolutely. Great. Come here. How do you see this question? What is the role of growth? Why is it important in your perspective? Well, I tend to agree with that we still need growth but it's the quality of growth that matters as we said. And you know, if I may put it this way, it's a quality. It has to be green and it has to be inclusive. And of course, but in this context, you know, today it's very urgent. These last two issues we see already mentioned, we have the climate crisis. We need to accelerate action in a massive way. We need to accelerate and then scale up action. But then there's also a little bit of tension with this equity inclusiveness question because a lot of resistance is coming from this, you know, what does it mean to have bold climate action imposed by governments? Sometimes we hear noises of social injustice and where I'm based in France, we've seen this yellow jacket movement, the Gillesian movement. And you know, one of the memorable, you know, lines from that happened erupted a few years back when people used to say, this was in reaction to the carbon tax hike. People used to say, Mr. President, you know, you talk about the end of the world, but we household, we worry about the end of the month to make ends meet. You know, what are we going to do when the price of gasoline and daily mobility going to work, et cetera, it's going to cost us so much when there are no other alternatives, especially for people who live in narrow areas. So there's a little bit of tension between this inclusive growth and green growth that we ideally want to achieve both together. So let's press on that. You know, you're in Paris. You obviously lived through regular protests for many reasons. Paris is renowned for its protests. But in that particular case, it did highlight the tensions. The first rule of economics is, you know, there's no free lunch. There are often trade-offs, right? Are we engaging in magical thinking by saying that we can achieve some kind of growth that can achieve all objectives, whether it's equitable outcomes, climate outcomes, and then we can fill in the blank productivity increases. I see multiple uses of things that people seem to be desirable that they want growth to achieve and that somehow can be also made desirable with what everyone else wants. Since you're at an economics institution, what do you think about the trade-offs that we need to think about? Is there some word of wisdom or caution you could provide? I think this is where a lot of the focus of further policy analysis is needed. You know, we spent, as economists, we spent a lot of time earlier in the case to look at the link between productivity growth and where I'm coming from, where I'm sitting, and green growth. There's much more analysis needed to look at the interface and interplay between the inclusiveness, social aspect, and going green, low-carbon, and climate resilience. And there, of course, much has been studied, and it's been studied as of now, where the biggest buck for the climate action is needed, you know, transport, energy, buildings. But the latest IPCC report says that up to a third of emission reductions needed to 2050 will have to come from individual behavior, and that's individual households. So much more has to be done, and I can talk a little bit about that. You know, OECD and some teams from the Harvard, we've done this public perception in individual behavior on climate policy. Colleagues at Daimler have done similar studies as well. Okay, well, we'll come back to that when we drill into some of the solutions. But that's a good point, and maybe finding sweet spots. Not everything can be achieved, but you can find areas where you can find those sweet spots. Alex, let me turn to you. You're a professor of finance, but if I'm not mistaken, you have an interesting perspective on GDP that financial growth is not the only way to think about growth. Can you tell us what you mean by that? Yeah, absolutely. So I agree with my co-panelists that growth is critical to increase social welfare to contribute to human flourishing, but we need to recognize that growth can be on many different types of capital. So you can have growth in physical capital, that might be infrastructure or schools or hospitals or wind farms, but there's also growth in human capital. So that could be devising an enriching workplace, improving medicines, access to food. There's also growth in natural capital. So that could be preservation and restoration and finally growth in financial capital, allowing people to save and invest for the future, as you've highlighted that needs to be equitable. But if we think about growth as not just growth in physical capital and that's often measured by GDP growth, but growth in these other types of capital, which are often seen as externalities and not captured in the normal statistics, that's the type of growth that we need to sustain our future. Growth in social value, not just economic value. Are you engaging in that classic debating tactic or redefining terms so that you can make your point? I am and I think that's critical, is that we do need to redefine the term. So is it, for example, I mean the OECD in particular has argued for a very long time about the need for investment in human infrastructure, for example. Countries like the US have been under investing for many years and perhaps pivoting it arguably at this time. Isn't that an input into economic growth? If we, again, put everything into the bucket of growth, then what's an input, what's an output? Don't we muddle that conversation or the analysis? Not necessarily. If we measure the outputs, there's not just economic growth but also include the externalities here. Then we think about what are the inputs that we need in order to create these positive externalities even if they're not measured in GDP statistics. So, example, it could be if we are thinking about shutting down a plant, what will happen to the people afterwards? Well, if you're a company and you're not retraining people before they end up leaving, then these are the human version of stranded assets. Let's take, say, Janesville, so this was famous in a Financial Times book of the year. What happened when GM shut the plant? They tried to retrain all the workers but they didn't even know how to use a computer so it was difficult for them to find alternative jobs. So had GM made the investment to invest in transferable skills, then when it made that shut-down decision, then these people could have been redeployed. But because that was not in the growth statistics, in the output statistics, the input of providing transferable skills was not a positive NPV investment because we did not measure the NPV on that investment in the traditional statistics. So I think we do need to redefine the output in order to decide, well, what are the required inputs to lead to that output? So a more holistic assessment and people like Tobin at Yale have argued for measures of economic welfare for decades. So this is an ongoing conversation and it sounds like you're very much on that side of thinking more holistically about what growth means. Yes, I unashadably am doing the debating tactic of redefining growth but I think only once we redefine output, as output that benefits wider society, even if it's not just in financial value, will we be able to debate what are the right inputs to invest in in order to achieve that. Very good. And there's a lot more to come back to when we talk about externalities about natural capitalism. We'll come back to that. But let me turn to our final panelist, Sandor. You are a scientist by background but you've spent a long time working on these related issues. How do you see the current global outlook and what do you think about the role of growth and the kind of growth that we have? Yeah. I am the, as Juan Tenoche, some writer said, invited of stone here because I'm not an economist. I'm a marine geologist. But I feel part of it and just because of my friend here, just mentioned, I completely agree that we need to find a new way to measure the performance of every single economy and GDP and PIB in Spanish is not the way. And there is one panelist missing here, is the planet. We arranged a circular stage. So I am representing the planet. And in that, from that point of view, the only way to solve the problem that Michael Lee here and my friend there also mentioned that the inequality of this GDP growth economy and the socializing all the way behind, this is not new. I'm 66 years old and I'm listening to this one since I am 14. So why we have not done anything? Because we are not solving the problem. We are still stuck in the take, make, say, waste. And that's our economic system right now. We need to think radically differently. How do I think it should be? And please help me, because again, I'm speaking about my planet. That's my territory. That's the earth. How do we take the pressure on this planet right now? And to me, it's not the slope, as you just mentioned, of the economic growth. But what I would like to change is the scale. Everybody's following the same slope of whatever you measure, GDP or PIB in Latin America. But the scale, it should be lower down. Why? Because we are going to surpass one of the ninth boundary very shortly if we allow deep seamining, for example, to take place, which is the ocean. And what is our goal as a citizen of the world? We are going to, myself, I will pass a bucket of money, assets to my kids. For what? They will go to the beach somewhere, and they will not be able to put their feet more than 50 minutes, because after that, you will start burning because it's acidified. So just to clarify, what I'm hearing is that you want to see a slower rate of growth going forward, rather than perhaps an obsession with increasing growth costs. For example? But to the end of trying to think about resources. Is that really the issue here? That's right. For example, are we low to have a country and are we low to have a society where we work only for hours a day? If we manage to work only for hours a day, we take 50% of the pressure in every single national resource of this planet, in everyone. Well, the French might come along with you, but maybe others that will disagree with you. France has been doing education for a long time. You know that they go only Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. When they never have been in this, and they perform worse than the American or the Japanese, they perform the same. So efficiency and efficiency, excellency has nothing to do with the lifespan that you spend of your life for money. We need to be more efficient. And I believe in four hours we can do the best thing. We still have physician, engineer, probably the same lifespan that we are now at the university. But if we think differently, and we think that the reason we are doing this is because we have only one planet, and this is the only planet in the solar system who has the life that we have. There's no other one. There's no plan B. We need to work, and I thank you very much. GDP has not been the way to do it. So Masoud, what do you think of the arguments that have been put on the table here? Do you think that what you've heard gives us a provocation in your mind about addressing the issues you put on the table earlier, addressing inequity, coping with climate, and we haven't talked about it yet, but there are also costs involved with the transition, and the pace at which we proceed. Yes, so I would start by the last intervention, and I would say, okay, that's a vision of how we should live. And we need to build consensus around that being the way in which we want to live as a global society. That's here. We're here. There's a bunch of people here who don't have the very basic means to live at the moment. And to say to them, we're going to go to that vision. In the meantime, until we get there, you need to wait is not sustainable for them. It's not fair to them. So for the people today who don't have electricity in Africa, 700 million people don't have electricity in Africa. What is our response to them? Do we think they should wait until we've got a global system that works in a way that will deliver them the life that you have a very compelling vision of that? So I really feel that we have to work on two fronts. That's what I would suggest. One, build consensus for a vision that is a long line. We have a lot of debate about elements of it. I think people would agree. People would disagree with bits of it. But today, we have to find ways in which we can improve the human condition for people who do not have an acceptable human condition, and do so in a way that minimizes the damage that it's doing to the planet because we only have the one planet. While changing the behavior, and that's where you come to the point that you made, Kumi, while changing the behavior of those who are consuming well above what a sustainable level can allow for the world as a whole. And that's a much harder process, as the yellow jacket showed, as similar pushback in the UK now shows, Germany now shows. So if the rich countries, which are consuming much more than their share of acceptable global resources, are not able to make the internal changes no amount of holding back progress in the poorest countries is going to make an impact. Does this necessarily argue your observation that we're really looking at a future of a two-track process that rather than what will be discussed six weeks from now here in this very spot in Dubai, that is a world coming together, 200 countries, 1.5 degree goal, et cetera, that in fact it's really going to be going back to the earlier conversation about common goals, differentiated responsibilities, maybe even two-track or multi-track approaches to development and to growth, the question we're here to discuss. Does that sound right to you? Because I'm trying to sing off of one songbook for the last few years. It's sounding a little dissonant to me. It doesn't make sense for us. First of all, we don't sing off the same songbook. We say we issue the same songbook, but we ask some people to sing more in tune than we do ourselves. You're a very simple example because it really irritates me and I think it irritates a lot of people. Is that when it comes to the use of natural gas, we say to a lot of countries in Africa don't have electricity, don't develop this gas, don't use it because it's a fossil fuel. But when it comes to our own needs, because suddenly we find in Europe that our gas supply is getting a little cut short because of our problems with our neighbors in Russia, we say, oh, this is a clean fuel. It's a transition fuel. So please develop it and send it to us. That's fine, but don't develop it for yourself. That's not singing off the same songbook. So I think the first thing we should do is have honest conversations. I made this point yesterday, I'll make it again. If we don't have difficult conversations and pretend that it's all nice, we'll never get anywhere. And I think we need to start having some difficult conversations of what kind of vision we want for the future. I don't agree with everything you said, but let's talk about it. And then let's have a difficult conversation about how to make trade-offs because there are real trade-offs. Alex, you had mentioned in passing externalities, things that are not priced into the market framework. What's the role for policy in that? Can you pick up on that? And especially picking up on the Sue's point about some of these trade-offs that need to be made and maybe some of the hypocrisy that we find or perverse outcomes in the way that we do things today. What is your academic work point to? And what do your arguments suggest might help us with that? Well, the key role for policy is to price these externalities. So externalities are a market failure. This is when the objectives of the individual company or the individual investor conflict with the objectives of wider society. And mainstream economics for decades has looked at the importance of pricing these externalities. So there's some externalities which are so priceless that you can just ban them. So there's certain activities, let's say child labor, which are directly regulated. For other externalities which are not so extreme to ban, you can tax them. And this is why economists around the world and also practitioners argue for a carbon tax. Because in the absence of that, the incentives of the private market to lead to a transition, be these investors disinvesting from fossil fuels, are not that clear. Because if you do that, it might be that this is reducing the returns to your investors in the long term. So if there is clear government action where these externalities are priced, then we don't have the difficult trade-off between let's try to cool the planet, but let's also try to maximize returns for our ultimate beneficiaries. Now, I think it was 20 years ago I wrote my first leader and the economist arguing for carbon taxes. We've long been advocates of this. The first principles argument from economics is pretty clear. If not taxes, at least some form of harmonized global carbon pricing, it hasn't happened, right? It's been a very rocky road. Politically it's very challenging. Implementation at the level of farmers who don't like increases in the price that they pay at the pump or at the level of global trade. There's a lot of friction. But we have got about a quarter of global activity now having some form of carbon pricing that's covered. So it is coming up a bit. Can you tell me in practical terms, sometimes we have to accept second best solutions, right? And what have we learned in the last 20 years in which there has been forceful advocacy, particularly from the economics community, on some kind of externalities pricing as to what works and what might be a better way to get on with this rather than fighting ideological battles that can't be won? I think what we've learned is that there are ideological battles and there are people who lose from carbon transition. And I think just to ignore them is not a correct solution. We need to try to compensate those who will lose. And so this is why I'm such a fan of growth if it's broadly defined. There's a famous economic theorem called the Coase theorem which is once you create value for wider society, there's a way of redistributing the value that you create to compensate the people who lose from the value-creating activity. So indeed there's rapid decarbonisation which might lead to a loss of jobs. Then can the government come in and compensate the people who are losing out? Let's just give an example. So NG, the French energy company, they used to own the Hazelwood plant in Victoria, the most polluting plant in the OECD. And they took the difficult decision to close down that plant because of the environmental impact. Now 750 people lost their jobs and that is something with a huge effect potentially on their families and for generations to come. So the government had the Latrobe Valley worker transfer scheme to find other jobs for these employees. And sometimes these were at competitors to NG but they didn't mind that. Their goal was to make sure that there was a just transition. These people lost out but let's try to make sure that their losses are mitigated. So that's an example of something that seems to be working, at least is well conceived. What we know from history is that, for example, with globalization, which has done quite a lot to lift living standards in developing economies, also had a huge impact on the rust belt of the United States or advanced economies in a negative way. And the promised trade adjustment was never delivered. Communities were left behind. We saw the hollowing out effect. You mentioned that the book that talked about the GM plant. Let me come to you, Komi, because you think about these trade-offs in the round at the OECD and we've talked a little bit about the costs of transition. What have you learned or what can you put on the table first to chew over on how to think more thoughtfully about making sure that when there are things like dirty factories that might need to be phased out or in the case of a live case of South Africa with the Just Energy Transition Partnership deal that came out of a COP meeting but which has had great difficulty in advancing. It's stalled. Let's be honest about it. Even though there are new partnerships being announced like that for Indonesia, for Vietnam, the first one is not a success. At least it hit some problems in practical terms. What advice do you have on how to think about compensating the losers as it were? I think this is the classic political economy challenge. What's really important is that, obviously, we are a mirror image of a national government, and policy makers in countries are making policies in their own, where they belong, whether you're a tax authority or finance committee or silos, social, labor market issues, policy. What's needed is exactly the example that you gave is perfect because basically, you want to say taxing externality, carbon tax, but then sometimes some of their revenues can be recycled to channel to some of the social policy. For example, what kind of compensation mechanism, transition and retraining of workers, investing in skills, local development for specific localities that are affected. So that kind of cross, if I may use the word, multidisciplinary, cross ministerial, cross government, cross discipline, compensation is needed to come up with practical, implementable solution that's tailored to each location. And that's again, going back to what was said earlier, breaking down silos. And it comes back to our councils here today. We need to be talking to different groups across the borders to come up with something that's implementable. So the key idea there is to really think across different sectors, silos, as we talked about. So if you were to impose some kind of externalities pricing to recycle or hypothesize those resources for investments to those that might be affected in the transition, is there something more we can do than this? For example, oftentimes across the board, externalities pricing does have regressive effects, especially in developing countries. The fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of trillions. The IMF is calculated, especially if you take account of indirect costs. However, it's not just big oil companies in the west that are subsidized. Often it's fuel subsidies for the very poor as well. But they're distributed as blanket subsidies. They're not done in means testing, for example. So is there something about either means testing the subsidies or, and I think there's been some reform in Iran on this, interestingly, moving away from blanket subsidies to having universal basic income or some direct kind of funding that's more targeted, are there some lessons, new tools that we can think about because these ideas have been kicking around a very long time and we have not had great success thus far? I think it's really difficult because once you provide something is provided by government in terms of support to consumer producers. It's really difficult to take it back because people get used to having it. It's really important to pre-announce, especially if it has to be time bound, pre-announce that it's for temporary measure and, as you said, has to be means that's targeted only for those who really need. And if you think about consumer subsidies for fossil fuel consumption, majority if captured by those who can afford to drive bigger cars and bigger fuel tanks rather than people who really, really need it. So means testing, better targeting and time bound and then time to face it out, then you take it back. I think these are the sort of the classic formula easily said, it's harder to implement for governments. Right, but this is some of the mechanics of how we could try to think about a different paradigm for growth. Sandor, one of the things that you hinted at, if I heard you correctly, was in that connection with how you'd like to see a different kind of growth in future and resources, that perhaps you'd like to see a circularity as part of that concept. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know you've done some work in this area. Yeah, just before that, I don't know if it's me, but it sounds like this issue of the pork and the rich and it's something that's in 16 October 2023. I heard this one since I was eight years old. So we have not done nothing, but we keep growing. We keep with GDP. So something is wrong. Visually, I see the economic model today as a pipe with an off here that is full throttle. Everybody wants to keep growing, but it's too much water coming in and it's making water everywhere. So what do we do? We just mentioned, we clogged this one, we clogged this one. There's another leak there. There's another leak there. So we need to change the pipe. We need to change the pipe. And in that, please come back to the question because it's linked to that. I really would like to see solidarity, really. In the last COP 27 in Sharma Sheikh, I asked a question. And I think it's something that you mentioned. We create imaginary lines in our beautiful planet. Some we call latitude, some we call longitude. And the latitude, it divides our beautiful planet into half hemisphere. Of course, Europe is on the top, but Europe could be like that because it depends on the reference of the universe. That doesn't matter. One of the panels of one of the countries said impossible to reach zero carbon, impossible to reach, not to surpass the 1.5 degree Celsius, which is a common issue that some of the countries are here. And I asked the question. What do you think if we eliminate all the species in the southern hemisphere? What is the impact in the reduction of CO2? Let's do the opposite. This is very radical, what I'm saying. One more sentence on this. Explain what you mean. Because if I now eliminate everything from the northern hemisphere, the change on CO2, it goes to 20 ppd. 200, maybe. We are 400 going to 500. That's your point. And thank you, my friend Al, I'm here. We need to be radical. We know, we always had the solution here, but what we cannot have these hands moving around is because they are tied by green. That green has to disappear. And coming from a developing nation, that's what we need to do. And for that to me is to take the pressure from the people in the country. I don't have any of that. So you're asking for maybe a deeper, more profound vision of social cohesion of where we want to go. Kumi, you talked about the role of individuals, each of us, right? This is not just a collectivist vision, or maybe it's both things, but it also requires individual action. Can you tell us just very briefly, because we want to connect it to the trajectory of growth we're talking about, which at the level of the UN and policy conferences is one thing, implementing it when you get back home can often fall foul of individual behavior, what insight has your team come up with on the question of what each of us needs to do differently? Yes, and of course it goes back to lifestyle issue, how to go from linear to circular economy. So thank you for bringing that into the question. It goes back to how each one of us will have something to contribute. And I understand there is a council on natural lifestyle or something along these lines. It's important, but I think this nudge of, and sorry to keep coming from government perspective, because that's what we study, where I'm sitting, what can governments do to nudge individual behavior? And this is really this further work is needed. I think communication is important. So it's not just about telling individuals and citizens, yes, climate change is going to be so bad, but what policies, how policies work. For example, what we talked about earlier, if there's any price on carbon, how the revenue is spent to relieve the needs of those who are more disproportionately negatively affected because of affordability, because they're vulnerable. How effective different policy actions are actually managing and making effect on the real greenhouse gas emission reduction, because that's what we want ultimately. And then how all these intricacies work. So I think much more needs to be done on communicating not just the need, but how different policy levers that governments put in place are operationalized and it's impacting every single person's, ultimately we are self-interested at the individual level. And so we do, this is a powerful point. If you look at, because there's often reasons how and why individuals are not able to take action. So we need systemic action, policy action, industry coordination. You just take the question of renters, for example, in big cities. Often you may want to be more environmentally minded, but you didn't design the building. The architect that designed it is not the one property developer who paid for it. It's not the company that might be the owner that rents it to you. That might have designed the HVAC system, the heating system. And of course, as a renter, you are not in a position to control which AC unit or not or heating or whether you have double glazed windows or not. And so you end up with these sorts of perverse and misaligned incentives. And so we need more systemic thinking, but at the same time, also have that nudge for individual behavior as you're talking about. And governments have to provide the options. And give people choices. Lower carbon green options for... Options that work. ...to be able to choose viable alternatives. And then of course incentivize, ban, regulate. I wanted to come to you, Masuda, because you run a think tank on development. You know, we've heard a little bit today, including from Sandor a moment ago, about the poor, you know, as the Bible says, the poor will always be with us. But if we actually look at the history of the last few decades, has there not been progress in terms of the greater number of people have been lifted out of absolute poverty in the last few decades and ever in human history? Lion's share in China must be observed, but as well in India more recently. And is that not a cause for some optimism that we can continue down this path on the questions of equity and development that your organization is committed to? So what that connects to the question of growth? Yeah, so the answer is yes and no. So yes, that is absolutely right. That over the last 70 years, we have seen greater improvement in the human condition than we have ever seen in human history in the terms of broader numbers of people living better than they did. Life's fans have doubled, number of women who die and giving childbirth has fallen dramatically. So I can give you lots of them now. Now, the question though is that the way we have achieved this and the way the people who are already rich live their lives is not compatible with ensuring this for the future with the technologies we have given what it means for environmental sustainability. And so the big challenge going forward is not let's stop the next group of people from improving their lives, but can we find ways of doing this in ways that don't tax the very limited resources left in our planet in the same way? And I think that's what the big debate is going to be all about. I think there are practical solutions. Just one small point following up on what you are saying. One is that I think there is a group of people who will say it's really only about big changes that will affect the outcome that individual behavior doesn't matter. I actually disagree with that. I think individual behavior matters not only for what you can make a change, but because that is how politicians get a signal about the big changes. Look at what's happening in the UK, in Germany, in France. In all these countries recently, you've seen people back away a bit from the commitments that were made about where we were going to go in terms of changes in our own patterns of consumption. So I think politicians react to what they see as their market. And individuals are the market. So unless we send the right signals through our own behavior and through what we want to see change, it gives the forces who are slow to change and who are profiting from the current system to hold back the process. And politicians are always balancing who to respond to. And I think we just have to raise the voices of people to demand the changes for the vision that we want to move to. Well, I'm a big believer that individual actions matter. And so I think we heard also from Kumi's shop they're doing a lot of studies on this. We have just a few minutes left and here individual action matters a lot because I need each of you to be on your best behavior in answering the following question in a short and provocative way. Okay, I'll give you let's say 30 seconds or so. Give me your most important provocation on what we need to do next on the question of growth, how to either fix growth or move it in the direction that you'd like to see. One important idea that you'd like to leave everyone here in this room and on our live stream. I'll go in reverse order of what I did previously. So I'll give the first word to Sandor. I'll put you on the spot. Yeah. One idea that you'd like to see. Whatever we do with the best of intention for the common of all of our species and include all species. You know, because we talk about only human. This is only one vertebrate. We have sent millions of other species. Bacterias I cannot even tell you how many. All of them deserve this planet. Whatever we do, whatever we do, don't forget that the common heritage of humankind belongs to the whole planet. So start with that vision, that empathy. Alex. My suggestion would be to think long term. So I've highlighted the importance of government action, but what happens if we don't have government action? Lots of my own work suggests that what we think of as externalities are actually internalized if we think long term enough. For example, if you're a company, you provide a healthy and enriching place to workers. If you're a person, fluffy or die, I say woke, you're actually investing your workforce in the long term, the company's become more successful and more productive. So with a long term mindset, even in the absence of government interaction, then actually a lot of these socially desirable investments will be taken. I'm reminded of what Goldman Sachs defined as the shift from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. He said you could still be greedy, but be long term greedy. Absolutely. Greed is good if the greed is in the long term. Kumi, you're a provocation. Yes. What we need next, going to the future, my starting point is net zero, but lots of obstructions, distractions from this all about net zero goal, and a lot of that comes from inequality. So you have to address inequality so that action for net zero is supported. You need to address inequality so that human capital can be better utilized because on natural world there are planetary boundaries, so thanks for bringing it up. So again, inequality and human capital, there's a lot of answers and trigger to that in order to achieve the prosperity growth, or let's not say growth, prosperity, well-being and the net zero goal. So find that sweet spot where you can unlock that potential. Very good. Okay. Masut, your final word. I have one suggestion. Every single person in this room, go and have a conversation today with somebody who disagrees with you about growth. Let's have a conversation, not with somebody who agrees with you, but go and talk to somebody who disagrees with you and figure out why and see if you can find a way forward. Wonderful. That's an excellent provocation for us all to think out of our silos, a point that Kumi made earlier. It's impossible to capture the richness of such a conversation with a simple-minded summary, so I won't do that, but we've clearly heard about the relevance of growth. You didn't hear anyone at this stage, at least, are advocating degrowth or shutting down the world and turning off the lights. On the contrary, from their different vantage points, we heard about how to make growth more robust, more inclusive, how to think about a wider and more thoughtful way of defining growth, which includes the kinds of investments that we will need to do to make sure that we find those sweet spots where we can achieve multiple objectives and not fall into the trap of merely seeing dichotomies and trade-offs. I think we can agree our experts have earned a round of applause of thanks, and as I close out this session, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. I think we're clear. Thanks. Nice conversation.