 Hello, I'm Janet Gornick, Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, a research center within the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It's my pleasure to offer a brief preface to this conversation and to introduce its four participants. I want to first say a few words about the genesis of this video to place this conversation in some temporal context. And that context, of course, involves the coronavirus pandemic. In September 2019, Anthea Roberts became an affiliated scholar of the Stone Center. She told me that she and Nicholas Lamp were completing a manuscript on narratives of globalization. Together, we designed and organized a workshop focused on the manuscript. A multidisciplinary group of scholars would spend a day in New York City sitting around a seminar table. We all remember those, reflecting on the book's core arguments. More than a dozen scholars accepted our invitation, including six senior scholars based in the Stone Center. In March of 2020, we were in the final stages of preparing the workshop, which was scheduled for April 6. Then the pandemic hit, quickly striking New York City with remarkable ferocity. The workshop was postponed and eventually canceled. Since then, an unimaginable amount of hardship and loss have unfolded across the globe, and the far-reaching and long-term consequences of the pandemic are not yet known. On a more positive note, during these bewildering 18 months, Anthea and Nicholas finished the book, and in September of this month, it's officially published by Harvard University Press. And today, we return to something resembling the original plan, but now smaller and on video. I say all this to briefly share this context, but also to point out the obvious, that the pandemic itself has cast a light on so much of what this book concerns. The multiple frames and ideologies through which the causes and effects of global events are interpreted, the extremely unequal distribution of winners and losers, both within and across countries, the complex contributions for better and for worse of national and supernational institutions, and so much more. In the next hour, you'll hear from four people who have spent years thinking about globalization, trade, growth, technological change, geopolitics, geoeconomics, and of course inequality. And Thea Roberts is professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at Australian National University. An author of the prize winning is International Law International. In 2019, she was named the World Leading International Law Scholar by the League of Scholars. Nicholas Lamp is associate professor in the Faculty of Law at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. He was previously a dispute settlement lawyer at the World Trade Organization and has published widely on international trade lawmaking. Paul Krugman is a faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center and a senior scholar in the Stone Center and a New York Times columnist. This conversation will touch on questions that he has spent decades thinking about, namely globalization, trade, and economic geography, the work for which he was awarded the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Paul is author of many books, most recently arguing with zombies, economics, politics, and the fight for a better future. Bronco Milanovic is also a faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center and a senior scholar in the Stone Center. He joined the Graduate Center following a long career as an economist at the World Bank. Bronco is widely recognized as one of the world's leading scholars of global inequality, and he too was author of many books, most recently Capitalism Alone, the Future of the System that Rules the World. I know that what follows will be a lively conversation and with that I will step out and turn the program over to you, Anthea. Thank you very much, Janet, and thank you very much both to Paul and to Bronco for joining us here for this conversation today. Paul, this is the first time we've met, but Bronco, you and I have now known each other for a few years, and you were really part of the origin story of this book. I think both Nicholas and I responded very much to your elephant graph, and then the idea of the six narratives was something that you and I had discussed at a dinner a couple of years ago in London, which is what's led to this book. I'm pretty sure that I learned about your elephant graph initially from a post in the New York Times from Paul Krugman, so it's interesting to now have a chance to talk to you guys both about this, so thank you very much for joining us. So I wanted to start, first of all, wanted to start by starting with the premise of this book. So this book is not about economics per se, you two are both amazing economists, we are international lawyers. This book is actually about public narratives about economic localization, because there's often a bit of a disconnect between what happens in different fields and also what happens in different fields and what happens in the public space. And we certainly after the 2016, both the Brexit vote and Donald Trump's election were really struck by the competing narratives that were happening in the public sphere, which seemed to me to be much more contested than they had been leading up to that. And it was in the wake of that confusion and looking at what the different narratives were and what the reactions were that we wanted to start to pass out what these different perspectives were. And so our book really starts from a premise that there are multiple communities and multiple narratives at play here, and that most of them have something interesting to offer. Our view is often none of them are fully true, but many of them have elements of truth. And what we wanted to do was create kind of a multi perspective approach of trying to bring these narratives together in an empathetic way, so trying to give better versions of the narratives rather than the worst versions of different narratives to try to increase understanding of looking through different people's eyes. Now, Paul, I say that because I've just been refreshing my memory of your book, arguing with zombies, which seems to have a very different premise, which is not the sort of empathetic perspective taking, but one of the things you say very strongly in that book is there are things that are right and there are things that are wrong, and sometimes things that are wrong are done first of bad faith argumentation. And so I thought we might want to start with that sort of premise of the difference between our book's premise and your book's premise and get you to reflect a little bit on how you reacted to that. Let me just say that I enjoyed the book very much, and I found it refreshing and very helpful to have this perspective. And I think there's an instrumental argument for in certain circumstances, trying to do a, let's presume that everyone is arguing in good faith and see, let's see how far we can go with that. Now, obviously, as you just pointed out, that's not actually how I think the world works. I think a very large proportion of the arguments that dominate public discourse are not offered in good faith. Globalization is a little bit funny in that it's not as central, if I can argue, it's not as zombie dominated as a lot of other things, not as zombie dominated as arguments about taxation or healthcare. It's a field where there are actually some serious disagreements where there are some cases of arguments on both sides, but it's also a field in which there's a lot of ignorance and mysticism. What I find interesting, and I think I found the parsing of the different narratives of globalization to be illuminating very much, this is, I think, worth asking, how do people talk about this and how do different groups of people talk about this? What it's on is that none of them correspond at all closely to what conventional mainstream economists would say. You might think that the establishment consensus, Davos Man, globalization is great, interfere with it at its peril, the world is flat and it will squash you. That's what economics textbooks teach you, but it's not at all. It happens that we're approaching the 80th anniversary of protection and real wages, classic paper by Paul Samuelson and Wolfgang Stolper, which said that free trade expands real income, but there are generally producers, losers, as well as winners. Not just relative losers, but absolute losers. Economics has never been as gung-ho about free trade as the establishment consensus was. Just to take that simple example. If I were to say, where would I, when all of a sudden, done a fairly conventionally economist, where would I fit in your narratives? The answer is, I think I sprawled across several of them. I think I've got some of the conventional stuff, some of the left-wing populists, some of the geopolitical some issues about corporate power, especially when we talk about globalization, it's not simply trade. So it's an interesting thing. Maybe this is a way of saying that economists matter a whole lot less than they think they do, that what economists have had to say has had surprisingly little impact even on our conventional wisdom about globalization. So I might just come into you on that to say it's not just necessarily whether economists have made a difference, but what you say also reminds me very strongly of something that Danny Rodrick has spoken about, which is the difference between what you say in an economics graduate seminar and what you say in the public sphere. And he says at one point that he found a real disconnect between, if you ask the question, you know, is free trade good, that many mainstream economists, when speaking to the press would say absolutely free trade is good and wanting to protect against what they see as zombies. And he said, yet if you asked exactly the same question in a graduate economics seminar, the answer would be, well, what do you mean by free trade? Well, for who and what time frame and it would be a much more past reality. And I think part of what he was arguing was that actually the sort of almost uniformly kind of positive impression that creates what we call the establishment narrative was not a true reflection of some of the doubts and concerns within the academic economics establishment. But there was almost a sense from them that this was something you couldn't speak, because if you did, you would give over arguments to the zombies. And he was wondering whether that had actually backfired against economics. Yeah, I think that's a huge, by the way, huge fan of Danny's work as well. And I think there's a fair bit to that. And they're trying not to go too deep into the weeds here, but free trade has a very peculiar position in the kind of psychology of economics. The proposition that free trade can produce mutual gains for countries, even countries at very different levels of development or whatever is one of those things where economists believe, I think correctly, that they have an insight that that lots of people don't understand. So there really is a major contribution. But because of that, you play into that. That's one of those that, hey, this is, this is something great we discovered and you oversell it. So you sell the benefits of free trade well beyond what your own model actually says you should do. And this is both a failure to appreciate, a failure to say that there are often losers as well as winners. So that's something you sort of don't point out. So, I mean, actually, I think it was Alan Blinder once said that if economists had a t-shirt that they all wore, would say yay free trade, even though that's not what the models really say. And it also comes in, and I think I hope that we'll get to this, to a tendency to just exaggerate the importance that we actually lay more stress on global issues on issues of trade than is warranted. That if you ask the question, how much does, how much do tariffs matter relative to other things? And the, you know, what the actual, you know, attempts at quantitative modeling, they actually tend to be a little embarrassing. If you actually ask what are the gains from trade liberalization, they tend to be relatively small, certainly nothing like the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that you often hear against protectionism. But there is a certain, I guess there is a sense. You're right. And in the public sphere, people who raise this are sometimes viewed as letting down the team because, hey, free trade, you know, leaving aside all of the usual, you know, corporate influence and corruption and money and all that, but just playing, hey, this is one of our success stories. Don't tarnish it by raising all of the second thoughts and the shadows that are lurking in the background. I think one of the key differences between the establishment narrative as we see it and textbook economics is the spin that is put on the fact that there are losses from trade. So, and maybe this is informed also by my background working with the World Trade Organization, when you look at the reports that came out after Trump became the president, it was very defensive and the emphasis was always an adjustment. Yes, there may be short-term losers, but in the long run, people can adjust. So, one aspect was this emphasis on adjustment. Everything will be fine because you can adjust to the dislocations from trade. And the second aspect was this idea that there's this division of labor. We have this international system which increases the pie and then how the pie is divided up is something for domestic politics. And so, that's why we don't really have to concern ourselves with the loser because that's something that's going to be taken care of by the increased gains from trade. And so, maybe in that way, the establishment narrative puts a particular spin on the fact that there are losers, which then makes it appear as a win-win narrative, even though that's not borne out by textbook economics. Yeah, although the funny thing is, I mean, I did mention Stolper Samuelson. It's that the whole point there was that it's not simply an adjustment problem. That if you are a labor, if you're a capital abundant labor scarce country and you liberalize trade, labor loses. Not short run because of adjustment problems, but long run. Now, the adjustment problems are also real. And one of the things I think we really have learned empirically is that the adjustment problems are a lot bigger than even I conceded to begin with. And yes, so the standard economic analysis says that, well, in principle, you can compensate the losers and still leave, that if you have an adequate system of compensation, then everyone gains from your trade, which is completely true and completely useless because it doesn't actually happen. And so, there is this funny question. It's a little bit of, you know, we're going to rely on some invisible actors who are basically figments of our imagination to make this a win-win proposition. And it's not our department. So, yeah, I mean, there's certainly a, there's an element of willful blindness, but it's also, I think, a question. This is a hope that we can get into. How do public narratives, how to establish the narratives? Not just, I mean, I think one thing I do really sympathize with in the book is the idea that everybody has a narrative and they're all to some degree false. And it's not the case that's the wise establishment that knows how things work, and then there are these crazies of various kinds. But in fact, everybody has a somewhat false narrative. And the interesting question is, how does even an establishment develop a narrative that really is not borne out by hard thinking or hard data? And, you know, I read about this all the time, but there was a point when we were all, when everybody who mattered thought that public debt was an imminent threat to everything. And that never actually made sense given the data. To some extent, the globalization story is similar. There was a point when everybody who would be invited to Davos, except possibly as entertainment, would be talking about the wonders of globalization. And yet that was never, never what the data actually said. One of the things I think is really interesting about what you said is I think it's very commonly the case that when people have a narrative, they think, what's right about my narrative? And what's wrong? And what's a fiction? And what's made up in your narrative? But they don't turn the spotlight back on themselves to say, but what's the fiction in my narrative? What's the stuff that doesn't make sense in my narrative? And I think this is one of the examples of that where we saw very strong reactions to some of the Trump stuff and some of the terrorist stuff of economists saying that makes no sense, but not necessarily reflecting back on some of their elements of their model as publicly discussed that didn't make sense. But, Ranko, I want to come to you here because I actually think you've got a really interesting trajectory in this because several decades ago, well, first of all, you've been doing an inequality research for decades, including during periods of time when this was not a hot topic and was not a welcome topic and was not a mainstream topic. And so you've had a narrative for a very long time. And you were one of the ones who I remember more than a decade ago, or maybe two decades ago, were saying that we've got one positive face of globalization and we're completely ignoring the negative faces of globalization. And you were trying to articulate those, but at the same stage in your own professional development, a narrative which had been only outside has become absolutely mainstream and embraced. And so I was wondering if you could reflect a little bit about this process of about the Davos man and where you fit into the story. Well, thank you very much. And I want to first say that actually going back to your introduction, that I do remember, of course, the dinner in London, which by the way is of course mentioned also in the acknowledgement section of your book. And I was absolutely, I have to say I was overwhelmed by and amazed by the Rubik cube analogy and your ability to go between the narratives because implicitly, of course, I had this like everybody else, we had in mind these things. But you know, it's one thing to have them somewhere in the back of your mind, but never to have them explicitly put together. As you, I mean, and you and Nicholas did really extremely well in this book. And I do actually like very much that you take each narrative on its own terms. So in other words, you try to present the best face of each narrative, because it's easy to actually go and present the negative sides. Now, the second point I would like to make going back to what Paul said, where he would find himself, I was actually thinking a little bit, where I would find myself and I would essentially find myself in the combination of what you call the corporate narrative, and what you call the left wing populist narrative, with one small exception is that I don't believe that the left wing populist narrative can really justify the existence of core, you know, a concordance of interest between the workers in the rich countries and the poor countries. I think that there is an objective conflict of interest. And I think that's actually one of interesting parts of globalization is that what I believe there is a kind of a tacit alliance between the rich people and capitalist in rich countries and poor people in poor countries. Now, going back to your question, where I mean direct passion, of course, I'm very much pleased about your your introduction does date been quite a lot by using the words decades, you know, and being more than one decade. And that's actually, you know, it's interesting how certain things were totally outside and then they of course become almost commonsensical. So if I were to take things from that, like, I think my first papers, which are just kind of raising questions that you mentioned were actually from the late 90s, 1990s. And if I were to read them now, which I don't do, but you know, if I were to do that, I think that actually, lots of people would agree with it. But you know, it is an entirely different world today than it was in the 1990s. As Paul knows, for example, there was like so many debates obviously that he participated in in the 1990s, whether it was technological change or globalization that is responsible for the decline of wages. In those days, really, the accent was much more on wages than on total incomes. Then things change. So there was a lot of stuff that was then heterodox or unusual or radical even, which now has become, if not mainstream, but has become sort of reasonable. On that alignment of interest between the rich in the rich world and the poor in developing countries, it's something that came us for me very strongly in the debates around the negotiation of NAFTA. When we had the Canadian Union leaders go to Mexico and protest with the Canadian Union, with the Mexican unions for higher wages in Mexico, at least there was a pretension here that there was an alignment of interest between workers in both countries because the corporations are exploited. Like the idea here was, well, that the workers in Mexico, they're not gaining from the productivity gains that they realize. The productivity is going up. It's almost reaching Canadian and US levels, but the wages are not going up with them. If we manage to make things better and enforce labor rights for workers in Mexico as well, all the workers are going to benefit. There's going to be less wage pressure on US and Mexican workers, and the Mexican workers are going to have higher wages. From this perspective, it's a question of whether labor gains at the expense of capital or not so much whether Mexican workers gain at the expense of US and Canadian workers. For me at least, that was one of the key differences between the Trumpian view, the right-wing populist view, and that left-wing perspective, which was really trying to say, Trump is trying to play off workers in Mexico against US workers, but rather the best way to look at it is that we're together, we're in the same boat. It's something that, for example, I think, motivated this key provision in the new NAFTA agreement, which ties the benefits of NAFTA to higher wages. One reason why everybody might be able to agree to that was that while everybody could agree on the promise of higher wages for Mexicans, everybody seemed to like that. There will be cases when there's a congruence of interest among workers, but it's clearly the pure, if you like, left-wing populist view is it can't be right. I mean, there is, in some sense, there is a hump and then a dip in Bronco's elephant curve, and while that is, we can argue about how much of that is actually a consequence of globalization, there really is. It's not wrong to say that if you're able to outsource labor-intensive production to lower-wage countries, that it is going to come to some extent at the expense of workers in higher-wage countries. I mean, that's Stolper Samuelson. Now, it's not pure, because there is, in fact, that's the point. None of these narratives is entirely true. There is a capital versus labor controversy, conflict of interest that extends across borders, but it's not, what we can say, I guess, is just that it's not going to be as simple, it would be really heartwarming if we could say that all workers share the same interest everywhere, and it would be, I wish it were true. One of the things we've learned in the case of the United States is that immigration, it looks as if immigration should be new workers coming in and competing with already present workers, but most of the evidence suggests that that's not true, that immigrants into the United States generally, although they may, on formal criteria, look similar to less educated workers born in the United States, they're actually quite different and they take quite different jobs and they probably don't actually compete, and they're more of a complementary factor than a competing factor. That's a case where the conflict of interest is not real in there, and maybe a bit of left-wing populism that says, well, let's have higher wages for all these workers is actually right. You've both said that you see yourselves across multiple narratives, so I want to know where do you not see which narratives drive you up the wall? Okay, I mean, I think, well, definitely the right-wing populist. I mean, I'm not sure that even there, I mean, as I said, there is a real sense in which workers in different countries are in competition with each other, and so there is something there, but the idea that the big problem is a foreign enemy, and certainly the idea that the rich countries are, or particularly that the United States is being taken advantage of and all of this is really wrong, and actually, I do think that the extreme establishment narrative, it's all coming up roses, the pure, if you like, I have no personal issues with Tom Frieden, but I think the whole, both the notion that globalization is unstoppable and the notion that it's all good are quite wrong. I don't know that anybody is completely wrong. I mean, each story has heroes and villains, and the heroes are, the stories by heroes are probably wrong, but probably most of the stories about villains are right. Yeah, I think it's a very good question, because I have to say that unlike Paul, the right-wing populist narrative doesn't drive me up the wall. We already discussed that, I think, probably factually and empirically it is untrue the claims that they make about, actually, partly true, partly untrue the claims that they make about foreign label versus domestic label, so I'll leave it aside. But the narrative may not be true, but the question of immigration is a question that is present in many people's minds. If you go to Europe, it's a very present question in the US as well, but US, in my opinion, is a little bit different because it has been constituted as a country, as a nation, based on immigration. But Europe has been exporting people for 500 years, and now for the first time, actually probably since the invasions from the end of the Roman Empire, they're facing actually inflows of people. So it may not be, and I think actually what I've seen also with Paul mentioned, studies for Europe, for Germany, for example, complementarity between foreign workers and domestic workers. But nevertheless, the narrative captures a view of a significant percentage of the population. So that's why I'm saying I don't agree with it, but it doesn't drive me up the wall because I don't think it's entirely false as a narrative, as a representation of people's perception. The narrative that I really don't like, as you know, is the China versus the US narrative, which was a new narrative, which practically, if you had written this book about three years ago, it would not have featured very much there, but or maybe four years. But now it is a big narrative. And I, as you know, actually, I don't see it as a narrative based on any coherent view. I think it's a narrative of power politics, and it's not not what they call the kitchen sink. You take every argument against China that you can find from any narrative and just throw to it actually, you know, your own chapter on that shows because the arguments are so heterogeneous in that chapter that is actually between Chinese students need to study Shakespeare to actually see PC stealing technology, you know, it's like totally like all over the place. So that one, I must say I actually, you know, I understand it again, because there is a sense to it. If you take it from the national power or national security point of view, but I don't see many redeeming features to it. I think Franco is absolutely right that this is a narrative that is not just in the book now, but I think it's becoming it's on the ascendancy, we're seeing it more and more. And I think he's also right to say that there is a bit of a kitchen sink quality to it or what we would say in the book, which is a sort of a kaleidoscopic alliances, which is we're seeing multiple narratives being able to come together for different reasons on the China threat. Now, that actually means that it can look inconsistent because they're actually often coming together for different reasons, but that they've got an area of overlap. But that's different. The fact that there isn't that there's sort of multiple arguments that are overlapping that are a bit internally inconsistent with each other doesn't mean that there's nothing to the narrative. And so one of the discussions I've had with Franco on this is, I think his reaction is often, this is just pure power politics. And I think that there's a very strong element of this, which is about geopolitical contestation between the US and China, and that both economically and militarily, I think that's a very, very strong driver for this. But I traced some of the earlier origins of this back to some of the things in particularly around 4G and then 5G, where you started to see governments, and I come from Australia, which was the first one to make the decision on this, a very sort of intense internal discussion about whether or not you can actually have that technology if there is either a potential to distrust the supplying company or the country that the supplying company is coming from. And I think if you look back at the debates that were happening in Australia at the time, I think there was absolutely expectation that they wanted to have Huawei come in and do the 5G and they wanted to try and make it work. And they were tasked with that internally within the government, like how do you make that work? And they came to the conclusion that they actually felt that they couldn't make that work. And so I think that there are sort of geopolitical elements going on and kitchen sink elements going on. But I think there's also something about just how invasive some of the current technology is and how that's going to be even more invasive with both 5G and data, which will be structural to our societies and intimate to our lives. Whether or not you can really have globalization between systems where there is a distrust. And this is another one where I would say that that distrust I think is on both sides. So if you think about the Internet, China de-globalized on the Internet at a much earlier point, I would never have had an American company do the equivalent of Huawei and 5G within China. And I think what you're seeing with China and the US on that is neither side trusts each other or each other's companies because they both know how much they can do when it's their facilities and their companies and they don't want to hand that over. Let me just say that this is not at one level, this is not new. The gap does include national security as a valid reason for interfering in trade and not casually. That was that has always been something of a concern because national rivalries haven't gone away and it doesn't have to be high-tech, although the examples are related to high-tech. The world's dependence on Chinese rare earths is not something that no matter how free trade, how relaxed about how much you think that the US-China conflict is being exaggerated, it's still going to make you a little bit nervous. That's a authoritarian regime and not necessarily friends of ours, not necessarily a custodian of global security having a dominant position in such a crucial material. That is an issue. And Trump gave it a bad name by imposing national security tariffs on aluminum from Canada, but that doesn't mean that it's fundamentally a silly thing. And sure, we did. I think that if you like, one of the mistakes of the establishment consensus was, among other things, believing that we're all going to be like a giant European Union where the possibility of serious disruptions and political conflict that rises beyond petty matters is no longer going to be there. And it turns out even the European Union is not like that. And you're right. I mean, I find it really hard to police in my own mind where the threats are, but I can see that some of these technologies, at least if not nationalism, at least clubs of countries that feel that they can trust each other may be the way the world will go. Just to pick up quickly on what Paul said about the national security exception in the GAD, I think what's really striking about the establishment narrative is that there was this belief that with rules, we could overcome the distress. And the way it manifested itself very concretely in the trade regime is that, yes, you had that exception, but it was never invoked or when it was invoked, it was never challenged in dispute settlement. It was never tested. So there was a strong taboo against going into that sphere because there was the fear that the floodgates would be opened. Once you start describing trade concerns in terms of national security, then anything can become about national security and the rules lose their meaning, the exception swallows the rules. And so we had the dispute, the WTO disputes about rare earths and raw materials in China, where China was strickening exports. We had that in the in the 2010s, but China did not invoke the national security exception. Since Trump started invoking the exception, other countries have the floodgates haven't really opened and more and more countries have been willing to invoke the exception, which shows that this other narrative which is portraying international economic independence in terms of its national security risks rather than the economic benefits really seems to be gaining the upper hand, even in the trade regime. So I had a similar reaction, Paul, to Nicholas about the way in which the exception was not used previously and is now used a lot. And where this really crystallized for me at a very early time, and I think we recount this in the book, was the story of one of the US officials going over to Europe and trying to convince them about Huawei. And so one of the executives in Europe pounding on the desk and saying, show me the smoking gun. I want to see the smoking gun. And the American official saying, I don't know why you're handing a loaded weapon to someone you don't trust to shoot you, who could then shoot you with it. And what that really sort of crystallized for me at the time was these two very different understandings of national security that I think the national security exception from everybody I knew in the trade space was very much of that first thing, which is if you wanted to prove national security, you needed to show kind of bad existing past bad actions of the specific actor in this narrow way. Whereas what the US official was trying to say is, this is this is so potentially damaging that I'm not prepared to hand it over and risk it, even if there's no past history of wrongdoing, just the sheer magnitude of what could go wrong, I'm not prepared to trust with. And I think, Branca, this is an interesting idea about does it undermine all globalization. So I don't think it actually does, because I think you're always going to have a risk and reward trade off. But in quite a few areas we've got, you have that risk and reward trade off where the rewards are high and the risks are relatively low. But there's also relative resilience, whereas in some of the spaces, there isn't relative resilience. So if you look at what's happened with Australia and China, with the economic coercion issues at the moment, in trade, even though there's been tremendous rewards and now genuine risk, there's also a lot of resilience. The Australian exporters have been able to go out to many other markets. And so there's been an ability to kind of bounce back or protect themselves from the downside. Whereas I think one of the things about 5G is it's only going to be one thing it's going to be so expensive to do. And the ability to swap afterwards if something goes wrong is sort of low and very costly. But I think when you don't have that kind of resilience quality, then states start to make different decisions. And so I think you may end up finding that states are prepared to play the risk reward in some areas of globalization, but less in others. And for me, the question mark is if we end up having a bit more bifurcation on something like 5G, but still a lot of trade on goods, what happens when most of the goods are not soybeans, and they're not necessarily semiconductors, but they're all data-based and there's distrust on data? The world in 1913 was not a world of trust or shared values. It was a world in which actually, you know, certainly large parts of Europe were basically planning the next war, at least on a contingency basis. And yet it was also a world with a lot of trade, but just not as much integration. Actually about as much trade as we had in as a share of world GDP as we had in 1980. So it was not a stunted thing, but the kind of hyper-globalization, the very complex supply chains, and now, just now, the idea that data becomes an important part of it, that's really a very recent development. These may not be sustainable, but the idea that globalization goes away if we decide that we can't have Chinese companies running our data networks is probably that's overstating the case. One of the questions I wanted to ask was about unusual alliances. And one of the things that really struck me in writing the book on the climate change aspect was the unusual alliance between the right-wing populist and the sustainability narrative. So I had typically understood the sustainability narrative to be quite a left-wing narrative and to overlap with the inequality and concern about inequality within states and also between states. And so I was quite struck also by the potential that the sustainability narrative might overlap with the right-wing populist narrative and particularly when we might see a shift from climate denial. So there isn't a problem to climate alarmism that there is a problem and if that's going to be the case, we're going to build the walls and make sure that we don't lose our advantages. And so we started to see that sort of alliance, which is really if you take the right-wing populist, it's not an alliance on the economic side, it's an alliance on that sort of cultural immigration side with the sustainability narrative. And we saw that in Austria. And so one of my, so maybe start thinking about unusual alliances. And then I think about a day or so ago, I saw on Twitter, Tucker Carlson on Fox News. And he was saying, look, we usually really criticise the Chinese Communist Party, but we've got to give them their dues if we see them doing the right thing. And what they're doing right at the moment is that they're cracking down on big companies. They're cracking down on media celebrity stuff. They're cracking down on gaming, children gaming. And this is something that we should really learn from them. And it struck me again as one of the ones where we start to see a more left-wing kind of narrative overlapping with the cultural part of the right-wing narrative. And that's a bit different to what we see in US politics at the moment, where I think often what we're starting to see in the Biden administration is we're starting to see the protectionist element of the right-wing populist narrative still being embraced along with some of these left-wing goals, but not the cultural anti-immigration one. And so it just made me think that there are interesting sort of kaleidoscopic alliances and question marks about what future alliances we'll see. So I wanted to throw to you about any unusual alliances that you either saw in our book or you project maybe happening going forward. I would say that the really odd alliance, the one that at some level I still don't understand, but it's not new and it's not especially globalization linked, is how does the right-wing populist cultural, racial blood and soil form such a natural alliance with corporate, the corporate side. How is it that you have someone, Trump obviously, but the foreigners are competing away our jobs and we need to stand up for the regular people of America and also have a gigantic corporate tax cut. And the durability of that, you might think that the agenda would have shifted and yet if you look at what's going on right now, where are the battle lines on U.S. policy, domestic policy right now, we have crazy people who believe that liberals are trying to bring in brown-skinned foreigners to replace us and also that we must continue to cut taxes on the wealthy. And I don't quite understand at some level why that works, but it still appears to be an alliance that's holding together. I just wanted to say that I'm reluctant generally to speak of the great events which do change the course of history, but I think in my lifetime, I think 1989, 1990 was one such event and I think that the COVID is another event like this and I think for all the reasons that we mentioned before, the duration of the crisis, the origin of the crisis, the fact that it has pushed us for new technologies, the fact that it actually has revealed vulnerabilities, is really a change. And I think when we come to write history, well, not us, but somebody else or maybe you guys because you're much younger in 50 years, I think this would be seen as a fork in the roads, which I must say originally when the crisis started, I was much more optimistic that it would end quickly and I couldn't see it to be an event of such what I believe now is the world significance. But one thing which makes me slightly optimistic is the fact and actually it has not been noticed that both the US and China are now engaged in sort of anti-inequality increasing policies. You know, obviously the conditions in the US and China are entirely different. But if you look actually what's now happening with the Biden administration domestically and what's actually in front of the Congress, and it might not pass all of that, but you know, there is definitely a groundswell of support at least among a significant percentage of the population and even in Congress for many of these measures. And of course, we have seen enormous amount of money which was actually spent fighting and actually, you know, fighting the virus, which alone, and we don't know the results, but actually might have had actually pro-equality effect. And on the other hand, we have a situation in China with somewhat similar, well, quite similar policies, including anti-monopoly policies in FinTech, which would actually come also here in the US and actually are on the table. Obviously, China can do it much more fast and much more brutally, if you will, but this is the same idea. So in my view, it's really, how should I say, it's the ultimate victory of the inequality discourse, because if the two largest countries are now engaged politically to curb the inequality increase, it is a big change. I have to say that when I started to see both the US starting to rain back in its big tech and China starting to rain back in its big tech, my assumption underneath that was that they had already decided to some extent to de-globalize in some of the technology space. And that there was actually sort of a relationship there, that they were starting to think the US one is going to be primarily in the US, the Chinese one will be primarily in China. We may battle it out to some extent over third markets, but there will be some level of decoupling technologically. And that's partly what allows us then to bring to heal our powers because it's no longer just how they go against each other, but it's our relationship with them. So I think that's an example of where these ones are quite connected. I just want to make one final point, which is that one of the weird things about COVID-19 is that it has to some extent it's brought the future that we were all expecting and kept not coming finally into existence, which is the world of remote work. But if you go back about 15 years ago, there was a kind of panic in the United States about we're going to have massive offshoring of service jobs because work can be done anywhere. All of the back office stuff, instead of being in Northeastern Pennsylvania is going to be moving to Bangalore, which never actually happened on a significant scale. And what we've now had is we've had an effect, an episode of unintentional infant industry protection for remote work of various kinds, which opens up the possibility of a whole new era of another leg of hyper-globalization. This meeting is a real live example of that, which is going to actually, of course, intensify all of these issues. If you really are having a situation where a significant part now, I mean, container ships is old news, and that actually probably had that kind of trade plateaued around 2008. But we may be about to see a new wave of novel globalization, and all of these issues are going to become much, much more intense. I think one hopeful message from the book hopefully will be that as we enter that next wave of globalization, there's not going to be one dominant view of the meaning and significance of that globalization. So we have all these different perspectives now laid out, which would point out to different problems and different pitfalls of that process. And so I guess our hope is with the book is that it can serve as like almost like a manual of all the things that we have to keep in mind as we confront the challenges of a new wave of globalization or the climate crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic. So I think with that, we'll wrap up. I just wanted to say thank you very much for joining us today, and we really appreciated having the chance to discuss this with you. So thank you.